Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Cheerios To Start The Day

White House Breakfast

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were having breakfast at the White House.The attractive waitress asks Cheney what he would like, and he replies, "I'd like a bowl of oatmeal and some fruit." "And what can I get for you, Mr. President?" George W. replies with his trademark wink and slight grin, "How about a quickie this morning?" "Why, Mr. President!" the waitress exclaims. "How rude! You're starting to act like Mr. Clinton, and you've only been in your second term of office for a year! '' As the waitress storms away, Cheney leans over to Bush and whispers..."It's pronounced 'quiche'

Monday, February 13, 2006

In-Store, Place-Based Media

Sam Walton's famous insight into advertising (paraphrase)--"...maybe 50% of advertising is effective; if only one could figure out which half of the advertising really worked..."

Ok, a bit dated perhaps--as there are now a number of measurement tools that can actually determine the effectiveness of certain types of advertsing...dedicated 800#'s tied to specific print and TV placements, and the internet clearly provides tools to follow a shopper directly from an ad into a shopping cart...But lets face it, the bulk of most advertising spends are directed to wide-net extended reach 'channels' (traditional network TV and print ads)--the effectiveness is hard to track, but are justified because a marketer exec can say to his boss ''Hey--our ad reached 20 million viewers yesterday".. Yeah..maybe some of them are even gauging the impact by reviewing real-time sales data and noticing whether those ads had any real impact..but lets face it...there's a trend taking place..and its about time...and its about place. I've said this before..and Aribtron's latest study, published on Friday, says it all.. "nearly a third of shoppers reported making an unplanned purchase after seeing a product advertised on a retail digital signage network." In-store and place-based advertising makes dollars and sense because the message is being delivered at a single moment in time when the consumer is most responsive, most impacted, and most likely to make a purchase decision...

Duh! Prospecting in Gold Mines; Not Haystacks

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times...the best source of new customers is leveraging your existing ones...You can cut your advertising budget in half, direct that money to customer service and relationship managers, and if you don't seen a noticeable (more likely quantum) leap in new sales over the next year, I'll eat my hat, turn in my passport and move to Mars.

Here's the excerpt from Forrester's latest poll...."That’s why “recommendation by relative/friend” comes out on top in just about every survey of purchasing influences. ....more than 90% of consumers trust “recommendations from consumers,” while trust in various types of ads runs from about 40% to less than 10%." Click on the link to read the article

Monday, February 06, 2006

MISTAKING A MARKETPLACE 'VOID' FOR A MARKETPLACE NEED

Brilliant article from today's AdAge profiling the do's and don'ts of branding--whether re-vitalizing an established product, or more likely, introducing a new one.