Truly Deeply/Madly

Just Because your Brand’s On-line -
Doesn’t Mean it’s On-target
With 130 bil­lion spam mails hit­ting in-boxes every day, it’s no won­der con­sumer out­cry about mis-targeted mar­ket­ing has grown from a mur­mur to a roar. Across the globe those screams attract the reg­u­la­tor and put busi­nesses at risk as well as dam­ag­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of the brands who are get­ting it so wrong. This used to be a prob­lem of the snail mail indus­try but it is expo­nen­tially worse since the advent of eDi­rect and email mar­ket­ing. Each day my sav­ior the spam fil­ter weeds out a pile of these brand com­mu­ni­ca­tions that are sent to me blindly in the name of eDi­rect. Here are just three from my in-box yesterday.

For those of you who’ve never met me, let me assure you, I do not own a large wardrobe of over-sized ladies clothes with dubi­ous fash­ion cre­den­tial, I har­bor absolutely no desire to become a nurse — much to the relief of our pub­lic and pri­vate health sys­tems, and whilst I may have had close rela­tion­ships with a cou­ple of vend­ing machines over the years I have never had any inter­est in own­ing one. When it comes to tar­geted mar­ket­ing, much of what they call eDi­rect mar­ket­ing appears to be as indi­rect and indis­crim­i­nate as is humanly possible.

As a direct mar­keter with 20 years plus expe­ri­ence in the indus­try I spend a lot of time talk­ing with our clients about where direct is going, and these reminders of poor tar­get­ing that con­stantly clut­ter my email in-box reminded me of a test that was put to me many years back to demon­strate that direct mail was no more inac­cu­rate at tar­get­ing rel­e­vant cus­tomers than the newspaper.

Here’s How the Test works
Next time you buy the multi-sectioned mon­ster that is the week­end edi­tion of your news­pa­per.

(1)   Read it from cover to cover

(2)   As you progress tear out all the ads (or sec­tions of ads)

(3)   Put those that are of inter­est to you as a con­sumer in one pile and those that aren’t in another

I’d be pre­pared to bet my Sun­day lunch (and my newly acquired vend­ing machine) that  you will have a sub­stan­tial pile of paper in the ‘not of inter­est’ pile and a much smaller num­ber of ads that appeal to you as a con­sumer. Which begs the million-dollar ques­tion; If this is the case why do we feel so dif­fer­ently about the news­pa­per than we do about direct mar­ket­ing? The dif­fer­ence is of course that you choose to buy your news­pa­per, based on its con­tent and broad appeal to you. If the news­pa­per has got it right it rep­re­sents the views and inter­ests of a broad group of which you are part. The ads are aimed at that group (or groups within that group), even if they don’t appeal to all of the peo­ple all of the time.

So what can DM learn from this?
Rather than obsess­ing with only online mail boxes (much like they used to our let­ter­boxes) the next gen­er­a­tion of smart direct mar­keters will embrace a broader range of oppor­tu­ni­ties the web offers to engage with cus­tomers. Social net­works, blogs and other thriv­ing online com­mu­ni­ties sur­vive and thrive because com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple actively inter­act with them. These on-line chan­nels are rich in data and cus­tomers choose to be involved. Look at the ads and brands com­pet­ing for my atten­tion on Face­book and Foursquare.

The chances of me being inter­ested in a smart phone, a new car or a dig­i­tal SLR are high. Call it good guess-work, call it smarter tar­get­ing, but I cur­rently own all three — Dumb eDi­rect 0 / Smart eDi­rect 3.

Whether you reach out to cus­tomers through exist­ing on-line com­mu­ni­ties or cre­ate you own inter­ac­tive com­mu­ni­ties through which to build your cus­tomer rela­tion­ships,  you need to be smart about it. To avoid look­ing like a wedding-crasher with your eDi­rect you need to build a foun­da­tion of trust and relevance.

• Make sure you have a right to be a mem­ber of the com­mu­nity you wish to com­mu­ni­cate with. If you build your own on-line com­mu­nity through a blog or other social chan­nels, your rel­e­vance comes ‘baked-in’ as you auto­mat­i­cally earn the right to be the tribal leader. If you are com­mu­ni­cat­ing to an exist­ing on-line com­mu­nity you should ide­ally be a pos­i­tive par­tic­i­pant first and an adver­tiser only after you have been accepted. The third approach is to build chan­nel part­ner­ships with the blog own­ers in order to cre­ate offers that add to the com­mu­nity expe­ri­ence, espe­cially if those offers uniquely reward the com­mu­nity for their membership.

• Your brand must align with the val­ues and needs of the group you wish to engage with. This cuts to the heart of the way on-line com­mu­ni­ties dif­fer to con­sumers of other media chan­nels. We feel we have no right to a say in who adver­tises in news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines or on TV as long as they stay within the social codes of accept­able prac­tice. On-line com­mu­ni­ties are some­thing else. We take our on-line com­mu­ni­ties very seri­ously, and all feel a strong sense of own­er­ship and kin-ship, which means we respond far more neg­a­tively to an ‘out­sider’ who tres­passes with­out good reason.

• Your brand voice must res­onate with the com­mu­nity. Most brands give scant regard to their tone of voice. Other than adver­tis­ing head­lines (if they adver­tise at all) few brands under­stand the extent to which the way they speak posi­tions them with their audi­ences. Brochure copy, web site copy, DM copy is all writ­ten with just the com­mu­ni­ca­tion objec­tive in-mind, not the voice of the brand. As a result, most brands, even those who’ve engaged a pro­fes­sional copy­writer, end-up speak­ing with an almost iden­ti­cal voice devoid of any brand per­son­al­ity. We wrote about the power and impor­tance for brands to speak with per­son­al­ity a few months back. When we com­mu­ni­cate on-line, brand voice plays a lead role — espe­cially in estab­lish­ing our cre­den­tials of rel­e­vance. In on-line com­mu­ni­ties where the mem­bers of those com­mu­ni­ties speak in their own, nat­ural voices — neu­tral brand speak, or worse, fake brand speak jar with the audi­ence. Brands need to under­stand and define their voice and speak with that voice always to estab­lish an authen­tic sense of who they are.

The growth of the web has pro­vided DM with the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to engage with cus­tomers in a far more tar­geted way than ever before. The eas­i­ness and econ­omy of this new chan­nel to mar­ket means many brands are abus­ing the oppor­tu­nity through lazi­ness and igno­rance. Cre­at­ing eDi­rect cam­paigns that lever­age the advan­tages of on-line is no sim­ple task, if any­thing, the mul­ti­tude of vari­ables make the task of direct more dif­fi­cult than ever. As an agency we’re com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing our clients with best advice around how to align their brand and core mes­sage with their cus­tomers whether in the off-line world, or the on-line world.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help your brand get direct with your cus­tomers just give us a call.

Mal­colm Har­vey
Client Expe­ri­ence Direc­tor and DM go-to guy

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, brand designers, Brand Experience, brand relevance, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, brand-designers-Melbourne, Corporate Image, direct marketing on the internet, DM, eDirect, email marketing, email newsletters, Facebook, Foursquare, Graphic Design Melbourne, internet marketing, Malcolm Harvey, Melbourne Brand Strategy, on-line, on-line communities, Social-Media

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.