Canadian Marketing Blog

Inbound Marketing Automation: 5 Steps to Harnessing its Power

The last of a three-part series:

post one - introduced the idea that Outbound Marketing techniques are no longer cost-effective in reaching B2B buyers, and suggested that we use Inbound Marketing Automation to replace it.

post two - provided a brief overview of what Inbound Marketing Automation is, and then outlined the software techniques used to automate it.

And here, post three details the 5 steps to harness Inbound Marketing Automation's power.

STEP 1: Shift your Marketing from Outbound to Inbound

Turn your website into a prospect magnet, and stop interrupting people with Outbound messages.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Start by developing your online brand identity: Your keyword strategy. Find those keyword phrases that you can compete on, and which will minimize “bounce” and maximize conversion. Optimize the content and structure of your website around those keyword phrases. And then, create meaningful external backlinks to your site, to boost your site’s credibility and its importance to search engines. Successful SEO is a marketing exercise and a technical one; so before the techies begin, make sure you have the marketing strategy defined well.
• PPC: If needed, use this same “keyword identity” to compliment your SEO strategy with PPC ads.
• Free Content: Show off your company’s knowledge leadership in your industry by creating the great content which inbound prospects want. Publish this content as whitepapers, videos, and webinars. Make it free and downloadable, provided prospects identify themselves and give you permission to communication with them 1:1. Map your content to your sales cycle, so that you can feed prospects with valuable information at each stage of the sales cycle.
• Integrate Outbound Campaigns with Inbound Marketing Automation: Some outbound campaigns – like tradeshows and direct contact programs – may still be delivering ROMI. (Return on Marketing Investment). By using customized landing pages on your website, you can bring those traditional outbound campaigns into the efficient inbound world of integrated analytics, CRM integration, and automated sales lead management.

STEP 2: Automate to cope with the volume and need for speed

Use Inbound Marketing Automation technology to manage the routine repeatable tasks, like the generation and management of inbound sales leads, and data analysis. Free up marketing and sales for value-added, strategic activities and the closing of deals. Two important elements of Inbound Marketing Automation are:

• Reputation Management Analytics: New tools allow you to Join in and influence the online conversation, with minimal investments in time. See Step 4, below, for more.
• Sales Lead Management Automation: Employ a Demand Generation software solution to automate the generation and management of inbound sales leads. Working with Sales, automate best practices and set business rules to automatically grade, score, and nurture prospects. Together, have Marketing and Sales define the stage a prospect is ready to be handed to sales, (by setting Grade and Score targets). And when you have a hot lead, seamlessly feed the new prospect’s profile and “digital footprint” data into your CRM system.

STEP 3: Get Analytics on your side

Transform marketing from art to a science. Inbound Marketing Automation captures and processes massive amounts of information, enabling you to close the feedback loop from your market and individual prospects. Now you can get this all in real time.

• For a macro view of your market, you can use Google Analytics, a free program. This yields macro insight, but does not “put faces” on individual visitors.
• The real power of Inbound Marketing Automation analytics is in the ways it captures the profile and digital footprint of every prospect visiting your website. By implementing a Demand Generation solution integrated directly into your CRM system, you can obtain a 1:1 insight into your prospect’s preferences and needs.
• Multivariate testing allows the effectiveness of different marketing messages, landing pages, and campaigns to be compared in real time.

STEP 4: Participate in the Online Discussion

Another opportunity to accomplish McKenna’s closing the loop; is to join the conversation in relevant social media.

• Join-in on the Conversation: Find the key forums, communities, and, especially, the blogs in your industry. Listen to industry issues, trends, and concerns. You have a unique perspective - you are after all the expert - so give it a “Voice” and point others back to your valuable content and website. This allows you to build backlinks, boosting your site’s credibility with search engines.
• Create your own blog. But beware of the time commitment: the effort required to keep it meaningful is high. But blogging is also a great way to increase your SEO effectiveness by creating effective backlinks to your site.
• Give your market a way to express itself: Empower your prospects and customers by giving them a forum to discuss issues of relevance. Give them the tools to build their own content. Create a portal that functions as a “water cooler” for customers and prospects. To marketers schooled in Outbound techniques, this is a risky proposition, but to Inbound Marketers it’s an opportunity to show leadership, add value to the industry, and strengthen connections with your market.
• Hidden in the last point is a tremendous potential benefit to your company. You can use the feedback you get from the community to help you design and develop your next products!

