The past few weeks, I’ve been working in The Tea Building, the former Lipton Tea warehouse, in Shoreditch, E1, an interesting, edgy area: a mixture of dilapidation and gentrification.

There are quite a few new businesses here, but no central gathering place where everyone goes to shop and eat.

So the retailers in the Box Park across the way – literally a shopping centre made out of shipping containers – have a big challenge to attract customers.

Last week Crussh Juice Bars showed them how it’s done. The takeaway food chain, which sells fresh juice, smoothies, wraps and soups, recently opened a new outlet in the park.

Now, what do most food outlets do when they set up? They usually just hand out flyers for special introductory offers, or have staff standing outside offering samples to passersby.

Crussh took a different, bold and, to my mind, very smart approach. It arranged with the agency where I’m freelancing (BD Network) to come in and serve free lunch to all the staff. There must be at least 150 people working at BD Network, and all could sample a wide selection of Crussh’s delicious products.

Marketing doesn’t get more direct than that. And it explains why Crussh is expanding so quickly around London. I wish them luck in Shoreditch.

The UK bookseller Waterstones [sic] has been doing some odd things lately.

Last week, much to the horror of grammarians, the store announced it was dropping its apostrophe.

Waterstone's poster, London December 2011 - click to expand

This is not the first instance of the company’s strange behaviour though.

Just before Christmas I spotted one of its posters, shown on the left.

So, what’s wrong with it? Well, it contains about 100 words. And it was sited on a busy pavement where pedestrians rarely stop. And it was in a scrolling light box fixture that displays a series of posters on a loop. For about 3 seconds each.

3 seconds to read 100 words?

Unless you’re the world’s fastest reader, there was no way you’d get what the advertiser was trying to say.

Maybe there’s an opportunity to advertise a speed reading course?

I had to be quick just to capture the poster on my camera, before it scrolled up into the innards of the lightbox.

Waterstones is one of many advertisers who aren’t thinking about the context of their ads.

If you go around London with a critical eye you’ll notice quite a few posters you haven’t been noticing.

Sometimes the problem is that the poster lacks graphic impact, so it doesn’t catch your eye.

But more often it’s a matter of there being simply too many words for you to take in at a glance.

In cases like these it’s clear that the creative team and the media buyer or planner didn’t talk with each other beforehand.

If they’d done so, they wouldn’t have created and placed posters that people couldn’t read. Ads that wasted the advertisers’ money.

Think about where your poster will appear

If you’re creating a poster, imagine how long it would take you to read it in situ. And consider, realistically, if you’d have enough time to take it in.

If it’s facing a busy road, I’d recommend using not more than 4 words.

Last year I saw a poster next to the M4 motorway that had at least 30.

Ideally run a concept that uses only a visual and logo without a headline.

Of course there are places for long-copy posters. They’re spots where people have “dwell time”. Inside bus shelters and on train platforms, for example.

I love the cross-track poster medium in the London Underground. It gives you an excellent opportunity to seduce your customers with a long read – as long as you make it an entertaining and informative read.

Maybe Waterstones should have run their posters as cross-tracks?

An error marketers sometimes make when
judging creative work.

The other day an agency asked me to do something odd.

They wanted me to rewrite the endline of a new campaign that was at concept stage.

It was strange because I reckoned the existing one was very good.

So did they.

Unfortunately their client didn’t.

He said he liked the campaign, but not its endline.

So he wanted new words to go on the end.

Now here’s the thing that non-creative people, like that client, need to understand about endlines:

The best ones are often the cornerstones of great campaigns.

The campaign ideas – the ads – are built on them.

Think of “Just do it”, “Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for any other beer” or .“Peperami. It’s a bit of an animal.”

To replace those lines would be like replacing the foundations of a completely built house.

The campaigns would fall apart.

Along with other copywriters, I tried to rewrite the endline of the new campaign mentioned above.

