In my email box first thing this morning, I had birthday wishes from a couple of companies.  The first is an online bank with a penchant for orange (which also happens to be one of my favorite colors).  Their message?  “We want to help you celebrate your April birthday with 15% off at the ING Direct Store.”  So what can I use these incredible savings to buy?  Stuff to promote their brand: the ‘Orange Ball Pen’; a book about their company titled ‘The Orange Code’; and the ever popular ‘Eco-Friendly Shopping Bag’ (because what company can resist the urge to demonstrate they’re going ‘green’).   While I appreciate the offer to take advantage of my birthday ‘gift’ and save 15% off, I think I’ll have to pass on the urge to spend money helping ING promote its brand.  Maybe next year.

This message was shortly followed by an offer from Lumosity.  For those not familiar, Lumosity is an on-line purveyor of mind-sharpening exercises.  I signed up for a free online trial at one time and thought the exercises were interesting – fun and purportedly scientifically-backed to promote sharper thinking (something I could definitely use at times).  Good product – just nothing I was prepared to spend money on at the end of the trial period.  But wait, Lumosity is offering 30% off a subscription as a special gift to me on my birthday!  Sorry, still not convinced.  Perhaps they should have used the space in my email inbox to tell me how much brain capacity I lose with each passing year.  Fear can be a powerful motivator.

This is not to say that wishing me a happy birthday is a bad thing.  But please Mr./Mrs. Corporate Marketer don’t taint my day by trying to sell me your crap.  For future reference, follow my handy hierarchy of company birthday greetings:

• Happy Birthday.  Here’s a gift to celebrate – one that is totally free and has absolutely no strings attached!
• Happy Birthday.  We don’t want anything from you. Just wanted to say we hope you have a great day!
• Happy Birthday.  Here’s a coupon to buy stuff from us.  By the way, we’re hoping you think we’re so cool that you can look beyond our shameless ploy to sell our crap and keep doing business with us in the future.

When you make your choice, just remember that we (out here in the great land of empowered consumers) love ‘generous’ brands.  And we don’t like companies who try to fake it.   Tote bags don’t make you ‘green’ any more than wishing me a happy birthday as a ploy to sell me stuff makes you truly interested in me as a person.  If you’re hiding behind any of these things, please stop.  Your customers (and your bottom line) will be glad you did.

This is a great way to engage clients without making the Roth conversion a huge either/or proposition. It gives them real reasons to take action this year without committing a large portion of assets. And it’s advice that can solidify you as a partner that brings innovative ideas to their portfolios.

To check out more posts like this, visit financialmarketingnews.com.

For more financial marketing insight like this and the latest relevant headlines, check out my posts at our financial marketing blog.

Many of these underserved may very well be in the mass-market segment, with the majority of their assets in a retirement plan but other monies scattered among different institutions.  Many times, these folks believe that they don’t have enough for a financial advisor to be interested in them.  Nevertheless, they have retirement worries and need help.

On top of that, advisor ranks are shrinking.  Bank Investment Consultant points to a study by Cerulli Associates in Boston and reports that, “The total universe of advisors keeps slowly shrinking over time, down about 1.4% from 2004 to 2008, from 313,705 to 309,693.”

So who can help bridge this gap between fewer financial advisors and a large underserved market?  For starters, insurance companies and banks.

Insurance companies have the opportunity to help advisors more efficiently reach out to this large audience with education and planning tools surrounding their annuity products.  Then support the effort with marketing programs that drive business to the advisor by addressing a major worry for many – the fear of running out of money in retirement.  This can go a long way to helping the advisor  serve this unmet need in the market in a way that makes sense for his or her business.

Banks also have an opportunity to serve this market.  They already have customers that are part of those 50 million Americans that Mr. Shiller has estimated.  They just haven’t identified them as such.  Banks have a unique advantage because they have already overcome the biggest hurdle – establishing trust. Now it becomes a matter of digging into customer data, reaching out to customers, and offering them engaging planning and education tools.

50 million represents a huge opportunity.  With some smart tools and the right marketing, insurance companies and banks can help bridge that gap and capture their share of underserved millions.

For more financial marketing insight like this and the latest relevant headlines, check out my posts at our financial marketing blog.

It’s difficult for regular folks to make sense of it all by wading through paragraph after dense paragraph of financial-speak.  Research reveals that today’s financial consumers crave simplicity and clarity.  But even the most seasoned financial services marketer knows how difficult it is to keep things simple while delivering valuable insight.  In fact, sometimes words get in the way.