STEP 5: Make it easy for your visitors and customers

This step may seem low-tech, but at the core, this is really what Inbound Marketing is all about.

• Consider the entire prospect and customer online experience. Trace it through the complete interaction lifecycle – from first contact, to training and after-sales support. Now remove any barriers or impediments to this cycle.
• Think Buying, not selling. Empower the Buyer by giving him or her all the information needed to make the decision. Make the purchase process itself as easy as it can be. Watch people interacting with your site and its software and fix any place where the person halts in confusion or goes back to try again.
• Remember, as a B2B marketer, your customers must buy. Many B2C purchases are discretionary, but B2B customers need your products and services to keep their own businesses running. It’s not just a want; it’s also a need. Often what determines whether they buy or not, is how easy you make it for them to do so.

In other words, make it easy for prospects to become customers, and then easy for them to remain one, and you’ll have a customer for life.

By implementing an Inbound Marketing Automation system, you, too, should see large increases in the volume and quality of sales leads, and triple digit increases in their sales conversion rates.

Please visit our website for more details, or to download white papers or tools to help you assess the opportunity.

The Competition Revs-up

McMaster Commerce students are back again, soon to launch year 4 of Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec competition. This is a competition you want to tell your friends about, who will then tell their friends, and/or their friends children, who if eligible to compete…..may find themselves getting the ride of their life…..literally.

Anyone who is a full-time undergraduate business or commerce student, undergraduate with either a minor or major in business, or MBA student, can compete to become Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec (see full contest and eligibility details). The task is to develop a pre-launch campaign for the [all new] 2011 Chevy Cruze. The real-time pre-launch for the Cruze starts in July 2010 with the possibility of the winning campaign strategies put to the test.

The competition is a dream come true, especially for students who live and breathe new media. The marketing campaign can ONLY include new media: digital, event, guerilla, social, viral, mobile. No TV, Print or Radio. The budget is $500,000.

Chevy has done a great job of preparing the campaign communications brief and this short video gives you what you need to get started.

Key campaign timelines:

Dec 7 – submission process opens (register at www.topadexec.com)
Jan 22 – two page summary outlining the ‘campaign idea’ is due
Feb 22 - top 25 submissions are selected – these students create a comprehensive report outlining key objectives, positioning, media strategy and creative execution
March 30 – top 10 competitors deliver a 30 minute presentation in Toronto to a judging panel

Winning team (of two) each drive away with a 2011 Chevrolet Cruze.

Full disclosure - CMA is a proud sponsor of Top Ad Exec

The New Normal

By any measure, the growth of the economy in the last decade can be likened to the roaring 20's-30's, consumers (and American ones at that) fueled a consumption binge that unleashed a wave of cashflow and optimism which was then leveraged by various financial instruments until finally the bubble burst.

Today we have a relatively more modest/humbled marketplace in the developed economies, and the hope/anticipation that emerging (BRIC) economies can help pickup the slack.

To make things even more interesting, we can add in the pending pricing of carbon into our goods and services, digital and the power of social resulting in a new landscape where the benefits of scale are no longer predictable. This alignment of forces raises questions about how one competes, builds value and differentiates.

I recently came across this conversation at McKinsey where a number of CSO's (Chief Strategy Officers) discuss their views of the "new normal". Click here for a video link to the conversation (you will need to complete a free registration) or here for pdf transcript.

Go ahead, we'll wait.

