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Is Your Marketing Missing a P?
-or-
Why Properly Executed Specialty
Advertising Works!
by Nye Ohrberg
If you’ve been in the marketing game for any length of time, you’ve seen all manner of professional nomenclature come and go. Positioning, share of mind, top-of-mind awareness, guerilla marketing…it’s a long list. And when something new does emerge, the tendency is to dispense the old to the archives of yesteryear.
Well, sometimes that’s a good thing (I am sooooooooooooooooo sick of hearing marketing mavens and advertising gurus trumpet “positioning” as if it were the Holy Grail of promotion!). Sometimes, however, it’s not, and one of the old saws that got tossed out quite a while ago but deserves to be resurrected is the “4 P’s of Marketing.”
You remember that, don’t you? It’s “Product · Place · Price · Promotion.” Or do you remember the 4 P’s at all (and if you’re young enough, chances are you’ve never even heard of it)? Whatever the case, let’s first do a recap of those P’s.
Product: The right product for the application. It doesn’t have to be the best product in its class, because this isn’t strictly about quality. It’s about applicability and practicability. It’s also about knowing what your product can and cannot do and who is most likely to be interested in this product. [NOTE: I’m using “product” here to mean both product and service. Call it literary shorthand.]
Place: Where customers can find your product. In real estate, it’s “location location location.” Same here. But more importantly, your product needs to be offered and available at a logical place. That is, it needs to be placed where potential customers are most likely to look for it or where it is most likely to attract buyer attention, either via product affinity or shopper surprise and consequent impulse.
Price: The right price for the product and the market (and, of course, your profitability). Notice that word “right.” It doesn’t mean the lowest price – it means the price that fits the personality and perception of the product. Indeed, the marketing annals are rife with examples of products that were priced so comparatively low that buyers perceived those products as being of inferior quality and, as a result, eschewed them.
Promotion: The communication of a product’s features and benefits. How that communication is delivered depends on myriad factors including target audience, product application, competition, time constraints, budget constraints, and lots more. But your communication must be delivered effectively, consistently, and repeatedly, or your product with simply gather dust in its place – regardless of the price you charge.
Those comprise the four wheels of your marketing vehicle. If one wheel goes flat – or just plain falls off…or isn’t even installed – your business will careen off the sales road and into a no-sales abyss.
That’s the longstanding principle of the 4 P’s, and it’s a principle that makes sense, all of the marketing profession’s pseudoscientific modern monikers notwithstanding. However, there’s a P missing – and it’s been missing right from the start. That P is “Presence.”
Presence – the Missing P
Presence is where your product exists in the eyes, hearts, and minds of your future, current, and former customers. Or, to be more precise about it, where your product’s messages and/or reminders exist.
Do not confuse presence with share of mind or top-of-mind awareness. The concepts are similar, but only just so. Share of mind and top-of-mind awareness are internal functions. They are at the mercy of the whims and fancies of memory and the synaptic detours to which our brains are subject. No matter how often a marketing message is transmitted, a potential buyer’s unaided recall of that message is easily and all too often diverted by any of an array of life’s little distractions – including the at-the-decision-moment arrival of a competitor’s message.
Thus, share of mind and top-of-mind awareness have no true presence, other than what might carom around in a prospect’s head. Real, genuine, enduring presence requires physicality – an existence that is external and not dependent on what a potential buyer might cull from memory.
Enter specialty advertising products. Of all the marketing and advertising investments available, a specialty advertising product (e.g., promo product, premium, et al) is the only one that has and can demand presence.
It’s basic human nature. You have no compunction about throwing out a brochure or flyer or other flat printed marketing communication. But an actual product? Even the chintziest geegaw stays around longer than a sales letter, sitting on a desk or stuck to a refrigerator or holding your morning coffee or whatever…and “broadcasting” a message 24/7. THAT is presence!
Promo Items Don’t Work…or Do They?
Yes, I can hear you now. You’ve used trinkets and fuzzballs before, and they simply don’t work, right? Well, the sad fact is that too many advertisers – and, for that matter, promo item sellers – don’t know how to make those specialty items work.
