Archive for September, 2007

Cut! Cut! Copy! Print.

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

At some point we all end up either writing our own marketing or working with someone who is writing our marketing. It’s hard work. If you have a talented copywriter already, you’re probably done reading. For the rest of us, here are some tricks for putting what we want on paper.

First, the steps of designing an ad, IN ORDER, are:

1.  Express the idea for the ad in one sentence (if you’re working on a catalog or larger advertising work, the advice is different and not our focus today). Why one sentence? One thought is all you can effectively convey in one ad. Examples include:
 
   “This ad will generate traffic by promoting our visit-with-the-expert Thursdays.” 

   “This ad will generate sales for a specific product.” 

   “This ad will engender good will for my business by sharing the results of our community action project.”

   “This ad will generate new service contracts by making people laugh, which shows them how fun we are to work with.”

Each example states what you want to accomplish (sales, traffic, good will) and how you expect to accomplish it. You have only a few seconds of your prospect’s attention, so make those seconds work.

 2.  Always write copy before designing or selecting visuals. Resist the inclination to do the reverse. Graphics and photos are gratifying. They make us feel as if our ad is coming together, they’re creative, and they’re fun. But graphics are intended to do three things: a) capture the prospect’s attention, b) amplify the message, and c) reduce the number of words required by translating them to a visual medium. Most non-professional ad designers only accomplish the first task.

3. Write, rewrite, and rewrite, the words. Any capable writing teacher will tell you the nature of good writing is re-writing. If the words don’t flow from your pen or your keyboard, it’s not because you can’t write. It’s normal. We’ll come back to this step in a moment.

4. Once the words are written and edited, design the graphics. If you’ve done the hard work, you’re probably in love with your copy. Beware! The role of graphics is to further reduce the need for written or spoken words. If a graphic can convey the ad’s mood or personality better than adjectives, drop the adjectives. If a graphic can clearly and powerfully convey action, you might drop a verb or a directive sentence. If you’re too in love with your words, the graphics won’t be allowed to make their full contribution.
So let’s discuss writing and re-writing. If you’ve expressed your idea in one sentence (Step 1), you’re on your way. I recommend you begin by writing the ad without concern for the number of words, if they are the best words, or if your sentence construction and grammar are correct. Say everything you want to say in the expression of your one idea. Self-editing while writing is a common reason for not being able to write at all, so let yourself go. The editing will come next.

 When you have one long, somewhat sloppy, not-quite-publishable thought, stop and get a cup of coffee. Celebrate! This is a big accomplishment.

If you are writing in long-hand, re-write (print not cursive) with enough room between the lines for editing notes and marks. If you are working on the computer, print a double-spaced copy. Editing requires uncluttered thinking. Approach editing with a clean desk and a red pen in hand to prepare your brain for the work you must do. You’ll also need a thesaurus and a dictionary. Now you will take four ‘passes’ through your copy.

Pass one: count your adjectives. I highlight them. Most writers clutter their writing with adjectives, turning a swift run around a smooth track into a jog through soft sand. Eliminate repetitive adjectives. Three adjectives in series are never as powerful as one perfect adjective. Use your thesaurus to develop a list of options and your dictionary to probe precise definitions. Avoid million dollar words. Keep it simple while conveying refined meaning.

Pass two: examine your verbs. Public advertising enemy number one is passive voice. Saying “our business was recognized by the governor for our contributions to state literacy” is passive. Saying “Governor Thomas praised our business for our contribution to state literacy” is active. Purdue’s online writing lab is a good resource for understanding passive and active voice.

Pass three: organization. Make sure your ideas are in the optimal order. Switch the sentences around to smooth flow or escalate energy. An advertisement is an argument for someone’s money. Build your ad as you would build a case, so by the time your prospect arrives at the call for action they’ve been primed to respond.

Pass four: grammar. Do you dread this part? Most people do, because they don’t feel competent. Tackling grammar after the first three passes is surprisingly easy. Read your copy out loud. Your ear will hear grammar and structure problems that your eye did not see. Still uncomfortable? Many online resources can help you. Try the Well Bred Sentence for starters.

If you have followed these steps you are either done with your ad or remarkably close to finishing. Is it perfect? Probably not. But it’s considerably better than it would have been, and you can trump writer’s block when you follow a process.