So what do you think?
What are the indisputables in your sector?
Do you think the long tail is going to replace the normal distribution curve as our underlying view of the world?
How about speed and nimbleness. Does that portend an eventual shift to smaller business units?
What of the shift to adaptive planning/budgeting/programing. No doubt it's necessary when the groundshift is severe..but what of the longer term, and more importantly are we the cause of it?
What about brands, are they more or less relevant in this environment? Will we see the rise of new regional brands or global?

Lots of points for discussion.
I hope to hear your thoughts. Just what is the New Normal?

Show Me How You Care

A new study from the Peppers & Rogers Group in partnership with SAS asked companies globally about their management of their customers’ experiences.

Almost half of the respondents (47%) reported lacking customer experience management processes, yet 85 per cent say the customer experience will play a critical role in their competitiveness. And we’re talking about companies of scale – one of the criteria to take the survey included revenue of at least $100 million (Canadian).

232 respondents at companies in the following countries completed the online survey (51 from Canadian companies): U.S., France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Australia, India, Sweden, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

It seems Canadian companies lead in the measurement of customer affinity compared to their global counterparts – 72% reported using key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction scores and 68% report measuring customer attitudes and perceptions of the company compared to the global benchmarks of 46% and 50% respectively.

But just 12% report being good or excellent at creating a complete and integrated view of the customer across multiple products and channels – insights that can lead to actions that will give customers cause to ‘feel the love’.

There’s a lot of rich data in the study report detailing the Canadian findings. There’s also a webcast (produced by SAS) where Canadian panelists react to the study findings (including CMA’s Chair of its Integrated Marketing and Customer Experience Council).

Finally – you can get a score of your company’s customer experience maturity by taking this 5 minute survey.

More on What's Right (and wrong ) with B2B Advertising

“We find it truly surprising that businesses full of smart people produce so much advertising that isn’t...Why then is good business-to-business advertising so hard to come by?” DAVE AND ALEX.

Dave and Alex are a pair of advertising executives who evaluated 79% of a set of 200 B2B print ads as “poor”. They followed up this assessment with a 12-page (highly entertaining) supplement called: “Why do so many business-to-business ads suck?"

1.The misunderstood business customer: some ads would have you believing that business buyers are “soulless automatons with parallel processors for brains”.

MY OPINION: the individual making an organizational purchase is weighing unique parameters – the B2B and B2C purchase processes are not equivalent. Emotions do play a part in B2B decision-making but it is qualitatively different from consumer decisions. The B2B campaign should focus on the feelings generated about the product or the company – the B2C campaign focuses on how the customer feels about himself.

2. The sales guy culture: B2B marketers are more likely to be drawn from sales and engineering backgrounds, and sales guy advertising tends to resemble product brochures.

MY OPINION: somewhat true. B2B marketing efforts are often reactive rather than proactive (i.e. prompted by a specific turn of events). There is a lack of strong training programs focusing on the business marketing, branding and advertising processes.

3.Lazy agency syndromes. According to Dave and Alex, agencies creating B2B ads tend to resort too easily to business terms and clichés such as handshakes and globes and mountain climbers. An internet search (by Dave and Alex) turned up thousands of clichés: “Why we mean business...When we say internet we mean business...We mean business in space”.

MY OPINION: again, a lot of this reflects a lack of understanding of the business marketing and advertising processes including: the role of emotion in business marketing and advertising; the uniqueness of business products and services.

4.Corpo-babble: the inability to speak clearly and directly to the target audience such as the following example: “Anticipating millions of connections your network will support, we deliver a business optimized infrastructure that provides scalability”.

MY OPINION: business marketing has become better than ever at communicating a single meaningful message and utilizing effective creative. Note the following headline for an IBM ad: “Stop thinking like a bank. Start thinking like a customer”. This is an ad informing bankers how IBM can ensure that their customers can open a new account in minutes rather than hours! It effectively uses copy and visuals to back up benefits suggested in the headline.

5. Marketing schizophrenia: Dave and Alex say the typical B2B marketer knows how he has to “differentiate” his product but when push comes to shove tends to back away from creative opportunities and seeks “credibility” and “security”.