Fortunately, we’re starting to see the adoption of information visualization to help bring that simplicity and clarity to financial topics.  Make no mistake, we’re not talking about charts created in your spreadsheet software.  These are insightful and compelling infographics that give you a powerful way to help clients and prospects understand what a complicated financial topic means to their lives.  When they understand that, they understand why they should do business with you.

Here is a starter list of smart information visualization:

• A visual guide to inflation
• Are we over the worst? – how to present a lot of information in a way that makes people want to explore rather than ignore
• Who is the modern media consumer? – great use of icons to make it easy to quickly navigate a multitude of statistics
• The surprising truth about what motivates us – graphics come to life in a mesmerizing video
• Customer service statistics
• The future of infographics – data visualization in real time

For more financial marketing insight like this and the latest relevant headlines, check out my posts at our financial marketing blog.

According to this article in Bank Investment Consultant, a recent study by TD Ameritrade shows that there may be a trend among boomers to define success as eliminating debt and saving for long-term goals.

This could be good news for us financial services marketers if we understand what this large (and valuable) group prospects really needs.  In other words, it’s going to take a change of attitude on our part as well.  That’s not easy.  Because we tend to focus on products and not necessarily solutions.  After all, it’s easy to push the tools of accumulation, but remember, this is a group that is used to spending – not saving.

So how do we together change our ways?  For starters, let’s help this group understand all the issues surrounding the life stage they are entering.  Take for example the boomer who is entering pre-retirement.  He or she is inundated with IRA rollover messages.  You don’t see messaging around things like reevaluating changing insurance needs (which could save them money), or ways to leverage home equity to pay college costs while getting a tax break.  Sure the information is out there for them to go find.  But if all you are focusing on is getting them to invest more or rollover an IRA, then a savvier financial professional is going to come along and help them solve those problems that are really weighing heavy on them.  And after they do, guess who is going to get the IRA rollover?

The good news is that this is a group that has immediate needs.  And as the TD Ameritrade study indicates, they may be truly having a change of heart about what’s really important to their future.  We just need to make sure we’re ready to change the way we think about their needs.  And to approach them with real help and not just a sales pitch.

For more posts like this, visit our  financial marketing blog.

The exchange went down like this.  My daughter and I pulled into a drive through to get breakfast on the way to school.  Luckily, as we were pressed for time,  there was no in front of us.  There was also no on behind us.  We ordered and pulled forward to the window as directed.  There, I happily traded a pleasant ‘good morning’, paid with a bigger bill than the total and received the correct change.  Great experience so far.

What happened next bordered on bizarre.  The window attendant (probably called something like a ’sales portal customer advocate’ in the franchise handbook) asked me if I would pull forward and she would bring my food to me.  I asked ‘why’ because there was no one behind me.  The attendant told me that the food wasn’t ready and they had a 90-second timer on their window.  I respectfully declined to move (raising my daughter’s fear level to code red because ‘Dad, they’ll spit in our food’).

In due time – didn’t seem like more than 90 seconds – we received our food and headed down the road.  The impact of the exchange lingered, however, as I analyzed the bizarre chain of events.  The attendant was no doubt aware of a well-intentioned metric to drive customer satisfaction based on order turn times.  In the fast food business, completing orders fast is a good business strategy (so is serving food that hasn’t been under the heat lamps for hours).  The turn time metric was probably established by a joint committee with marketing providing competitive intelligence and operations working with the service (sales) side to implement strategically aligned business processes that would guarantee optimum customer satisfaction.  Which all sounds great until people get involved and have to implement the plan.

In my case, who knows why the food wasn’t ready.  Maybe the bacon cook called in sick.  Or maybe the kitchen folks needed to finish the text message they started when I pulled up (lol).  The window attendant was clearly on top of her game, calling a process audible and asking me to move forward. Or maybe the franchise owner directed it as a store policy because they got hammered recently for not meeting the window turn time metric (ignoring the obvious answer which is making sure food is ready). Regardless of how it happened, the process didn’t work as planned.  I didn’t get my food within the prescribed standard and being asked to move up didn’t add up to a very good customer experience.

Don’t get me wrong, delivering to high standards is hard.  It’s also a worthwhile endeavor.  Just make sure it’s real and authentic.  Tricking the system and hiding behind false data doesn’t do a thing to help a company grow a loyal base of customers.

Some of this shift in thinking is driven by a desire for a more active and productive lifestyle during these years.  But there will also be a significant number of boomers who simply will not have enough saved and will have to work.  Whatever the reason, this shift in behavior during retirement years will drive new needs for insurance and annuity products.