But nothing we came up with worked with the campaign ideas as well as the line the client didn’t like – the line that gave birth to the campaign.

So, the lesson is, if you want to change an endline, watch out.

Because, chances are, you’ll need to create a new campaign as well.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi doesn’t have 10 fingers. He lost the ends of two of them in an accident. Since then he’s had to play in an unusual style, which has helped give his band its distinctive sound.

In Iran, there is widespread censorship. To find ways around it, film makers there have to be inventive. And that’s led to some internationally acclaimed productions.

In Hong Kong, architect Gary Chang lives in a tiny, 344sq ft apartment. Using sliding walls and detachable shelving though, he’s created an extraordinary space that converts into 24 different layouts.

Those are just a few examples of how the lack of something can lead to an innovative outcome.

Sometimes I need to remind myself of that when faced with an advertising brief where the production budget is next to nothing.

Oddly enough, a lack of money forces you to think more deeply about the problem you need to solve. And that leads to creative solutions that are more original than you might otherwise have come up with.

A tip from music producer Brian Eno

“if you want to get unusual results, work fast and work cheap, because there’s more of a chance that you’ll get somewhere that nobody else did. Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is to make things more normal.” 

I’ve found Eno’s advice also works in marketing and advertising.

Recently, my art director and I had to create a campaign for a new brand. Once again there wasn’t much money to play with.

We knew that our campaign had to be strongly branded to stand out in a highly competitive market. And original photography would be too expensive.

So we came up with an idea based on the packaging, and requiring only illustration. The result was an easily affordable campaign that looked like nothing else out there in the marketplace.

How to produce an original, affordable campaign

If you need to stretch your production budget as far as possible, and you want to create an original piece of work, here’s what I recommend:

Look for a creative idea that comes out of the brand design, be it the logo or packaging.

Then you can produce big, branded ideas on a small budget.

Imagine you have to stand up in front of a crowd and tell them about your business.

You have 60 seconds to explain what you do. And why people should buy your product or use your service.

You need to be persuasive. And make your audience remember you.

So what are you going to say? And how are you going to say it?

Those are challenges I used to face every Tuesday night.

I belonged to a business referrals network* where members have 60 seconds to sell their services at every weekly breakfast meeting.

You couldn’t just read the same script each week either.

You had to be different and interesting.

As a copywriter I was used to writing 60 second radio commercials for advertisers.

(Although these days, with tightened budgets, the ads aren’t usually longer than 30 seconds.)

But I’d never had to advertise my service this way.

It was a good exercise, which I recommend to you.

Whether you own a small business or you’re a brand marketer who would normally use an agency to write your ads, I think you’ll find it helpful.

The benefits of writing a 60-second talk on your business

• It focuses your mind on your business. With so little time, you have to avoid waffle, and decide on the important things to say.

• It forces you to think who your customers are and what they want.

• You have to describe what makes you different from, or better than, your competitors.

• You can see the strengths and weaknesses of your sales proposition. (Do you have a USP? How can you make your proposition more compelling?)

• It forces you to be clear and simple so that your audience understands you.

I’ve met many business people who are unable to describe what they’re offering simply, clearly and succinctly.

At least one was a director of a well-known brand.

The fact he couldn’t explain his brand clearly did make me wonder how it survived.

Go on and write your 60-second sell.

Read it to yourself and ask if you’d buy the service or product you’re describing.

Then try it on a friend.

You might be surprised by what you discover.

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*The referrals network which I belonged to was BNI.

A long time ago a businessman came to me for advice.

He was starting a men’s clothing store and wanted to know what to call it.

I asked him his surname.

“George.”

“That’s a great name,” I said. “George. The name of kings.”

I didn’t tell him it was also my dog’s name.

He shook his head.

“No, it’s old fashioned. I want a modern name, one that describes my customers’ aspirations – they want to be cool… hip. I’ve actually got a name already.”

I was taken aback. I thought he’d come for my help. Turned out he just wanted my approval. So, what was this wonderful name he’d come up with?