MY OPINION: a fading problem – as evidenced by the many good examples of focused B2B marketing and advertising out there but some may be going too far (but that happens in the B2C world).

6.Trying to hard: when they do go out on a limb, B2B marketers will try to be unique and draw attention to themselves in almost a “frantic and hyperactive” fashion”.

MY OPINION: this is still very true – sometimes it is very hard to tell who some business ads are targeting. Fortunately it’s not all bad news. Many more B2B companies are investing in business marketing and there is a noticeable increase in the variety and number of business advertising campaigns. BtoB Magazine, for example, in its monthly evaluation of business advertising campaigns (Chasers) has no trouble digging up examples of both well and poorly executed B2B campaigns. This suggests we’ve come a long way as an industry but there remains lots of opportunity for improvements.

What Marketers Want...... to know

We strategize, develop campaigns, market products and services and engage our audiences. And in the end, consume – as typical consumers.

Because we are 'in the business' - will our opinions differ on consumer facing issues, such as the environment, packaging, innovation, buying organic? Hmmmm.

Brandspark’s 2010 Marketers Survey – now in field – will study these issues. More importantly, it will give you (marketers) a handle on the kinds of marketing strategies your competitors and peers in other industries are planning for 2010, where their marketing $$ are being allocated, their capacity to innovate, the issues most pressing related to brand management, etc.

Both CMA and Strategy are fielding partners of the survey - we invite the marketing community to complete the survey - we'll be talking more about what it means a little later. (Yes, there's a draw prize you can opt-in for (iPod Touch) at the end of the survey, and respondents will get survey results directly.)

This is our chance to get a pulse of how our operating environment may be shifting as we come out of the recession - please try to take a few moments [less than 15 minutes] to weigh in with your opinions!

Note: We'll be discussing more about the study’s implications at the Success Makers Workshop [a real WORKING workshop] February 11 2010 - where the focus is on leveraging digital tools and social media to connect with consumers to uncover brand insights.

Social Media Pollution

Consider the following scenario: Your plumber approaches you after completing a repair in your home. He seems like a nice enough guy, so you give him a chance when he begins speaking to you. He asks if you’d be interested in receiving his weekly newsletter. You are confused and a little bit uncomfortable. You decide to play along, though, and ask him what the aforementioned newsletter would touch on. He responds, “Oh, various items on plumbing and how you can get the best out of it. I have different tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of your toilet-water… I also review new fixtures and pipes that are hitting the market.”

At this point, you awkwardly decline, allow him to leave, and lock the door. Why did this happen? It’s simple; there is no need for an exterior relationship between the service (our weird, hypothetical plumber) and the consumer (you). When my water pipes are busted, I require the service. Beyond that, it’s not really part of my world – and I’m okay with that. So why do so many marketers try to force the same kind of irrelevant content down the public’s throat on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook? As these sites continue to grow in popularity and international reach, uninformed marketers are latching onto their coattails and, consequently, making a fool of themselves.

When done right, many brands have been quite successful utilizing this young medium. Clothing company H&M posts photos of their new seasonal collections and other interesting materials that their close to1.5 million fans on Facebook legitimately care about. As marketers, we are obligated to understand and properly take advantage of the trends that affect our consumers. There is no doubt that social media provides an opportunity for branding. However, that opportunity isn’t open to every business out there. You must have something unique to offer the consumer - beyond a price listing or link to your website. If there is no demand for additional material, don’t provide it. You’ll just be polluting an emerging media that consumers are still interested in.

So before you hop on the social media bandwagon, please take a minute to consider if anyone wants you going along for the ride. After all, it’s already pretty crowded out there.

Brook Johnston @marketingman.ca

Electronic Commerce Protection Act Moves to the Senate

The ECPA (Bill C-27), Canada's overdue "Anti Spam Bill", has now been passed by the House of Commons and will now be debated and studied in the Senate. For marketers and eCommerce businesses, it is good to see legislation taking direct aim at spyware, phishing scams, spamming and other damaging practices that undermine consumer confidence in the digital marketplace.