This change in retirement thinking provides a unique opportunity for marketers.  Here are a few ways to capitalize on this emerging trend.

Talk about the new retirement reality
Help your clients understand the options they may want to consider as they transition to retirement years.  How can they use insurance and annuities to complement their plans?

Deliver the message through seminars
Boomers continue to show a propensity to respond to seminars to gain understanding of the issues and opportunities ahead of them. A seminar creates a low-pressure setting for information sharing.  Look to develop a presentation that helps them view you as a resource for helping them find the right solution.

Extend it online
Boomers may have been slower adopters of the online channels, but now the group represents one of the fastest growing segments.  Take your education online.  Develop interactive tools to help them evaluate the options.  And then help them connect to you to take action.

By acting now to help retiring boomers, you have the opportunity to position yourself to serve a segment that will be controlling the largest share of wealth in the country for a number of years to come.

So if you’re not immersed in or nerdy about following the web design community you may have missed out on the string of discussions and debates that were sparked by one little tweet by Elliot Jay Stocks that called out ‘web designers’ who don’t code. The community responded directly to the tweet, other respected minds in the community wrote their own posts here, here and here and I’m sure many other blogs and tumblrs.

I followed this when it went down and the fact I’m writing about it now makes me feel like the guy walking up to the group of people laughing at a joke and tries to fit in by laughing, only to have the people laughing stop laughing and look at me. Screw it, IMMA BLOGABOUTIT ANYWAY. Mostly because I was brewing on writing a post on designing for the web for awhile before this great debate happened (this debate actually gave my post some meat to get the thought train rolling – meat, rolling, train, wha?)

Throughout the back and forth of this discussion I felt like a little ship getting sloshed around by waves from experts. I was being convinced of every side of the argument, which leads me to believe there is no one ‘right answer in this debate’. Let me expound on a few of the thoughts that stood out. From Mark Boulton’s post:

“Let’s look, for a moment, at Tele­vi­sion. TV is a mature broad­cast medium. Good telly is not about pixels, or how the they get sent from one place to another. Good TV is about storytelling, engage­ment, audi­ence, inter­ac­tion and a whole lot more.”

You said it Mark. Let’s have a drink together – I’m buying. This is so true and I already have a list of people in my head who may stop reading this post at this point and take that quote as their new gospel. But, as illustrated in a point about fashion design by emenel an understanding in the craft is necessary:

“As a web designer the equivalent would be knowing enough HTML, CSS, JS, (etc) to create a version of your idea, something good enough to convey your creative vision and be constructed fairly well. Does it have to be ready to launch for a million people? Absolutely not.”

Righty-o man! When I read this I was reminded of my years in design school and early days in agency life, making books by hand, cutting and pasting tiled print outs to convey a large format poster and hand preparing paper mock ups of a brochure or a collateral folder. We as designers need to be able to convey a website to the client in a true form. Yes, that’s what Photoshop is for.

Ah Photoshop, an amazingly wonderful tool. A program that I intentionally stayed away from for years because I saw it exploited and made to do things it was not intended to do. Coming from a print background, PS to me was to touch up photos, crop and color correct. I still believe this is the strength of this program, but I understand and am much more comfortable with PS’s tools, which are yes indeed quite dense. It can literally do just about anything you want it to do, you’re often only limited by your own imagination (After Effects is in the same camp).

But, just because you can do anything with something does not mean you should do anything with something (paraphrase from Jurassic Park). I’ve learned to love or at least become so comfortable with PS to the point that doing a web mockup in any other fashion, be it illustrator or in browser, to be quite honest scares some little part of me that wants televisions to still be in large wooden boxes that sit on the floor despite the fact that LCD progressive 1080i yada yada are much better (I don’t have one so I don’t know). My reasoning isn’t rational, but it’s my reasoning so it’s valid, right?

PS has become my crutch, but ask any web designer how fun it is to dig through 200+ layers to make a simple change, copying and pasting layer styles to 15 different layers, updating text on multiple layer comps (are we even utilizing these?) going back and saving jpgs of the website, then dropping the jpg in a static screen grab of a web browser, placing in indesign, exporting as pdf then sending to client.

Then ask the same update be made to a front end developer who has both design and coding capabilities, watch them make a few quick edits to their css document, save and update their browser on their development server (which the client can already view in the medium the site will be viewed in). Just ask, sit back and watch. It’s not about speed to market, but it’s kind of about speed to market. It’s also about making everyone’s lives easier. From clients, to creatives, to bosses on both sides of the equation (to whom the reality of the bottom line is a truth we cannot nor should try to shake).