Advertising is communication. When you want to stop a child from running into a busy street, you instinctively choose abrupt, succinct, loud communication. If you want to convince your spouse to make an expensive but unnecessary purchase, you naturally choose conversational, persuasive communication. You already know how to choose communications styles. Combine the correct communication style with thoughtfully constructed copy that clearly conveys one idea, and your ads will be better than ever.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

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An Ode to Difficult Geniuses

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Dale Dauten’s most recent column should be required business reading. Of course, that’s sort of a teasing thing to say, because I can’t find an electronic link to it anywhere. The title is “Let Us All Praise the Quirky, Weird Ones,” and it starts with a quote by William James that says “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” You could go in a lot of directions with that quote, but where Dauten goes is to the sad reality that business managers these days would prefer to employ safe, average, presumably less imaginative sorts than unruly, challenging, wildly intelligent sorts.

After describing how business managers fear and dislike people who are challenging, a little un-PC (it’s amazing how damaging one little acronym can be, isn’t it?), perhaps prone to scandal on the personal (not the work) side (i.e., “lacking a certain decorum”), difficult to manage, or even egotistical, he says “not only would you fire Winston Churchill, you couldn’t hire John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. or Pablo Picasso. Instead, you can staff up with the corporate equivalents of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and a pair of Bushes. How did we get to be so small?”

Indeed. Every business leader preaches the importance of innovation and outperforming the competition, yet business managers are busy squeezing every threatening and/or unconventional element out of their environment. The only possible result is the lowest common denominator, which clearly won’t achieve innovation and competitive wins.

I think we are all guilty of this at some time or another. The column caused me to look back over all my years of hiring and firing, and I can think of two specific cases where the difficulty of managing someone won out over their significant creativity with questionable resulting benefit.

On the other hand, there is no question that my most creative experiences at work have been while surrounded with very quirky people. The graphic designer whose psychological insights into others was acute even as he was a complete socio/psychological mess himself; the sarcastic but intensely effective professional who was repeatedly accused of egotism when he really was smarter than everyone else and if I couldn’t help but notice it surely he was aware of it as well; the completely adolescent, self-absorbed writer who could make business writing sound like poetry; the zen-y assistant who repeatedly came from so far in left field that he frequently took the rest of the group on a detour that invariably introduced creativity we never would have stumbled on without him; the cross-dressing analyst who regularly forgot to get all his mascara off before coming to work in the morning, and who freaked out the men around him by flirting with them just like they flirted with all the women in the office; the nuts-o marketer who spoke incomprehensibly fast and always had a personal crisis going on, but who could produce flashes of insight three or four times a year that paid for herself and everyone else in her department four times over; designers who could only work in the wee hours of the night and had to be cajoled into considering another viewpoint; and . . . my experience tells me that the sheer fun and creativity of working with people of superior talent and intelligence is well worth their eccentricities.

Years ago when I was in advertising, an art director, aware that I was frustrated trying to manage a group of what seemed to be overbred, tightly wound creative types, told me that I had to learn how to “ride the white elephant.” He explained that white elephants were believed to be as royal as kings, and moreover, they knew they were as royal as kings. So you couldn’t manage them like regular elephants, because they would refuse to participate. If you wanted to associate yourself with a thing of wonder, you had to accept that you weren’t going to be able to make all the rules. He taught me that I had to learn how to make the rules and not get run over (we did have a business to run) while learning how to accept that sometimes they made their own rules, and most important, how to offer them as much in value as I expected to get from them.

Is it a double-standard that I would never advocate keeping egotistical, difficult, surly, or eccentric people who are NOT smarter, more creative, more productive than everybody else? Maybe, but common sense says, why would you? 

In a very funny passage regarding a friend’s sexual deviation and her own mother’s response to it, Dauten share’s the mother’s advice, which was “Unusual people have unusual tastes.”  He ends by saying this:

“Whenever I’m tempted to be narrow-minded or judgmental, I think of that little sentence, “Unusual people have unusual tastes,” shrug, and mind my own business. I can only hope that there are executives who’ll do likewise, that they’ll keep eccentric geniuses on the payroll, despite the trouble they cause. Let’s broaden that maternal advice to this business wisdom: If you want unusual ideas, you’re going to have to put up with unusual people.”

Amen.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

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Business Stability or Business Change?

Friday, September 7th, 2007

One of the most important things any business must do is create stability. And one of the other most important things any business must do is always be prepared to change. So it’s no wonder that many business leaders find themselves caught in a conundrum. If stability is most important, then how can they be prepared for change? And how can an ever-changing business be stable? The good news is that stability and flexibility are not as contradictory as you might think. The example I’ll use is one for business, but (other than the documentation part) this thought process works on the rest of your life as well!

Business stability is frequently misunderstood. The most common measurement of stability – positive cash flow – is not the only measure of stability. In fact, if the other important aspects of business stability are not present, then positive cash flow won’t be either. Business stability is achieved when a business owner or operator has established superior management of all of the processes of their business.