Key features of the Bill are that consent will be required to send a commercial electronic communication to someone or install a computer program on someone's computer. The law will also require that electronic messages properly identify the sender, related contact info and provide the kind of easy unsubscribe that responsible marketers now offer in any case. Most important perhaps are the provisions allowing the CRTC, Competition Bureau and Privacy Commissioner to enforce their respective responsibilities under the Act -along with hefty potential penalties of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for corporations.

Overall the ECPA will be a big step forward to achieving better consumer protection online. Yet it also recognizes that organizations should have implied consent to communicate with their existing customers until advised otherwise, and it leaves legitimate B2B communications largely unconstrained.

The Federal Government and Parliamentarians have stated that their aim is to crack down on the really "bad actors" and the worst online abuses, but without causing harm to legitimate and responsible businesses. The degree of success on that score will depend on the extent to which the ECPA requirements are consistent with the rules that responsible businesses have been following since Canada's privacy law (PIPEDA) came fully into force in 2004. PIPEDA and CMA's Code of Ethics already require that responsible businesses must have consent to use email addresses, must properly identify their organization and provide an easy unsubscribe. That reality is in stark contrast to major spammers who illegally harvest email contact information, send emails without any consent whatsoever, and generally provide no legitimate unsubscribe opportunity. It's this second category that represents the vast bulk of what gets picked up by spam filters, or worse, ends up as unwanted material in our inboxes. At the end of the day a credible anti-spam framework comes down to effective enforcement.

Countries like France, Germany, Spain and the U.K. have all adopted tough anti-spam regimes featuring explicit consent requirements that actually make things much tougher for legitimate businesses - yet these places remain amongst the top ten sources of spam (www.spamhaus.org). It comes down to a commitment to enforcement. As the ECPA moves forward in the Senate, CMA will continue to deliver the message that this important new law and related regulations can provide the basis for an effective crackdown on spammers while not unnecessarily harming responsible businesses that use email for legitimate marketing purposes.

Co-workers for a while. Friends for life.

Let’s face it, I’m writing this blog because it’s my turn. I’ve been asked before but always managed to wiggle my way out of it. Until now. “Do one for December,” I was told. And, like all good creative people, I respond well to deadlines. Sort of.

Finding a topic was my biggest challenge. My first idea, albeit an obvious one, was to talk about deadlines. After all, asking a Creative Director to take time out of a really hectic December schedule to write a blog is basically asking for a commentary on deadlines. Why must everything be done before December 24th?

My next topic idea was to discuss what a tough year 2009 was. And boy was it! I’m glad to see the end of this one. But as a veteran of the business, I have to admit, I’ve seen worse. I’d be happy to swap battle stories with any other vets out there – over a glass of wine of course.

Other topics entered my frantic brain, but they all felt too negative. An old memory flashed through my mind. Once, when I was in my 20’s and looking to switch agencies, I discovered I didn’t get a job I wanted because the Creative Director thought I was bitter and jaded. And that was before I actually became bitter and jaded. Hmmm… Happy thoughts…. Happy thoughts…

Then I received a phone call from a friend, one of my best friends in fact, inviting me out for drinks. And I knew I had my topic. Sure it’s a tough, relentless, harsh, often thankless business (happy thoughts, happy thoughts), but it can also be very rewarding. In particular, in the friendships you make.

My friend, let’s call her Beth, and I met over 10 years ago – working at the same direct marketing agency. As creative partners (she’s an art director, I’m a writer), we bonded over 3am arguments over which concepts were stronger, over headlines that were too long, or layouts that just didn’t work. We shared the joy of a brilliant idea and the panic of a bad one.

Life eventually took us in different directions – different countries in fact – but we never lost touch. And now, back in the same city, we talk pretty much daily… even if it’s just to complain about something.

