So, when something comes along that makes me laugh, and I remember it long afterward, track it down, and it STILL makes me laugh? That is truly remarkable. I’m not a huge fan of their coffee, but I do love this ad:

Marketing can be highly positive where it’s used as a tool to educate people about important issues, like back when we found out that eating a medium size bag of movie popcorn and a soda is equivalent to eating three McDonald’s Quarter Pounders and 12 pats of butter. That’s a good thing to know and educating the movie-popcorn-buying public resulted in immediate changes in how movie popcorn was made. Hurrah marketing.

Or the recent Method cleaning products commercial that educated while making us laugh and squirm, just a little.

Sometimes advertising — mistakenly equated with marketing — IS plain dumb, I’ll give you that. And dumb ads give all advertising, even the clever ads, a bad name.

But sometimes marketing and advertising go way beyond dumb. Take Dace, a local fashion label. Their new anorexic paper doll campaign is sure to be a winner. You can go to their website, download an anorexic paper doll, and then download a set of three fashion plates for your emaciated, famine-ravaged doll to wear.

I’d like a moment with the brilliant minds who ran with this idea and encourage them to give their collective heads a shake. In fact, I sent them an email:

“I’m appalled at your recent anorexic paper doll promotional campaign. Here’s something you may not have considered when you made that choice. Paper dolls are for little girls. Little girls are inundated with images telling them normal size is too big. Little girls grow up into young women who carry those beliefs with them. Are you hoping to reinforce the message?”

Dace blew a really great opportunity to showcase beauty, rather than an impossible beauty standard. I’m pretty disappointed that they haven’t moved beyond that whole illusion and taken a more enlightened stance. Instead, they are using advertising to perpetuate outdated views about beauty.

Two thumbs down for Dace.

If you want to give Dace two thumbs down too, you can email them at info@dace.ca, tell them on Twitter @daceclothing, or let them know via Facebook under “dace clothing.” Oh, and then there’s the old fashioned phone: 1.604.694.2442.

Start With the Destination in Mind

There’s an old saying that if you don’t know where you’re going that’s exactly where you’ll end up. Nowhere. It’s also a basic principle of marketing that if you don’t know specifically what your marketing is meant to accomplish, it hasn’t a hope of being successful. With copy writing, that means you have to know what you want readers to do about it once they’ve read your stuff.

Marketing needs to have a reason or it’s just so much blather. What do you want potential customers to do when they see or hear your ad, or read the sign in your window and the info on your website? It might seem obvious, “I want them to buy!” but there are many different reasons to engage customers.

Do you want them to go to the website to purchase? Call the 1-800 number?  Attend a community event at the store? Give you feedback on their experience? Become a testimonial? Sign up for your newsletter? Refer a friend? Quality marketing campaigns don’t just ask customers to buy, they also develop a relationship that educates, establishes rapport, and earns respect.

As part of developing relationships with her customers, Rhiannon Cosgrave, owner of Natural Synergy Day Spa in Parksville, uses a monthly newsletter. The newsletter format allows Rhiannon to educate customers about the services she offers while also informing and offering tips on general health and wellbeing.

“I do a lot of advertising in many different forms for the business, but ultimately it’s about keeping people engaged so they think of your business first,” says Cosgrave. And her customers are thinking of her. Cosgrave was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by the Parksville & District Chamber of Commerce this year.

Yes, It IS All About Them

I often say marketing isn’t about telling people what you want them to know. It’s about knowing what they need to hear. That means you need to know your customer. Put yourself in their shoes. Start with understanding what their main pain points are. What are the challenges you can resolve for them? The only way to know this for sure is to ask them.

Start With the Highlights

Much can be said about any product or service, but often the details are more important to you than the customer. When you want action, it makes most sense to focus on what matters most to your customers. Frankly, it also saves a lot of time and space. When you’re dealing with small ad spaces, it’s vital to get right to the point.

Start with a bullet point list. Often this starts out with the features of the product, the technical details. These may be important, but usually they are not nearly so important as the benefits – how does the customer benefit by choosing your product or service.

In the case of a highly technical product or service specifics of how something works play a larger role, but for most buyers, this is still secondary information. The first step is to address immediate needs. Provide the in-depth as an easily accessible follow up.

Prioritize Information

Once you have the bullet points, prioritize the information based on what your customers have indicated is most important to them. Ideally, ask people who have already purchased why they did and what helped them make the buying decision. This kind of market research  will ensure that you are not making unfounded assumptions about what motivates your buyer.

Know the Venue

Appropriate tone and style depends on where the content will appear. Ads are typically short and sweet, and often catchy or humourous – you have little space and it’s costly, so use it wisely for greatest impact. Websites content needs to be easy to scan through, for easy reading and quick sound bytes. White papers are an example of in-depth content that may be downloaded from a website and thoroughly read and absorbed.