“Style master”

Terrible. At least that’s what I thought. But I said something like, “I much prefer ‘George’. It belongs to you. It has a reason for being there on your shop front. Sell funky gear, give your shop a hip design and George will become a cool name.”

He didn’t buy it. And that was that.

I never heard of him or his shop again.

That chap was like so many SME owners: they’d rather use some gimmicky name instead of their own.

But why? Clothing stores like Abercrombie & Fitch and Benetton have done all right using their founders’ names. So have brands in other markets, like Bacardi and Dyson.

Of course, there are lots of successful brands with names I don’t like. Microsoft for example – incredibly bland. Or, on a much smaller scale, Dr Oetker foods – very unappetising. Who wants pizza that sounds like it was named after a German scientist? But people do.

Considering that, I’ve come to this conclusion:

A bad/weak name won’t necessarily stop you succeeding (e.g. Microsoft).

But a good/strong name can help you go further (e.g. Apple).

I agree with marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Tout, who say: “The most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product.”

How to come up with a better name

Below are a few tips for naming your brand. These aren’t rules; rather, they are general guidelines that have helped me. I hope they will help you too.

• Choose a short name. Long names can be striking (e.g. Lost Boys International, a digital marketing agency) but they tend to get reduced to initials (LBI). Unless your long name becomes famous – e.g. International Business Machines – before you shorten it, nobody will remember what your initials stand for. An acronym can work though, if it forms a new word, e.g. FIAT.
• Avoid punny names; they lack stature. Can you name a successful brand with a punny name?
• People’s names are great, especially if they’re connected with the person or people who founded the business.
• Choose a memorable name, of a thing or a quality, one that creates a picture in your mind, like Apple or Orange.
• Choose a name that stands out in your category, e.g. O2, the mobile telecoms provider. Or one that helps position you. For example the name Apple made that company’s products sound easier to understand than a lot of the technology that was around at the time.
• Read the chapters about naming in Al Ries’s and Jack Trout’s classic, Positioning.

Any questions or anything to add? Or do you disagree with my views? Feel free to comment below.

The first coffee ad in England - click to expand

Modern marketing seems so different from older forms, doesn’t it?

With things like social media and content marketing, it’s easy to believe that advertising has changed fundamentally.

But has it really?

On the left is something interesting I stumbled across the other day. You can enlarge it by clicking here.

It looks like an old news clipping or a page from a book, doesn’t it? But it’s actually an ancient advertisement: a copy of a handbill from 1652 that was the first ad for coffee in the English language. The original is in the British Museum.

More than 300 years before Starbucks invaded London, an entrepreneur called Pasqua Rosée handed out copies to Londoners, inviting them to try the then-exotic beverage at his café.

To our jaded, brand-filled modern minds, it’s a pretty dull ad. If you were to launch coffee today you’d probably write shorter, punchier copy, and include an eye-catching photo.

But give old Pasqua a break. He wasn’t David Ogilvy. He didn’t have a Mac or even a camera. And his media opportunities were pretty limited too.

I think he did an admirable selling job. If you’re to believe him – and many Londoners probably did – coffee was a cure for all evils, including “Dropsy, Gout and Scurvy”.

I’ll bet gullible Londoners queued up to get into Pasqua’s café.

After all, the ad has just what Samuel Johnson, in the following century, said a great advertisement should have:

“Promise, large promise”

And I think that is the fundamental thing that’s never changed in advertising.

Jumping ahead to 2010, look at the Tweet below, from the highly successful Old Spice campaign. It’s essentially an extension of the brand’s advertising, promising that you can “Smell like a man, man.”

Old Spice Tweet. Click to enlarge

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Or, coming back to coffee, look at the Starbucks Tweet below. Underlying all that brand’s customer communications is the promise of a more pleasant lifestyle.