And Beth isn’t the anomaly. Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years have become good friends. We invite each other out for lunch, coffee and drinks. We go to each other’s parties. We’re facebook friends. We email each other youtube videos. We tell stories and laugh at the things that once made us hide out in the bathroom and cry. We dance together at the CMAs. And we hug… every time we see each other.

Recently an intern asked me, “what’s the best part about being in the advertising business?” And I had trouble answering her. (“You’re bitter and jaded,” flashed through my mind again.) But now that I’ve had time to think about it, I know what I’d say: it’s the people you work with. Friends. Friends for life.

By Shelley Sutherland, Vice-President, Creative Director, Rapp Canada (and CMA Direct Marketing Council member)

Two Pigs an Oinking and a Chicken in a Pen

I opened up a Christmas card the other day from my cousin and was thrilled to receive two pigs (she assured me there was no pun intended). Will my pigs be arriving in a one horse open sleigh on Christmas day? Hmm good question, if they are arriving via one horse open sleigh I won’t be seeing them; they’re going direct to Zimbabwe. I’m guessing this was in response to the goats I gave her last year.

In this festive season we often get caught up in consumerism. We’re decking the malls and buying incredible amounts of stuff for people that “have everything”. We’re so busy purchasing, partying and stressing all of the holiday festivities that we forget to adopt an attitude of gratitude.

This year, we’ve all experienced some kind of financial repercussions from the economic downturn. That being said, we’re still well over half way up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs while a good chunk of the globe is in need of food, shelter and clothing.

And don’t even get me started on our political freedom. As a post boomer female, I haven’t experienced workplace prejudice; I’ve shared equal rights with my male counterparts and had the ability to be all that I can be. It may seem like a small thing but on the world stage where many girls are struggling to get an education it's paramount.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day hassles, focus on the things that aren’t going right and believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Wake up, we are in Shangri-La and the grass doesn’t get any greener. We have the right to choose and an attitude of gratitude and the good life is a choice. I learned this little trick many years ago that may help if you’re down, feeling sorry for yourself or otherwise irritated. Write down 5 things that you are grateful for. Do it every day and eventually that feeling will disappear. As Aristotle so aptly quoted “We are what we repeatedly do – excellence then is not an act but a habit”. Why not start the New Year with new habit – an attitude of gratitude.

Product Marketing Trends for 2010

While your mechanic might want you to believe that your car needs an oil change every 6,000 kilometers, automobile and oil technology has progressed to the point where recommended service intervals are now 15,000 kilometers or more. While this saves money and time, the downside is that minor problems often go undetected and become major issues; thus, it probably makes sense to have someone pop the hood every once in a while. In much the same way, product marketing should conduct periodic checks to ensure things are running smoothly. A perfect time to do this is during the yearly planning and budgeting cycle. In this post, I will reveal three key trends that should be on the radar of every b-to-b product marketing executive in 2010.

One: A Role in Sales Readiness
Many organizations have a dedicated sales readiness function that resides in sales and owns coordinating, synchronizing and integrating field, inside and channel sales with a variety of marketing functions. Product marketing must work with this function to define a common lifecycle management process across product lines/business units and to develop field requirements for sales tools, which will help sales reps understand what will be available when a new product or service is introduced. Product marketing will also need to work collaboratively with field marketing and communications to build the tools and collateral necessary for sales to more effectively facilitate buying/selling cycles. Product marketing can also play a key role in the evolution of the sales and marketing portal still prevalent in many organizations. Newer sales enablement platforms give reps the ability to intelligently search a content database for opportunity-specific content and customize it. These platforms also encourage collaboration across sales and marketing functions through community features and support for embedded social tools.

Two: The Rise of Hypersegmentation
Effective b-to-b organizations target at a sub-vertical level rather than stop at macro verticals, as buying triggers, trends, regulations and propensity to buy often vary wildly. This calls for increasingly defined target-level segmentation, or hypersegmentation, then choosing the strongest targets relative to one another. As product marketing tends to serve as the go-to source for information on an organization’s target markets, it will primarily fall to these marketers to educate the rest of the organization about deeper industry segmentation possibilities and how they can help provide a competitive advantage. Tighter targeting helps product marketing deliver better intelligence in such key areas as markets and roles, competitive threats and opportunities, win/loss analysis and pricing. Product marketing should help develop processes to take advantage of a hypersegmentation model without having to continually recreate individual programs to target.