Choose a style and tone appropriate to both your brand [link to branding article] and where content will be read. It’s fun to be creative and play with this a little, particularly as something surprising can help attract attention and be memorable.

Being in the fashion industry, Colleen Becker, owner of Frakas, Shops for Women Inc. in Kelowna, knows that nothing attracts her customers like the promise of access to the latest fashions. Her marketing includes an ongoing series of promotions through radio, newspaper and social media that link feature items in her store to the hippest celebrities in Hollywood.

“Our ads are enticing and paint a picture of an item we carry in the store and its connection to a celebrity. We try to create an ongoing story that engages the customers and keeps them listening and looking for our ads,” says Becker.

Becker, also points out how important it is to follow through on the promises you make in your ads. When her customers come in looking for the earrings that Gwyneth Paltrow was spotted in, they’ll find a cardboard cut out of Gwyneth’s face with the jewelry dangling from her ears. There’s no missing those earrings!

Tighten Things Up

Readers Digest Condensed was onto something. Get to the point! Don’t use five words where one will do. Get to the heart of the message. One of reasons visuals are so effective is that imagery is so powerful. When you write, paint a picture with your words.

One of the easiest ways to get hung up and stressed out about writing is by fantasizing that you’ll get it perfect the first time. You won’t. Relax, and have another go. It may take some practice, but you’ll get there – that’s what the Draft stamp was invented for.

Writing good copy means the difference between moving prospects to customers or having their eyes glaze over…if they even noticed you at all. If ever in doubt about your ability to capture attention, be sure to bring in an outsider who can provide the objectivity and writing finesse to make your marketing sizzle!

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Examples provided by Women’s Enterprise Centre. Around the corner or around the province, Women’s Enterprise Centre is helping women start, grow, and succeed in business by offering business advisory services, business skills training, business loans, resources, publications and referrals.

The Wizard of Oz

One of my favourite beneficial impacts of the Internet has been how the curtain can be pulled back to reveal the reality behind the facade.

Marketing has gotten a bad rap over the years — and rightly so at times — with the misrepresentation that occurs when companies do not behave honestly.

It seems crazy, but our parents and grandparents took what they heard on radio and saw on television as complete truth. “Smoking isn’t bad for your health.” How could they know any different? The message was tightly controlled and there was no platform for anyone who felt or thought differently.

It used to be that you only knew what companies wanted you to know. We may take it for granted now, but that changed in a huge way with something we may already take for granted — the ability to publish video and text to a worldwide audience. Now, news of any and all kinds spreads like rapid-fire around the globe.

Keep that in mind as a business owner. It’s not that everything you do is under scrutiny or that you can never screw up. Just set out to be the kind of business you want to do business with. And when you screw up (not if), be transparent and resolve it quickly.

Stating the not-so-obvious

I found this ad, also in a magazine, which plainly states the obvious: “Grape is a fruit. Not a flavour.”

But wait. Maybe it’s not so obvious to state the obvious anymore. A couple of summers ago my sister moved onto a farm just outside of town, taking her two young children with her (…which just seemed like a good idea).

Anyway, my sister was thrilled to have the space and grew a huge garden full of produce. One day that first summer she said to my neice, about four years old at the time, “Look honey, these carrots came from our garden.” My niece looked at her in that way only a four-going-on-14 year old can, and said patiently, “Mom. Carrots don’t come from the garden. They come from the store.” My sister was horrified!

So began a concerted educational program which included having the kids plant seeds and water them, assisting with harvest, and providing tours to all their visiting friends to show them where lunch was coming from.

If my four year old niece didn’t know where carrots come from, maybe we can’t take for granted that consumers will check to see if there actually are any grapes in their grape juice, or oranges in their orange juice.

Advertising: Gone to the Dogs

Yeah, so busted.

In this day and age, advertising still has a bad rap and based on this recent find torn from a health and wellness magazine, with good reason. This time, it’s the ludicrous-ness that gives advertising it’s apparently well-deserved reputation.

“Unlock your dog’s full potential,” the copy says.

I just have a few questions:

1. Exactly how much potential does a dog actually have? Can we every truly expect them to graduate much beyond tail wagging, bum licking and fetch? And if so, how would kibble be the catalyst in this grandiose evolution?
2. Who hires the people that come up this stuff?! Better yet, who at Purina authorized payment? I’ll bet it was a committee decision; someone on that committee should have known better.
3. Do the people these agencies hire and pay to write this stuff think we’re all idiots?! Give your head a shake.

Seriously, people.

Note to advertisers: THIS is what gives advertising a bad name. I wouldn’t care except that many people are under the mistaken impression that advertising and marketing are the same thing. Which means you’re also giving ME a bad name.