Years ago, I convinced a client to purchase a considerable quantity of pens, coffee mugs, tile coasters, and assorted other promo goodies, and I showed them a promotional program for sending or otherwise giving these items to current customers, new prospects, and employees.
After a few months, I followed up to see how the program was working. The client told me that it wasn’t working at all. And why wasn’t it working? The client was reluctant to give away the merchandise because it was so “valuable.” That was tantamount to the client saying they don’t give out brochures because they cost so much to print! Yikes!!
Unfortunately, scenarios like this are far too common. Even more common, though, is the penchant for promo product buyers to choose products based solely on price and then distribute these products willy-nilly without any kind of promotional program behind them – as if just handing a prospect a pearl-handle pickle picker is going to pry open their checkbook!
Promo items don’t work that way. Sure, even without a program or romanced message or enticement to respond, that pickle picker may stay around. But its presence – especially immediate but also long term – is minimal, to say the least.
The 3 R’s of Effective Direct Mail Promo
Specialty advertising works only when it is properly executed, and far and away the most effective use of promo items is in a direct mail campaign. Yet proper execution of such a campaign entails multiple stages, not just a one-hit-hopeful thrown on the wall to see what sticks. It involves various and ongoing communications steps that engage the target, repeatedly deliver the sales messages, and motivate the recipient to take action. And most importantly, it must involve “dimension” – mailers that are not as flat as the results those ubiquitous envelope mailings typically generate.
To truly work, a direct mail promo employing specialty advertising items should adhere to the “3 R’s of Effective Direct Mail Promo”: Relevance · Repetition · Reward.
Relevance: Make each item relevant to the message you’re trying to convey – NOT necessarily your product – and complement that “borrowed interest” item with creative copy that crystallizes the allusion to your message.
Repetition: Follow up, follow up, follow up. Hit your targets again and again and again with different promo items but a reiteration of your message, your product’s features and benefits, and your offer. Statistics for flat mail alone show that a follow-up mailing averages twice the response of the initial mailing. Dimensional follow-up mailings almost always do even better.
Reward: In direct marketing parlance, this is your offer. Every direct marketing professional will tell that the offer is king. They’re right. It is. But people being people, an offer of a discount or some dollar or percent savings isn’t nearly as powerful as when it’s coupled with an offer for another free gift (remember, you’ve already sent them one gift in that first dimensional mailer). People simply like to get free stuff…and that stuff creates presence.
Now don’t think that I’m just shilling for the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, or FedEx. Those 3 R’s apply to the entirety of a campaign, and they need to be followed equally among all of a campaign’s marketing communications – especially including emails and the advertiser’s website.
You see, the “multiple stages” I mentioned earlier aren’t limited solely to direct mailers. A correctly developed and implemented promotional campaign should take advantage of all appropriate and affordable direct marketing media – that is, media that can follow the 3 R’s and fully exploit the potential of presence-building promo products.
What’s Old Is New…and Newly Powerful!
Since the advent of the Internet, an ever increasing share of an advertiser’s marketing mix has gone “e.” It makes sense, at least to a point, because e-communications are cheap, quick, immediate, and instantly generated. The trouble is, though, e-communications can be just as easily ignored, deleted, or automatically blocked. Wastage is exceedingly high in e-only marketing.
Nevertheless, the fixation on “e” shows no signs of abating. But a funny thing has happened on the way to today’s cyberspace: Direct mail is moving from quaint to unique and exciting – direct mail, that is, that’s dimensional…that doesn’t just sit their flat amidst other promo envelopes and relentless bills.
That means specialty advertising items. And again, promo items stand alone in their ability to generate and sustain presence among a business’s prospective and current customers.
Of course, there’s nothing new about the notion of promo gadgets. They’ve been around for millennia. What is new is the immense burgeoning potential of promo items to cut through media noise, gets sales messages received and remembered, and produce viable measurable results.
The paradigm has shifted. Product, place, price, and promotion – the traditional four wheels of the marketing vehicle – now have a fifth wheel: presence.
Presence – cultivated through a carefully planned, developed, and executed multi-stage promo-item campaign — is the steering wheel of this vehicle, one that has the power to guide and maneuver targets from contact through curiosity to concrete buying interest.
Nye Ohrberg
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