Three: Program Interlock
One common theme for every marketing role is program interlock, or the process of marketing counterparts building integrated programs that align reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence goals under a common campaign framework. Besides streamlining activities, this level of integration supports the reuse of content and best practices across marketing programs. Working together to align campaigns will also help raise the visibility of product marketing within an organization. Product marketing can provide field marketing input on product/solution positioning and messaging to ensure consistency, but also share its customer knowledge with field marketing to take advantage of hypersegmentation, which should improve the performance of demand creation programs. On the reputation side, product marketing can contribute to communications programs with unique value propositions for various audiences, then work collaboratively to define the mix of tactics that deliver them.

Product marketing is a hub of marketing, providing a foundation of intelligence and content that can be leveraged by the entire marketing function. While its capabilities and value to sales and marketing processes are often overlooked, product marketing can take concrete steps to integrate its expertise across a wide range of marketing programs.

Subconsciously Slaying The Naysayers

There was turkey, some new books, more turkey, and a few conversations spent defending the ethics and practices of marketing. Being home for Christmas gave me the chance to talk about advertising with people who don’t spend much time thinking about it - which is actually extremely refreshing. You see, as soon as you spend too much time inside the marketing space warp, you risk forgetting about the conventional perceptions most people have about what we do. It’s necessary to step back every once and a while and listen to the organic views they have on brands and their strategies.

However, I occasionally speak with people who have an overly aggressive viewpoint. It typically consists of marketers being evil, brainwashing, corporate devils that are out to destroy society. I call these people hippies. Regardless, they are consumers and we must pay attention to them. The first question I am typically asked is ‘Why are there so many bad ads out there?’ This is a valid question and one that has plagued the industry. There’s way too much crummy advertising. It’s undeniable.

Not every client can afford to hire a top-tier agency like BBDO or Taxi to create campaigns for their business. It’s hard to develop a clever concept, execute it perfectly, and have everyone love it. So, my defense goes something like this… You have to look beyond the cutesy jingles and cringe-worthy puns we see happening far too often. Advertising is all about positioning and presence. These two things happen on an almost subconscious level. For example, ask anyone to name off a couple adjectives describing Telus. Unless they’re a disgruntled customer, you’ll hear words like fun, silly, cute, and cool. Why would this reaction occur? Have you ever had a personal interaction with any Telus rep that could be described by one of these adjectives? The answer is probably no. It doesn’t matter though, because Telus has strategically positioned themselves this way by using effective branding and great TV spots that feature lemurs and festive hippos.

Apple is another great example. Many people say they are immune to advertising, yet they sure know how cool Macbooks are… Maintaining a strong media presence also works to improve the perceptions and trust of consumers. Effective media planning and solid frequency provides a sense of legitimacy to any product. It’s what separates brand names from cheap imitators. This is especially true for goods that the public doesn’t generally have a strong opinion towards – like pain-relievers, for example. By maintaining a prolonged and successful marketing presence, Tylenol and Aspirin have built rock-solid brand loyalty amongst consumers. I’m sure the no-name acetaminophen would work just as well and cost a dollar less, but I want the legitimacy of Tylenol. I’m willing to spend the extra money for an established product. I don’t think many people can recall a specific ad for Tylenol that was overly charming or memorable, but I’m sure they possess the same perception. Advertising is all about the intangibles. It’s built upon developing relationships – sometimes without the consumer even knowing – so that brands can eventually become successful.

So next time you run into one of these anti-advertising hooligans, let them think whatever they want. Chances are, they’ve already fallen victim to the genius of our work. And they don’t even know it.

By Brook Johnston @ marketingman.ca