So what are the processes of a business? They are different for each business type. A retail store’s processes include opening the store, opening the register, ringing up sales and returns, taking in repair work, sending repair work out to the contract bench jeweler or entering a work-order for an in-house bench jeweler, checking in bench work and preparing it for customer delivery, customer sales calls to generate traffic, closing the cash register, closing the store – and these are just a few examples.

Some of a manufacturer’s processes include establishing materials required for each manufacturing item, ordering inventory, receiving inventory, managing inventory, issuing work orders, checking out inventory to work orders, managing WIP, closing work-orders, recognizing finished goods inventory, packaging for delivery, writing sales orders, fulfilling and shipping orders, and many others.

Most business problems arise as a result of failure to control one or more of the business’s processes. Stability arises from having a clear procedure for each process, documenting that procedure, and following that procedure each and every time. In this way you can avoid the errors that come from multi-tasking, untrained help, and faulty memory. When a business has excellent control of all of their processes, they can achieve stability. Better yet – they are prepared for change.

Have you ever heard the phrase “all improvements are changes, but not all changes are improvements?” It’s true. Unfortunately, many businesses change processes that didn’t need to be changed, or change them in ways that don’t create business improvement. How can you avoid that? First you need stable, documented processes. Once you are confident that your entire business is well managed through stable process, you can begin searching for the change opportunities that will drop straight to your bottom line.

Eli Goldratt, in his Theory of Constraints, teaches that there is no such thing as unlimited capacity. We all know this – but then we try to run our businesses as if there is unlimited capacity. Theory of Constraints helps the business owner recognize that in a capacity-constrained world there is always one change that needs to be made that is more important than all the others. It’s your primary ‘bottleneck,’ and if you can find it and eliminate it, you will drop more money to the bottom line. The acronym to remember is IESER.
Step 1: (I)dentify the bottleneck
Step 2: (E)levate the bottleneck
Step 3: (S)ubordinate everything else to the bottleneck
Step 4: (E)liminate the bottleneck
Step 5: (R)eturn to Step 1.

Once your business processes are stable, you can effectively evaluate your entire business. Ask yourself, “what one thing, if improved, would make the biggest difference in my ability to run a profitable business?” There’s always something. It may relate to how you serve your customers, or how effectively you make your products, or even a business policy related to accounting or purchasing. Whatever it is, figure it out! That’s (I)dentify the bottleneck. This is hard to do if your business processes aren’t already stable though. Because if you don’t do your processes with consistency, you won’t be able to tell where an improvement might make a difference, since your results are different from time to time already.

Once you figure out what the single greatest improvement is,
(E)levate the bottleneck. Focus on the change you have realized will make the single greatest difference. Make sure you spend time on it every day. If you don’t know the answer to how to improve it, research it. Make it a priority. This is where it gets hard, and you need to (S)ubordinate everything else to the bottleneck. If you’ve already recognized that this one change could make the single greatest difference to your business, then it’s worth it to devote the time and attention it deserves, right? Be disciplined and don’t turn your attention away from the bottleneck until you’ve solved it. Which is Step 4 – (E)liminate the bottleneck. Once you know the solution, you need to implement it. That sounds silly, but many businesses go under simply because the business owner failed to implement solutions they were completely aware of! Don’t let this happen to you. Carefully document the improvement so you can return to that stable state you started from.

And now, the part that guarantees that your stable business will always be ready for change; (R)eturn to Step 1. Since there’s no such thing as unlimited capacity, it’s important to evaluate your business again. What’s the next most important thing that, if you changed it, would make the greatest difference to your business? And now I’m sure you can see how a stable business is also a business that is perfectly adapted to change. The most successful business owners are the ones who are constantly looking for the next change. This activity will guarantee that you are adapting to a changing world and changing market, while restoring stability after each effort.

(c) 2006.  Andrea M. Hill

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Can You Put 200,000 Miles On Your Brand?

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Ford is making advertising headlines this week as they launch their “Swap My Ride” campaign. Consumers who just bought new cars – but not Fords – were asked by a seemingly independent 3rd party researcher (in actuality, Ford marketing staff) to trade their new car for a comparable Ford for one week. The ad campaign shows the results of trade participants as they say things like “I got bad news for the Suburban,” and “can I keep this?”

I imagine the commercials will be well done – there’s no excuse for presenting bad advertising these days. But this isn’t just about advertising. There are two deeper brand issues to consider.

