Tag Archives: advertising

Compare Your Marketing Mix to This Bar Chart

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The eloquent bar chart here speaks long and loud about changing the marketing mix. It shows where marketers report their business lead come from. Look at it and tell me what it says about the businesses that aren’t at all online:

I picked this chart out of literally dozens of great charts related to marketing, media, advertising and such offered for free in Hubspot’s Marketing Data Box. I realize I frequently criticize survey results and the conclusions people draw, but I love a whole lot of data condensed into a good-looking chart (like this one) so much that I don’t even want to drill down into the methodologies and poke holes in the conclusions.

What I draw from this chart goes back to the absolute fundamentals with the concept of the marketing mix, with emphasis on the word mix. I don’t think every business should run from everything on the right of this chart over to everything on the left. I think it’s a mix because you’re sending messages to different people using different media, hoping to optimize results from a given unit of resources. I do think you have to take a fresh look at regular intervals, so you change your business plan to keep pace with changes in the business landscape.

Five Words That Won’t Work in an Ad

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Very good reminder here about the way words get diluted, and then useless. In my early days in the PC industry all software was supposedly “user friendly.” And that phrase ended up mocking, humorous, a caricature of hype.

In this same vein, Steve McKee writes Five Words to Never Use in an Ad in BusinessWeek. And they aren’t what I would have thought, but, as soon as I think about it, he makes a great point.

The words? Well, for example, he finds the same underlying problem with “quality,” “value,” “service,” and “caring.”

The above four words all fail for essentially the same reasons. Not only are they overused, they’re based on variables that will be different for everyone. There’s a quality/value/service/caring continuum in each person’s mind for every purchase occasion, and it is a continually moving target.

And the fifth word, “integrity,” is one that you have or you don’t; and you don’t get by proclaiming it.

A company either has integrity or it doesn’t. It’s either honest or it isn’t. And most people give companies the benefit of the doubt in believing that they operate with integrity. When a company talks about integrity in its advertising it’s for one of two reasons, neither one of them good: They’re either trying to cover up some lack of integrity (which never works) or they’re implying they live by a higher standard than their competition. That’s impolite, to say the least. Every company needs to have integrity. No company needs to advertise it.

I agree.

Reality Check: Beauty, Women, Distortions

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I picked this up while browsing Seth Godin’s recent post over the weekend. He had it here, as part of a riff on the new world of commercial advertising on YouTube. Good post too, but I ended up thinking this Dove commercial on YouTube deserves special attention.

(If you don’t see the video, click here for the YouTube source.)

I assume you’re aware of how much we distort the supposedly ideal beauty in women. I am. But we forget. This is a bad thing. It hurts people, both women and men, and we should remind ourselves frequently.