Great Stories Sell

We’ve had a little fun with Super Bowl ads this week. All the water cooler talk has been “Did you like the Clydesdale?”

While no ad will ever please every viewer, I think there are at least 5 things we can take away from this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads.

1. Puppies and Clydesdales still pull at our heart-strings.

2. Even though we pull for the underdog, a sloppy wet kiss with sound affects is just too much information, even if the nerd IS kissing a supermodel.

3. Goats, should be limited to 3 bags of Dorito’s a day.

4. Old people getting tatts and having midnight munchies is pretty funny. And

5. Telling an authentic American story will win us over every time.

While there’s a little post-game blow back from Black’s and Latino’s for their lack of inclusion in the imagery, you have to admit, if your demographic is middle-aged white men, Paul Harvey reading his essay “So God Made A Farmer” captured the resilience and determination of the American spirit. Dodge tried to pull the same rabbit out of a hat twice with the Oprah voice-over. But there’s just no connection between American Heroes and Oprah. She spent her glory years telling soccer moms what to read and how to think. And middle-aged soccer mom’s aren’t Jeep’s demographic. 

But Ram was careful not to sell trucks. In fact, you barely knew it was a vehicle ad until the end. What they did, was remind us a lost heritage. For 2 whole minutes, we relived the values of the Greatest Generation. And in a time of high unemployment, fiscal instability, and disintegrating families, Paul Harvey selling us Americana to the tune of Yankee Doodle, was pure genius. 


If you need help telling your story, contact me at 256-425-8787 or chris@ad4group.com.

Is your brand working for you?

Is your brand working for you? Business owners are generally reluctant to change or update their brand, and rightfully so.

But is your brand a good reflection of your company vision? Maybe the better question is do you know what your company stands for? Can your articulate your values? If you can’t answer any of these questions easily, or you have no idea what we’re even talking about, then the answer is probably less important than the question. 

In order for a symbol to represent your vision and values, you have to be able to articulate your brand promise. And here’s the important part, you have to operate your company according to that vision and treat your customers, vendors, and employees according to those values. If you don’t do that, then no flowery logo or fancy-sounding tag line will convince the market that you are a great company. 

It’s not about having the best product or the lowest price. It’s about treating your customers like you really appreciate their business. It’s about treating your vendors like partners. And it’s about treating your employees with dignity and respect. If you can do these things, you create an environment where employees will clamor to work, and where vendors line up to help you create value for your customers. And, instead of widgets at 5 cents less than your competition, you can start selling magic. 

If you need some help getting your brand in order, give me a call at 256-425-8787 or email me at chris@ad4group.com.

Success Consciousness

We talk about making plans and setting goals frequently here on my blog. That’s all very important for achieving success.

For many entrepreneurs, the real key to their success is not making a plan or hiring good people. They’ve already made a great plan. It’s not hiring good people, they’ve got highly motivated people with exceptional skills. The real key to success is mastering their own minds.

It’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in the creation zone. People are throwing great ideas at you all day long. We love to build new products, new teams, new organizations. So, you have to have a system in place to allow you to quickly evaluate new ideas and determine their value in relation to the current project you’re building. Sometimes these ideas have to be put on the back burner, or filed away for another time.

It’s really easy to get caught up in the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. That’s where we spend our days chasing shiny objects down rabbit holes. Someone sends you an email or gives you a call about an interesting idea and next thing you know you’ve spent four hours researching and evaluating an idea that has nothing to do with what you had planned to spend your day doing. You’ve wasted all your high-level energy doing what amounts to non-productive work.

It’s not that you can’t consider new opportunities. If your organization is going to grow and thrive, you have to consider new ideas and learn new things.

However, I think the real key to success is having a success consciousness with a singularity of focus. We create a success consciousness by having a team of positive people who have the same values as us, and who will constantly support each other and encourage each other to do exceptional work. We hold a singularity of focus by having a plan that we work every day. We have higher aspirations that cause us to continually reach for those things just beyond our grasp. You don’t accomplish great things by reaching for things in front of your nose. Everyone can do that. You achieve greatness by continually trying to work a little harder and to reach a little farther.

