Is making the customer "Believe" in your marketing proposition, a necessary and sufficient condition of a successful sales pitch?

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No. You need to identify a Special User Effect which is consumer-created and the by-product of a new knowledge creation process. That way, the belief is already built in. Everything that has come before, via the utilization of assumptions and old knowledge is contrived and less effective.

Airline Marketing Hits Rock Bottom

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Didn't yo momma tell you that the instant you trade on price your brand equity's so low you'd have to climb up a ladder to get to the bottom? Has average gotten so bad that an airline thinks it can get to the head of the class by charging for your baggage? I don't know about you, but given the choice of no baggage charge versus a baggage charge, I'll choose free. Still sitting smug thinking their positioning strategies and messaging reaches captive business travelers, how long will it be before some airline wakes up to the magic of abstract creativity? Of positioning their stew as a soup you eat with a fork (Chunky Soup); of finding abstract selling solutions the way Pampers took 'fit & dryness' for granted (business travelers) and found that more diapers (and airline seats) can be sold on a 'developmental' brand platform? Hmmmm? United, "the developmental airline." What could they develop as a campaignable idea that would make all the charges worth it? Business relationships, personal relationships? There are so may Special User Effects still to fulfill - an airline (like American Airlines) could go a lot longer on one tank of creativity.

Why "BRANDING" Goes In One Ear and Out The Other

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John Jantsch posted his "Definition of Branding" on Duct Tape Marketing today - which always gets my blood boiling. No, not that John wrote something, but because today's branding practitioners have so fouled up the art. Here's my take.

In an age where consumer packaged goods have become commodities, top executives wonder where their growth will come from and short-lived CMOs spend more time chasing consumer ears and eyeballs deep into new media forests, I had a President at Procter & Gamble tell me that he thought branding was something you did when you didn't have anything important to say about your product. In my book, a "brand" is just something that someone started that caught on. Then "marketers" contribute to its obesity and kill it. And I have foundthis to be more true than false across the industry over the last 45 years when you consider companies such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield "brand" themselves with slogans such as "Discover The Power of Blue." Gee. I thought that was IBM. How is that "likable, knowable and trustable?" Simple? Yes? Easy to remember? Yes? Unquestionable? Debatable. But the problem with branding today, like advertising, is that it has fallen to the level of the people it targets, which is why it transmits right through us - in one ear and out the other.

So what should you do? Indelibly etch your impression on your consumer with a highly-differentiating and consumer-desired product-based selling dimension. I provide consumers over 10,000 comprehensive datapoints (product dimensions, product potentials, USPs or whatever you want to call them) in homework projects that frequently define breakthrough Special User Effects (tm).

How Marketing and Advertising Screws The Pooch

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We like to think that everyday marketing and advertising gets better and better. As marketers, we accumulate more knowledge and experience. We get a promotion. We hire and manage direct reports. More people give us more things to do. We become busy - and full of ourselves, right?

But marketing and advertising, since the inception of television, the first mass advertising medium hasn't gotten better. It's gotten worse, a lot worse. And here's why and how. Have you ever played the game where you whispered something in some one's ear, and then they whisper it into the ear of the next person, and they to the next and the next and so on, until the last person says the secret he or she just heard? The fun part is that the end result never matches the original phrase. And down the years, that's what's happened to marketing and advertising. Consider this. The original instincts of the first televised mass marketers were typically correct. They were exceptionally good at finding highly differentiating product-based selling solutions - what Rosser Reeves called USP's - or what I call Special User Effects. But over the years, the whispered message changed, softened, became impotent. Sales intent fell victim to the antagonists of awareness, recognition and buzz as if sales and the later three were synonymous until categories ultimately became commodities and business schools churned out future CMOs and CEOs believing that markets were becoming increasingly complex and segmented and that their salvation would lay in chasing the new media's consumer ears and eyeballs. Hey guys you got it all wrong. You have to remember that making you believe that all of these different consumer segments exist is so that their purveyors can make their next car payment. You have to chase consumer ears and eyeballs, not because "that's marketing and advertising," but because that's the way media, strategy, research, trend and innovation guys all make their mortgage payments. They make it all up in their heads sitting in closets on Friday afternoons. Think I'm full of shit? Well remember, my family invented the game founding the first TV station CBS in NYC. Before it was "a network" it was just a low power one city "experiment" and we made all of this stuff up to make people believe in the need to use the new mass media. Billions were to be made and we had to "convince" people like print mad man David Ogilvy to "try" the new mass media for the very first time. He preferred print.

But my bottom line here is that you should go with your instincts - first instincts. Not those of today, but the instincts of those who started the industry. Their first impressions of how to reach people was and remains correct but unpracticed today as the whisper got fainter and fainter and increasingly distorted. Marketers have not made marketing and advertising better. They have watered it down, like a muscle, it has gotten weaker because we don't use it. It takes thought we don't have time for today - which is why I say marketers today try to do with [new media and technology] brawn what we used to do with brain and finesse. Miller strikes Anheuser-Busch feigning a new beer war, Crispin Porter + Bogusky looses ConAgra but shoots from the hip and gives us Orville Dedenbacher. The evidence is all around us - which is why so much more advertising is forgotten than remembered.

No matter where you are in your management and marketing career remember. Your grandfather had a farm. Your dad had a garden. And you got a can opener. You are practicing marketing and management with can opener practices past along from the last can opener's owner. And this is why we have a problem with advertising today. It's fallen to the level of the people who watch it, which is why we click through it.