With the Internet making it very easy to remove material from its original context and share it, I see a lost opportunity in this spoof ad by an environmental group attacking Royal Bank of Canada for its funding of highly polluting and environmentally destructive oil extraction from Canadian tar sands. Here is this stunning video, as flawlessly produced as anything from Madison Avenue.

On the original page, the action is clear:

Email RBC’s CEO Gordon Nixon and ask him to stop financing dirty tar sands oil and start funding a clean energy future.

But inevitably, there will be versions of this video circulating by e-mail or posted on other websites. All they needed to do was have a slide at the end with the URL to take action. That chance will be lost. People will see this video, with no action step at the end, and they won’t know what to do about it. They’ll be a bit more educated on the issue, but will have no place to channel their new concern.

Also, the letter text itself is another lost opportunity. Mired in passive language and bureaucratic tone, it takes some doing to extract (pun intentional) the actual message. Yes, there’s the opportunity to edit the letter, but the complete rewrite that’s called for will be too time consuming and most people won’t bother. I confess, I didn’t bother.

Here’s the first paragraph; tar sands don’t even come up until paragraph 2:

Amidst an unprecedented transformation in the banking sector, RBC clings to the outdated idea that social responsibility is separate from core banking activities. This letter is to encourage you to update its social and environmental practices to meet modern standards.

This was probably a deliberate choice, to talk to a banker in banker’s language. But I think it’s a wrong choice. I’d have gone for a much more direct lead, like

RBC’s continued funding of environmentally devastating tar sands oil extraction is not acceptable to stakeholders, and won’t be acceptable in the courts.

I’m going to use the email contact on their website to send these suggestions, so the page may have been fixed by the time you see it. If so, more power to them. I think Rainforest Action Network does great work, and my goal is to educate, not to embarrass. I’m dong it publicly because I see many worthwhile messages and opportunities similarly lost in the inability to step out of the branding mindset. Next time you send out a political action message, I hope your call to action will be clear and thoroughly integrated.

Great Ad…Missed Opportunity to Increase Effectiveness is a post from: Principled Profit

Last year, I happened to meet Kevin Daum at a dinner party Sam Horn threw in Washington, DC (where neither of us live) and we connected quickly and personally. Kevin is a sales and marketing guy who has a similar approach to mine, and he’s also someone who can write. He’s even working on a book about Green business!

Kevin’s latest book, Roar! Get Heard in The Sales and Marketing Jungle, is a classic business parable of the sort popularized by Ken Blanchard. I’ve read a lot of these. What’s especially interesting about this one, in addition to the quality of the writing is what he calls the “3500-year-old sales process,” rooted in, of all things, the metaphor of the Four Sons from the Passover Seder.

And it’s impossible NOT to get the message that every company employee needs to know how to highlight the company’s strengths and points of differentiation, both in general and to specific types of buyers with specific concerns.

As a marketer, you can learn a lot just by watching this book launch. Kevin is doing something very smart: he’s building his preorder list months in advance. And he’s built in lots of try-before-you-buy (something else I recommend). He’s even managed to find a bcouple of independent bookshops to do discount coupons. So you can go visit http://www.awesomeroar.com/index.htmand see a brief video, grab a couple of sample chapters, and read dozens of blurbs (including one from me). and of course order your advance copy, if you’re so moved. You can also read Kevin’s wonderfully transparent blog about his “Quest for the Jewish Super Bowl Ring”: to launch as a New York Times bestseller (where he’s not afraid to discuss failures in the campaign as well as successes).

Not a big surprise either that Kevin is a master networker who’s asked a lot of important people to help out. I’m glad to be in that category, and happy to alert you to what he’s doing.

A Fun Book About Marketing…A Great Strategy for Product Launch is a post from: Principled Profit

What a marketing advantage they would have had, if they had made this commitment the centerpiece of their marketing–especially in the old days, when it was hard to find recycled paper goods at any price, and their pricepoint was competitive with non-recycled brands.

Instead, they actually went bankrupt before the turnaround management team rebranded the company and emphasized saving a million trees.

The lesson: if you’re gong to do the right thing, harness the marketing leverage it gives you! This is something I discuss extensively in my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), BTW.

If You Don’t Tell Them, How Will They Know You’re Doing the Right Thing? is a post from: Principled Profit

So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book:

Building Cooperative Marketing Relationships: Practicing What I Preach is a post from: Principled Profit

But that advice is totally wrong-headed! If he wants to be remembered as anything other than an ineffectual one-term president, he and his weak-kneed party need to seize the debate, push the agenda, and present themselves once more as the party of change. Maybe they should even go back to Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativsim” and pin that label on the GOP.

It is unconscionable that even the last few months when they’ve had their precious 60-vote supermajority, they’ve kowtowed to the right and let the party of intransigence frame and control the debate, and the votes. Now that they’ve lost that cushion, they’ve got only one hope of staying viable. Here’s the briefest outline:

To Obama and the Dems: Wake Up, Move Left, Be Powerful is a post from: Principled Profit

First of all, almost every restaurant (and they are numerous), not only on Ocean Drive but on several of the surrounding streets, like Lincoln Mall and Española Way, hires shills: people to stand outside, engage anyone walking by, and try to get them to stop and eat. Most of the restaurants have at least one, some have several (for the most part, pretty young women, many with European accents. I guess it must be effective, but after a while, it feels like running the gauntlet.