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Brand

We kicked off our first week of Ad4! Radio: Communication That Counts last week. We’re going to talk a lot about BRAND on the show. It’s the foundation of your company’s reputation and how the world views you.

If you don’t know how to market your company, brand is a great place to start. If you think you know how, but aren’t sure about your brand, perhaps you should take a step back.

Your brand represents your promise to your customers and your market.

What are your customers saying about your brand? …about your promises?  Think they aren’t talking about your brand? Yelp! is filled with bad reviews of restaurants that don’t know Yelp! exists. And Twitter is filled with bad reviews of local businesses that don’t think social media is important to their business.

You see, it doesn’t matter if you’re Joe’s Car Wash or Bank of America; your customers are talking about you. That talk will affect your brand. Left alone, that talk may become your brand.

If you’re not sure what to do about all this talk, then join us each Thursday on Ad4! Radio. We’ll explain how our secret sauce works. We’ll have some guests who can bring special expertise to small businesses marketing and we’ll highlight some cool stuff our clients are doing.

We’d love to hear your feedback and your questions. Email me at chris@ad4group.com. If you have a question that’s of interest to a wide audience, we’ll even talk about it on the show.

WTKI Huntsville 1450 AM / 94.9 FM
WEKI Decatur 1490 AM / 94.7 FM
Listen Live www.wtkiradio.com

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Creativity…Gone Amuck!

Companies and individuals spend a good bit of time and money to be creative. That creativity is expressed in everything from interesting logos to the entire corporate culture. Some companies like the design firm IDEO, are known for their creative cultures that allow employees to express themselves to benefit their clients. They create products and services for clients that solve problems for customers. Always, the customer’s pain is at the center of the creative process.  This helps the folks at IDEO generate very creative ideas that support the client’s brand and solve problems.

Some local companies try to do the same thing. The group I practice with, the Ad4! Group, takes these same concepts and principles to solve problems for our customers, but always with the customer’s brand and pain at the heart of the process. That allows us to be creative without giving the customer a solution with which they are not comfortable or portrays them in an unfavorable light. This kind of creativity almost always leads to happy customers.

Sometimes, however, ad agencies or in-house marketing personnel lose focus on the customer and get creative just for the sake of being creative. Today, I received in the mail, a 6” X 9” hand-addressed manila envelope. The envelope had my name and company and address as well as the sender’s address, but no name or company listed. The envelope had a stamp, not postage machine affixed postage. So far so good. They got me to open the envelope.

Inside was a 6” X 9” card with a web URL, and an instamatic photograph. You know, kind you take in a pop-open camera and pull the cover sheet off to expose the image in about a minute. This picture was very dark and I was just able to make out what looks like a Sasquatch. That’s right, a big foot.

Now I’m thinking, what the heck? Why did someone send this to me? They took the time to hand address the envelope and attach an actual stamp. Normally, I would have thrown the whole mess away and thought, these fools. What a waste of money. But today, I needed a blog post idea, so I went to the website to see who these fools were.

So it turns out that this big database management firm has hired a marketing firm in the Dallas area to create a clever marketing campaign. From my perspective, I think they totally missed. They sent me a photograph of big foot. Trying to be clever, they out thought themselves. The theme here is you have to see it to believe it. But my perspective is they have been extremely “clever” just for the sake of being unusual. The end result is they missed the mark and have a stupid campaign that doesn’t support the customer’s brand or their pain.

Marketing isn’t about being clever. Sure, being clever is good, but it can’t be about just being clever. It has to be about the customer’s pain and solving it within their brand. Those things have to come before the clever part, or it turns out like this campaign.

If you need help with your marketing strategy or need to refresh your branding, give us all, we’re here to help.