The first issue is that Ford is behaving like a challenger brand. Challenger brands can be highly successful – think 7-Up’s Un-Cola, Avis’ “we’re number 2 so we try harder,” and the early days of FedEx going after UPS. But is Ford a challenger brand? Challenger brands are generally upstarts in a market who are going after a specific niche and are prepared to rely on esteem and preference to set them apart. It’s possible that Ford sees themselves in the challenger brand role, given how their US market share continues to slip. But it can be dicey for a one-time leader to now be satisfied with asserting “Hey! We’re as good as the other guy!”

The second consideration is how this strategy will play out over the life of a product. This is a thought process that marketers do not engage in enough, and it can provide significant insight into the future marketing and brand perception of your product.  It goes like this:

First Wave:  Ford goes under cover and gets new car buyers to swap for a Ford for a week. Customer loves product and wants to keep it.

Second Wave: Ford goes under cover and gets drivers of cars with 5 years/60,000 miles to swap for comparable Fords (in terms model, care, miles, etc.) for one week. Or, better yet, have a real third-party research firm follow customers of comparable cars – Ford and non-Ford models – and track their service and repair experiences and costs over the life of the vehicles.

Third Wave: Same as second wave, only at 8 years/100,000 miles.

How will Ford stand up to the competition then? Will people be enthusiastic enough about Ford to lead to a significant increase in customer loyalty? If not, then Ford has just produced another extremely expensive advertising campaign with little hope for creating increased brand value.

Brand value must be considered over long timeframes. Coming up with great advertising just isn’t that difficult. But building a brand requires commitment to every aspect of your business, from the quality and cost of components, to post-sale support, and all the way through long-term product satisfaction. If you have these things but suffer from bad advertising, that’s actually quite easy to fix. But if you have great advertising yet suffer from weakness in your organization, that’s much more expensive and difficult to repair.

Next time you put an ad together, ask yourself how that ad would play out – not to the next new buyer of the product – but from the perspective of owners of the product over its reasonable life. If you don’t feel great about what you come up with, maybe the next budgetary allocation should go, not to a new ad, but fixing the parts of your company that are keeping your customers from coming back.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

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The Inappropriateness of Fair

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

The folks who worked in the call center were in an uproar.  Apparently they heard that a new person was hired at a wage comparable to what the more tenured agents earned, and they felt that was unfair.  They brought it up in a department meeting, asking why new people weren’t brought in at the starting wage.

The answer their manager gave them was that the salary range for that function was from $11.50 to $18.51, and that people were paid commensurate with their experience.  When the group argued that this still wasn’t fair, the manager asked them the following question.  “So imagine for a minute that you are applying for a job elsewhere.  Their starting wage is $11.50/hour, but you have been making $13.40.  Which one of you isn’t going to make a sound argument for the fact that you have worked for five or six or nine years in this field, and that your skills and talents would be an asset to that organization?  Who among you is willing to work for less than you’re making now?”

This quieted them, but the discussion of what is fair will happen again, just as sure as it will rain.  What is fair in business?  When my kids say to me “that’s not fair!” I always say, “well, life isn’t fair.”  They hate this response, just as I hated it when my dad said it to me.  But it’s true.  And what’s truer is that I don’t know if we actually want life to be fair.

The definition of fair means to be free of favor to any side.  But in business we really do favor some things.  We favor more education over less, we favor strong work ethic over slacking, we favor experience, and we favor great communication skills.  And that’s appropriate.  Which is a word I far prefer.  I like to award compensation appropriately.

The same people who complain that it’s not fair American jobs are being shipped to China are doing their weekly shopping at Wal-Mart.  The same people who are complaining about reduced hours and layoffs remain committed to their unions and the collaborative bargaining agreements.  I don’t know whether or not any of this is fair, but it’s all appropriate.  Everything in nature seeks balance, and this is balance, believe it or not.

What’s appropriate is that some companies use compensation as a driver. What they’re counting on is that their employees will think it’s appropriate to work more creatively and more diligently to make their incentive the biggest number it can be.  We’re not looking for fair here — we’re looking for motivation and drive.  These concepts are the foundation of our society, and as Americans we inherently understand them.  Or we should.

To do the work more creatively and at less cost we need the best people, the best processes, the best training, and the best focus.  Every high performing individual who ‘gets it’ about working for the bottom line makes a direct investment in profit realization.  That call center hire with five years previous experience who came in at $2/hour higher is likely to contribute to profitability faster than the individual with no previous experience.  Their $2.00/hour more — which translates to $4,160/year — easily paid for in the first year with plenty left over.  Smart managers and organizations will structure compensation to ensure that real contributors in the organization benefit directly from the additional profits.

Is it fair?  Maybe not.  But it’s certainly appropriate.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

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