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It's easier than you think
How to get it wrong in business
by John Graham
The Internet retailers are doing it right. Email your order at 10:22 p.m.
tonight and it arrives in two days. And delivery is free. That’s doing
it right.
Radio Shack is doing it right, too. They’ve dropped the irritating
“Can I have your name and address?” with every sale, even if
you are buying a battery.
Walk through the door of any of Radio Shack’s 7,000 small, local stores
and trained people are ready to answer your questions, get what you want
and send you on your way in record time. Why get stressed with parking problems
just to get to a big box retailer where there’s no one around to help
you find what you need?
While doing it right deserves applause, doing it wrong deserves even more
attention. See what’s going wrong may help to get it right. Here are
just a few examples:
• Confusing personal opinion with fact. We all have
a right to our opinions, but acting as if opinion is fact can hurt
a business. “No one looks at direct mail any more,” the vice
president snorted, as if the idea of a direct mail campaign was preposterous.
How many times a day do we run into those who honestly believe what they
view as fact is nothing more than personal opinion. “No one opens
mail. Direct mail is a waste of money,” growled the VP of sales. As
far as he was concerned that was a fact.
Even so, a recent Ad Age survey of marketing professionals indicated
that when it comes to return on investment, no media comes close to the
power of print advertising and direct mail. Direct mail was favored more
than two-to-one over the second-best medium, the Internet.
Far too often research is ignored and even irrelevant. Personal opinion
is the deciding factor.
• Marketing should make sales.
“What we need are sales,” blared the sales manager to the marketing
consultant, as if to say that marketing was failing to dish up deals for
the sales force.
That’s exactly the way sales-driven organizations often see marketing.
Some years earlier, the consultant had called this same company one morning
seeking a replacement for a particular piece of office equipment. Within
two hours it was delivered, installed and paid for without any reference
to price.
Because the focus was on getting the sale, no one in the company bothered
to welcome the new customer or say thank you for the business. No one took
time to understand the company’s needs. The dealer made no effort
to let the customer know what it sold. In fact, there was no further contact,
other than sending a calendar a year later. Yet, over the next dozen years,
the consultant’s company purchased more than 20 pieces of equipment
sold by the dealer––but from other sources.
Could a marketing program have delivered more sales from that customer?
Absolutely. And many other customers, too.
It isn’t the next sale that builds sales. It’s creating a customer
who wants to continue doing business.
• Inflate for
effect. The law actually allows for puffery in advertising. Such
unsupported claims as “the world’s best hamburger” or
“the earth’s most comfortable shoes” are acceptable.
How many companies get themselves on the “fastest growing companies”
lists––without the benefit of corroborating data? No one is
going to be sued if the figures just happen to be inflated.
Is it all only a matter of degree? At times, but not always. While advertising
puffery is accepted by law, there’s a more devious side that isn’t.
The depressing business revelations of the past few years testify to what
we might call “The Lying Spirit of Business.”
As has been demonstrated so often over the past several years, those who
lie to the government, their bankers, accountants and shareholders also
deceive their customers and employees.
In the same way, a salesperson making inaccurate or exaggerated claims regarding
the performance of a product may make a sale, but rarely makes a loyal,
trusting customer.
• Confirm your prejudices. Some business executives hire
competent consultants to solve problems and then turn around and hand them
the solution. Marketing is a good example.
The owner of a business was initiating a new venture and engaged the services
of a marketing firm to develop the corporate identity and marketing materials.
At the first meeting, he “shared” his marketing insights. Everyone
listened attentively. While he said he wanted a creative, distinctive approach,
there were strong indications that he was highly opinionated and rigid.
Three painful months later, the creative work presented to him had been
revised to the point where it looked exactly like the picture he painted
at the first meeting.
A clever, innovative program that could have differentiated his company’s
services had become run-of-the-mill, perhaps worse.
It’s a clear case of never taking advice but always expecting others
to take yours.
• Offers that don’t grab the customer. Far
too many so-called “special offers” or “value-added”
benefits are neither special or valuable––at least to customers.
They fail at the very point where they should succeed––at capturing
the customer’s attention.
Bundled software packages in the early days of selling PCs are a good example.