Starbucks Tweet. Click to enlarge

Almost four centuries after Pasqua’s flyer, how we communicate with customers has completely changed, at least on the surface. But underneath, “promise, large promise” is not only the soul of an ad, but also of social media, content, experiential or any other form of marketing.

Any comments? Please share yours below.

Do you spend too much time trying to get new customers, when you could use it more effectively winning it from existing ones?

Some years ago I was freelancing at a big, famous agency. I noticed they never seemed to pitch and I thought perhaps they’d lost their edge and were failing to get on pitch lists.

So I asked a full-timer about it.

“We don’t do pitches,” he said.

“What, not any?”

“None”

“Well then how can your agency grow?”

“We develop business with our existing clients.”

More recently, I met a guy whose agency had been thriving during the recession.

I asked him how they did it.

“We find out from our clients what services they’d like. Then we bring in the relevant expertise and open a new division.”

So now, in addition to offering clients the typical services you’d expect –  advertising, DM, PR, etc –  the agency also offers staff and management training.

And with those new services, the agency is winning more business from existing clients.

Then I thought of my own experience in direct marketing over the past 13 years.

The easiest gains were all made by cross-selling, up-selling and making special offers to existing customers.

So why make things difficult for yourself? Go for the easy sell – people who already buy from you.

According to research, shoppers make an average of 70% of their purchasing decisions at the point of sale.* That gives marketers a brilliant opportunity to turn those people into customers in the store.

The trouble is, retailers won’t always let you advertise on in-store posters or shelf wobblers. So what can you do?

Look at the most obvious and affordable advertising medium available to you – your packaging. Is it working as hard as it could? How does it compare with your competitors’ packaging? Could it be telling customers more?

So much packaging isn’t trying very hard. Sure there are many excellent package and label designs, some of which catch your eyes as you scan the shelves. But when you look closer, and read the label copy, it doesn’t often tell you much beyond the ingredients and where the product is made.

The marketers of these brands are missing an opportunity to tell their brand story, to engage prospective customers more deeply, to sell harder.

Think about it. This is one of the best opportunities these marketers will ever have to sell directly to customers. And they’re wasting it.

In the case of new brands, it’s an opportunity that’s too good to miss.

But where would you add more copy to tell your brand story? You don’t want to mess up the front of a label design – that’s what pulls people in. But you could use the sides and the back and the top, couldn’t you? And if you market a drink, you could include a neck tag.

The following are examples of brands that use copy creatively on their packaging. In some cases they just use space cleverly. In others, they add charming or even outrageous copy that matches a powerful pack design. These are not my work – I wish they were. Click the photos to enlarge them.

1. innocent smoothies

innocent smoothies' distinctive label copy helped to create the brand

Over a decade ago, this brand started using copy on its packs in unusual ways that other brands have imitated. The copy has a distinct, playful, “innocent” tone of voice. It informs and entertains, and invites you to interact with the company, either online or  by calling innocent’s “Banana phone”.

innocent develops a rapport with customers by including cheeky messages in unexpected places

(Thanks to Ted Hunt, at This Is Helpful, for the photos of innocent packaging.)

2. Dr Bronner’s

Dr Bronner was never lost for words

The copy on Dr Bronner’s soaps is part of the visual attraction – there’s just so much of it spilling all over the front of the label. When you first read it, you might think the writer (the rabbi Dr Bronner himself?) was bonkers – but in a charming way. You’re left in no doubt of his passion for his product.

Here’s a sample of the good doctor’s label copy:

“6^th: Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Balanced food for body-mind-soul-spirit is our medicine! Full-truth our God, half-truth our enemy, hard work our salvation, unity our goal, free speech our weapon. All-One our soul, self-discipline, the key to uniting All-One above! Above! [etc]”

You’ve got to admit, it’s different. (Thanks to photographer Omegatron for the use of this shot.)