You catch the little thing about rationality up there? It all comes back to the man who sparked this debate with his tweet. That same day he posted a blog explaining more fully his thoughts. One part spoke to me. Challenged me and highlighted why diving into the pool I have studied and walked around has been so difficult. I’ve spoken for months about the benefit of designers who can code, but I’ve just begun to even get my hands dirty. This statement here is why:

There are some great designers out there who don’t know how to code and some of them produce amazing things for the web. But whatever excuse is given basically falls down when you look at one simple fact:

It’s easy.

That’s right: writing HTML and CSS is so easy, that there’s actually no excuse not to learn how.

Then why doesn’t everybody do it? </thirdgradesnark> But seriously. Part of me knows that html and css isn’t the most complicated thing in the world. I’m amazed and impressed by the intellect of a good deal of coders, programmers and devs I know, but not all of them. Why then is this how I feel in regard to coding my own designs for the web?

While this drawing is a true to form depiction of how I feel right now, what it doesn’t show is the mountains and hills I’ve climbed for the past 14 years to get me to where I am now. This doesn’t show me discovering graphic design as a job path in junior high, or me teaching myself how to use adobe software, coding an Aerosmith fan site with a welcome page that featured a ‘frames or no frames’ option then going on to a school who was more versed in print design fundamentals than they were preparing me or nurturing my skillset to prepare me for the web world (blame is wholly on me for letting my coding go dormant for years though).

This illustration doesn’t show the skills that I have mastered, even if there is still room for more mastery, which there definitely is. Truth be told, I got to a place where I’ve learned a good deal and in the last year my focus and knowledge has expanded in a new direction, but adding more and learning more seems daunting. I am reminded by some words that were given to me almost a year ago which lead to one of my first blogs. I don’t have to know where the path I’m on will lead, what specific skills I will or will not learn and I’m amazed at the amazing people I continue to meet and connect with. I don’t have to have it all figured out, I just have to decide that’s the direction I’m going.

I am going to take a step out in faith and I know deep down if you’re a designer who has struggled or been curious about learning the craft behind the designs, you want to as well. We don’t have to, but it’s probably in our best interest. And even if it’s not easy it won’t hurt forever and I’m sure we’ll all be thankful once we have and will likely be saying ‘oh html and css, that’s easy’ in no time.

Or perhaps you will hold onto the ‘architect/engineer’ mindset and who am I to say whether or not that is valid and whether or not that might be where I end up as well, but I urge you to respect the engineer, lean on his/her expertise, listen to their voice and embrace the idea of true creative collaboration. Because without this I can assure you that we will be missing out on many great solutions that we cannot craft up in photoshop alone.

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Other takeaways worth your time and articles that helped inspire this post (whatever that’s worth)

http://forrst.com/ community connecting designers who code and developers who design to share, connect and inspire.

http://www.visitmix.com/Articles/The-Anatomy-of-Web-Design amazing article about the process of design and web design collaboration.

http://www.printmag.com/Article/Oscars-of-Type sexy type from the past year

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/ Sparked some thoughts in regard to knowledge of tools for better type treatment in online design

So what does all this mean? In the same article, APPA president Bob Vetere explains, “Our pets give us so much it is no longer enough to simply give them a treat. We want to keep our pets healthier longer and are willing to spend what it takes to make that happen.”

Pet owners love their pets. And it’s this relationship between the two that is driving the pet market forward despite the tough economic times. In fact, veterinary care is the category that’s experienced the most growth, increasing 8.5% over the previous year. People are willing to spend what’s necessary to ensure their pets’ health – and it’s time marketers took advantage. Here are a few ways to do this:

Focus On the Relationships
Identify the role your product or service plays in the relationship between the owner and pet. Specifically, talk about the ways in which your offering keeps their pets healthy – both now, and in the long run. Use this as your platform for all your marketing efforts.

Share and Connect
Find a way to help pet owners share and connect with the animal health community around them. Sponsor a contest. Find a location and offer free advice to pet owners once a month. Participate in social dialogue by joining ongoing conversations. Or, start your own.

Vets, Vets, Vets
There’s no one more knowledgeable and able to care for a pet than a community’s local veterinarian. So leverage that expertise. Provide wellness tips that can be customized for a veterinarian’s clinic. Then get these tips out to the community through traditional and online channels. It’s an easy way to show pet owners that there are people out there who care for the well-being of their pets as much as they do.