The Ad-Writing Acid Test

The Ad-Writing Acid Test

A quick but revealing story. Ten years ago. The Pillsbury mansion near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Chuck Anderson and I are sitting in his second floor office admiring the Institute and ignoring Chuck’s office walls. Those walls are covered with our ideas of an ad. After two days, our creative director notices the stench and boldly enters Chuck’s office.

Then he mumbles and leaves.

The next day he returns, he sees we haven’t progressed.

He says something I still remember vividly. “If it’s this hard to write the ad, the product is flawed.”

It’s true. If you cannot write a reasonably good ad for your service- an ad that makes an attractive promise to your prospect- your service needs fixing.

Write an ad for your service. If after a week your best ad is weak, stop working on the ad and start working on your service.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

The First Rule of Marketing Planning

The First Rule of Marketing Planning

Unless warned otherwise, the people responsible for marketing a service almost will take up where they left off the last time they thought about marketing.

Everyone will assume that the company is in the right business, basically organized in the right way, and staffed as it should be staffed, give or take a few thorns in everyone’s side.

And everyone’s focus for marketing for the year immediately will turn to “How do we sell this?” Instead, everyone should start at ground zero. They should ask, “Is this viable anymore? Is this what the world wants?”

Have we added capabilities or skills that suggest that we should enlarge our scope, to serve new markets? Should we develop or acquire related skills and capabilities? Or should we narrow our scope, and leverage these specialized skills and services we are developing to prospects looking for those specialties?

Whatever questions you ask, you should consistently follow the first rule of marketing planning: Always start at zero.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect

In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz announced a stunning conclusion.

For decades, people had viewed the universes as a large machine in which causes matched effects. People presumed that big causes had big effects, and little causes produced little effects. Lorenz doubted this.

The question posed to Lorenz sounded strange but simple. Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Singapore affect a hurricane in North Carolina?

After considerable study, Lorenz answered yes.

Lorenz’s postulation of what is now called the Butterfly Effect was one of several findings in the last twenty years that reflect the unpredictability of everything: weather; the likely outcome of direct marketing programs, and the distant but often enormous effects of tiny causes.

One group of people was not surprised by Lorenz’s discovery, however. Those people had seen the Butterfly Effect at work everyday. They were careful observers of service companies- a world where my efforts often produce enormous, though sometimes distant, effects.

Remember the Butterfly Effect. Tiny cause, huge effect.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

You Are Competing with Walt Disney

Bad News: You Are Competing with Walt Disney

I [The Author] stride into a coffee shop one morning, hopeful.

Four people are in line, but I decide I can bear that.

Unfortunately, nothing is in line behind the counter. A server hands Customer One a large decaf. The customer had asked for a small regular. The other server is flirting with Customer Two. It’s touching and nostalgic to me, but not entertaining enough to make me overlook the delay.

Four minutes later, I get my large latte.

Twenty years ago, I might have accepted that delay. Twenty years ago, I also accepted rest rooms carpeted with wet paper towels, waiters wearing catsup-stained aprons and chewing Bozooka bubble gum, and ten-day delivery from catalogs.

Then McDonald’s came along and raised everyone’s standards for rest rooms, better restaurants raised our expectations of waiters, and Federal Express raised our standards for catalog delivery. Those services changed our expectations forever.

Now we expect cleaner rest rooms, faster services, and more attentive waiters.

More people ever day have experienced extra ordinary service. Many have seen Disney World; they know how clean, friendly and creative service can be.

They have seen world-class service, and now every service has to accept it. Printers, for one wretched example, cannot expect their customers to tolerate service that meets printing industry standards if those industry standards fall below customers’ expectations, which they routinely do. The printers’ customers have been to Disney World, and that experience has raised their expectations.

A service that does not jump to meet these rising expectations will have a small revolution and a customer exodus on its hands.

Ignore your industry’s benchmarks, and copy Disney’s.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”