Second, recognizing that the consumer benefits from comparison shopping, many of the establishments print up postcards with their (for the most part very similar) offers. To us as consumers, this was very helpful, because after walking three or four blocks along the strip, we had a basis for remembering which ones had seemed like the best choices (and in fact returned to one to actually eat on the basis of the postcard).

Third, when you’re doing popular loss-leaders, you make up the revenue in other ways. We were offered $4.95 breakfasts and $8.95 to $9.95 lunches all up and down the street. The food was actually quite good—but a simple cup of tea was $3.50!

Finally, one to avoid: unpleasant surprises. When we were seated, the shill had told us she could to the advertised prices or 20 percent off the specials on display. My father asked the price of the steak special: $65! “I didn’t want to buy the cow,” he said, ordering instead one of the $4.95 breakfast deals: a huge omelet with meat, cheese, and vegetables.

We saw this same strategy in some of the retail shops, where some items were really, really cheap, and others were wildly overpriced a shelf or two over.

On the steak dinners, I imagine a fair number of people order one of the displayed specials without bothering to learn the price, and suffer major sticker shock when the bill arrives (or maybe after the drink specials, they’re too gone to notice). Considering that the same restaurant is using the same term to describe both its loss-leaders and its top-line offerings, I think this could be a disaster. It doesn’t strike me as a good way to make up revenue. In a crowded market, the last thing you want is a customer loudly arguing about the bill, especially in an open-air café that faces directly out on the street. Yes, of course, there are many places where you can pay $65 for a steak dinner and feel fine about it, but those are not restaurants that get you in the door on the basis of a $9.95 entrée. Different market, different clientele, different expectations, and no price resistance.

Interestingly, our dinner choices for two of our three nights were restaurants with no shill. In both cases, we had excellent, reasonably priced food, and the place was certainly busy enough.

Shills and Specials: Running the Gauntlet on Ocean Drive is a post from: Principled Profit

I take a heretical view of this. Here’s the comment I posted on Sean’s article.

Actually, the answer is (like so many things) “it depends.” I actually talk in my book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First about how to bring the six or seven impressions down to just one by laser targeting the intersections of prospect’s need/desire, frequency, and message. In other words, if you make exactly the right offer to the right person at the right time, you may only need one impression. If you have something that’s just not of interest, no amount of impression will shift. Example: as a 36-year vegetarian, I am not motivated to buy anyone’s burger by any amount of marketing. Only a sudden and very urgent need (like genuine starvation in a prison cell somewhere where meat was the only available alternative) would move me into the customer zone.

But in truth, it works the opposite way, too. I have had people who were on my newsletter list or in a group I participate in for several years, or who saved a newspaper clipping and then two years later, contacted me—and became clients. In some cases, there may have been 100 or more contacts; in some cases, only one, but with a big time delay.

No hard-and-fast rules, in other words–which is one more reason to…

How Many Contacts Do You Need to Make a Sale? is a post from: Principled Profit

Me: “Hello, this is Shel, how may I make your day special?”
Her: “I’m from and I wanted to let you know that our sales manager will be in your area on Thursday and would like to make an appointment.”
Me: What does your company do?”
Her: “We have a free credit card terminal for you.”
Me: “I’m happy with my current merchant account provider and I already own my own terminal.”
Her: “Our system includes a digital receipt system where you don’t need paper receipts. What would be a good time on Thursday to meet with her?”
Me: “I need to see information before I set up any appointments. Can you send me something and I’ll call you back if I’m interested?”
Her: “Well, it’s on a laptop, you have to see it.”
Me: “Can’t you e-mail it?”
Her: “You can go on our website–”
Me (interrupting): Wait a minute. You call me up out of the blue and try to sell me something. You want to waste my time with an appointment. And you’re going to make ME do the work to research you, you won’t even send me information?”
Her: (no response)

At that point I hung up. I wonder who would actually buy from this idiotic process.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. These people think they are marketing, but this is not marketing. Marketing is about building relationships, providing or adding value, solving problems. This boiler room telepressurer (I will not dignify her by calling her a telemarketer because she’s not marketing; she’s confronting people who don’t want her message) is doing one of that.

I’ve written six books and hundreds of articles about how to market effectively. People like this give the whole industry a bad name, and then we have to work that much harder to overcome prejudice against us.

This is What Gives Marketing a Bad Name is a post from: Principled Profit

My wife teaches business communication (with a heavy focus on international dos and don’ts), and she and I both give Barack Obama high marks for his sensitivity to other cultures.

Two quick examples among many:

In the campaign, too Obama was consistently on message, able to deflect all the name-calling from the other side, and consistently able to turn attention back to the real issues.

So what I’m wondering is why, since he does have such awesome communication skills, he seems totally unable to focus on his message. Issue after issue has gotten bogged down, and he’s fallen into a rut—abandoning the very successful organizing and communication strategies he used so well during the campaign, and continues to use well in his international contacts, in favor of overly nuanced, bureaucratic, uninspiring policy-ese. I think he could move his agenda forward a lot more successfully if he went back to building support among the American people, and organized them to be a force influencing their own legislators to push the change he was elected to bring.

Obama, International Communication, and the Need to Organize is a post from: Principled Profit

I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

Shel,
have you
seen this?
Brian

Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?

Earth to Marketers: Don’t Act Like We’re Stupid! is a post from: Principled Profit