3.  Fat Pig

Breathtakingly cheeky copy

Perhaps you wouldn’t give Fat Pig chocolates to your mother, but I expect a lot of unashamed fat pigs out there would love a box. The big and bold copy is part of the pack design, and it really gets straight to the point.  It has  a very distinctive tone of voice. (Thanks to Chris Zawada at Lovely Package for the use of this shot.)

4. Nutrient Water

Make your prospective customers smile about your product benefits, and you'll start to develop a relationship with them

I think this is an Australian brand. I’d never heard of it before I stumbled across it online. But if I was in a store and picked up a bottle from the shelf to check it out, I think the amusing copy would tempt me to try it. (Thanks to photographer Cameron Laird for the use of this shot.)

5. BrewDog

From a distance it looks like a promotion...

This Scottish beer brand has made the news a number of times with one outrageous stunt or another, most recently with an aphrodisiac brew for the royal newlyweds.

...The necktag makes not having a promotion sound like a virtue

I love the way BrewDog uses a neck tag on its beer to send up other brands’ promotions. It draws attention to the craft that’s gone into making BrewDog beer in a clever, original and inexpensive way.

(Thanks to James Watt at BrewDog for the use of these photos.)

Would you like to mention another excellent piece of packaging copy? Share your thoughts below.

*Figure taken from Business Link.

No one should write, produce or have to receive junk mail.

It wastes marketing budgets, not to mention precious natural resources. And it annoys vast numbers of recipients who aren’t interested in what’s on offer.

The following is an account of an experience I had. I hope it will help you prevent your direct mail shots from turning into junk mail.

A true story

I took a brief from an account man. It was for a UK national brand – one that should have known better than to make the mistakes below.

“Who am I writing to?” I asked him

“Cold prospects.”

“Do we know anything about them?”

“Not really. They may or may not have a product like ours.”

“So we don’t even know if they might be interested in our product?”

“No.”

That’s mistake #1: no knowledge of your recipients. Mail to recipients you know little about and you’re bound to fail.

I said, “Can you tell me anything about them?”

“Some have received our communications before.”

“Do we know which ones”

“No”

That’s mistake #2: not being able to distinguish between recipients. When you know who’s received previous mailings and who hasn’t, you can tailor messages to be more relevant to the particular groups or cells.

I went on, “And is our offer better than our competitors?’”

“It might be but we can’t be sure.”

“Hmm.”

That’s mistake #3: marketing without a clear advantage over your competitors. You need to offer prospects something your competitors don’t.

“But,” said the account man, “we do have a special free introductory offer, worth £25.”

Joy! A little difference, a sort of USP.  (The competition was unlikely to be making the same offer). At least there was something to tempt our prospects. I almost danced.

“Now,” I said, feeling more positive, “what about the format?”

“Letter in a C5 envelope with window on the front.”

“Er, surely it’d be better to send a postcard? Then we wouldn’t have to depend on recipients opening the envelopes. We’d save the client some money too.”

“The client has thousands of envelopes that need using up.”

“Okay, so can we print the offer – or some enticing message – on the envelope to make people open it?”

“Afraid not.”

Mistake #4: No incentive for recipients to open the mailer. Envelopes with windows, sent from companies you don’t already buy from, look like junk mail (especially if they have a PPI mark). If you must use such envelopes be sure to print an offer or an intriguing line on the outside to make recipients want to open them.

Tips to make your direct mail more effective

The following are very basic DM tips. Based on my experience though, even some big brands – ones that should know better – need to start applying these:

1. Get high-quality data so that you can target hot prospects. Try to give your copywriter an insight about your prospects.
2. Group your prospects based on their different needs, attitudes or whether you’ve communicated with them before. Then make sure your copy is tailored to these different groups.
3. Give prospects an offer that, in some way, is better than your competitors’ offers – give them a USP.
4. Unless you’re sending a postcard, include a line on the outside – an encapsulation of your offer, or simply a compelling line that makes them want to open the mailer and have a look inside.

Follow the above tips and there’ll be less risk of your direct mail becoming junk mail.