Consumers learned quickly that the dozens of programs were little more than
a hoax. The marketers’ learned their lesson. Today’s computer
offers deliver software that meets customer needs.
Such fakery sends the message that the company is playing a cheap con game
and has no serious interest in satisfying its customers.
• Dismiss public relations as puff and fluff. Much
PR is worthless, primarily because it has no purpose. A primary objective
of PR is to influence how a company’s constituencies think and
feel about it.
Following the announcement of the sale of Fleet Bank to Bank of America,
there were noisome rumblings in the Northeast where the historic and venerable
financial institution had its roots. The idea of selling Fleet did not go
down well.
It didn’t take long for the public relations efforts to begin. This
included a page one article in the Boston Globe’s business
section on the soon-to-disappear Fleet CEO. It opened with him walking the
beach near his Nantucket home, ruminating over the possibility of selling
the bank and coming to the conclusion that it was inevitable. It went on
to describe how he analyzed the possible merger suitors and made the decision
to take the lead in seeking the best buyer to protect shareholders, employees
and the region.
The piece ended with the Bank of America and Fleet CEO’s sharing what
was pictured as a near sacred moment as the one from Bank of America said,
“Today, Bank of America truly becomes Bank of America.”
Schmaltz? Perhaps. To be sure. Brilliantly crafted? Yes. Factual? We would
assume so. Full of spin? Undoubtedly. Effective at influencing how readers
feel about the merger and the Fleet CEO’s decisions? Absolutely.
Companies have a right to tell their story as effectively and persuasively
as possible.
• An inability to be consistent.
Allowing external circumstances to determine a company’s actions is
painfully common. Many auto dealers base the next month’s advertising
budget on last month’s sales figures. If sales are up, they spend
more. If not, they cut back. That’s it. Nothing else is taken into
consideration.
Such inconsistency is detrimental to successful marketing. “People
who starve their brands now will be paying for it in the future,”
stated Kevin Lane Keller, a marketing professor at Dartmouth’s Amos
Tuck School of Business. Specifically, he was discussing the role advertising
plays in influencing choice. Even though customers may not be making purchases
at the moment because of reduced spending in a slow period, that’s
exactly the time to maintain and strengthen brand relationships.
The history of too many companies is strewn with the remains of initiatives
because of a lack of will. According to Oscar Wilde, “Consistency
is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Perhaps. But inconsistency
is the destiny of those who can’t grasp the value of marketing.
• Failure to understand branding. With an endless
array of articles, books, seminars on branding, why does it appear to be
so misunderstood?
How many company presentation folders go out the door to customers and prospects
filled with brochures and sell sheets from manufacturers? The old saw, “You
know us by the companies we keep,” lingers on, as if it expresses
some deep insight. Somehow or other, we seem to think that basking in the
sun of “big names” sends the right message to our customers.
That’s naïve thinking, at best. It worked in the bygone era of
“protected territories.” But not today. To depend on someone
else’s brand as the basis of your business is to entertain trouble.
Unless customers come to want to do business with your company because of
the way they understand and appreciate the value you bring to them, there’s
no reason to do business with you. They can go somewhere else and get the
“name brand.”
You can put it to the test: If price is a problem, so is the branding.
There’s nothing theoretical about these “attitudes.” They
come from the real world. They can lead to the conclusion that most of the
problems a business faces don’t come from the marketplace. Rather,
they are self-induced.
If there is a common theme running through these attitudes it’s simply
looking at business from what happened yesterday and failing to recognize
that what worked in the past may not serve as a proper prelude for action
today.
Why point them out? The more clearly we see where we are at the moment,
the better prepared we are to deal with the inevitable contingencies.
© 2004 Graham Communications
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John R. Graham is president of Graham Communications, a marketing
services and sales consulting firm. Mr. Graham is the author of four
books on marketing and sales, including Break the Rules Selling: Success
Strategies that Beat the Competition (Superior Books). Mr. Graham
writes for a variety of marketing and sales columns for business and
trade publications and he presents his Magnet Power presentations
at company and association meetings. He can be contacted at 40 Oval
Rd., Quincy, MA 02170; by telephone at 617-328-0069; by fax at 617-471-1504;
or by email at j_graham@grahamcomm.com. The web site is grahamcomm.com. |
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