ID POSITIONING GIVES THE
EGO TIME TO BUY.
In step three of our guide Write
Marketing Strategy Yourself you are encouraged to think of all the possible
excuses people can concoct to avoid trying your brand. This part of the
Marketing Strategy Seminar
gives you six examples of how I've identified Id-Factors and by defusing
them, helped turnaround brands whose sales had slumped.
Qualitative or quantitative
research can often reveal why People Don't Buy. Sometimes you can put
two and two together yourself. Look at the early ads, the
competitive response, what most normal people would think. You may be able
to impute obvious or likely Id-Factors.
Enough generalities.
Here's how Id-Positioning works.
National Dynamics Speed Tapes
Carnival Crystal Palace
Time Warned Cable
Pulte Homes
Army National Guard
You?
I.
National Dynamics Speed Tapes had run a highly successful
Marketing Strategy for
nine years. Direct
Response Radio :30's positioned Speed Tapes as the way to learn Spanish, French, German, Italian or
Japanese in only, "20 Minutes a Day." The telemarketers
routinely converted 2,000 calls a week to 440 unit sales.
After several fruitless
attempts to beat the control copy, I ran a Brand Resistance Survey among a dozen telemarketers.
What do people say when they first learn the price? Eureka! The
most common excuse for not buying was "I had a hard time in high
school Spanish memorizing all those rules. I guess this wouldn't work
for me."
As it happens, it is indeed
physiologically very difficult to begin learning a new language after the
age of ten, but I found it remarkable that so many adults in their 30's and
40's remembered the same unpleasant experience from so long ago.
The Marketing Strategy required only a change of copy.
To Id-position the brand, I
created forty :30 DR radio spots that each presented one easy-to-remember
word or phrase in Spanish (the most-requested language).
The "I
can't memorize," excuse disappeared.
The first week S-O-C-K-S ran,
calls increased to 5,000. Conversion rate increased from 22% to
28%. National Dynamics sold an extra $35 million worth of Speed Tapes
during the next three years.
Then my client, Jim McAlister, retired to a lovely home in Lake Havasu, AZ. This year, he decided to reactivate ND, this time on-line. The re-launch is scheduled for October, 2006.
In all these years, I've never actually met Jim McAlister. Come to think of it, I've never met you, either.
II.
Carnival Cruise Lines had already written off the $40 million
Crystal Palace in the Bahamas. The marketing strategy -
cross-sell to Carnival clientele - had failed for years.
Budget-conscious cruise customers simply could not afford the $340/night rack rates. The resort itself was
a gargantuan polychromatic oddity, but did offer a full array of
activities, sports, shops, restaurants, and meeting facilities.
When YPB, Orlando, was asked
to pitch the account, I visited the hotel and quickly realized that the
only people on earth who would enjoy a stay there would be type A+
personality workaholics. Price would not be an objection, however
their "Yeah, but..." would be, "...I don't have time for a vacation."
My
"Work Work Play Play"
Id-positioned the Palace as the best place to jam two weeks of fun in the
sun into four days, or to run a four-day Business Meeting! The
Marketing Strategy: Find softer Id Factors. Here's the radio.
We increased occupancy from 59% to 85% in three months,
sufficient to enable Carnival to unload the white elephant to a consortium
of Type A+ German investors - at a modest profit.
III.
Time Warner Cable's
Orlando
operation, CableVision of Central Florida, had no real marketing
strategy. The did have a reputation for indifferent
service, spotty transmission, and incomprehensible rate promotions. Customer churn
was horrendous. As Creative Director of
Gouchenour & Associates, I pitched the account with a dramatic
Id-position: Create an upbeat new brand for the shows - separate from
the company brand. Promote the movies, sports, news and
pay-per-views. Make CV a "must-see programming source."
Marketing Strategy: Change the Subject!
In its first year, "See
it on CV" - in image TV, radio, newspaper, outdoor, DM, and
cross-channel promotion - reduced churn to a minimum, nearly doubled the
subscriber base, and gave customers a steady barrage of new and different
reasons to tune in tonight. Click here for Intro Radio, and Intro TV.
Today CV is Bright House. People, however, still hum
my jingle.
IV.
Pulte Homes' Woodstone Condominiums in Alexandria, VA had languished
for months in the Sunday Real Estate Section of the Washington Post.
Corporate Marketing Strategy dictated that the ads show floorplans and prices. The
problem was that nearby competitors offered bigger units at the same price,
or similar units at lower prices.
I suggested to agency honcho Michael Gura that selling to this week's
Active Condo Shoppers was pointless. Instead, we should run against next
week's shoppers whose Egos had already almost persuaded their Ids that
RENT was a waste of money. Get them before they checked out the
competition.
Marketing Strategy: Find
softer Id-factors in stand-alone media. We ran the ad above in Friday Events,
and similar copy in Automotive and Sports. Pulte quickly liquidated the last 90 units. The
Marketing Director was ecstatic, however his boss was puzzled.
"These are not typical real estate ads. How did they ever work?"
V.
Army National Guard.
For years the Guard's Marketing Strategy was to pitch college
tuition benefits to soon-to-be high school graduates. But many of
them turned
up their noses at the Guard, which they considered to be a "bunch of
pencil-necked geeks."
Id-positioning required a rather brutal
reconstruction of the brand image: Swamps, Apache Helicopters, War Games.
DDB/Needham's "Irresistible Force" campaign set all-time response and
recruitment records - the "Kiss Your Momma Goodbye" spread at the left drew 75,000 replies in one
summer. Click here for the rest of the ad, and the
surprising upshot of our repositioning Marketing Strategy.
VI. You?
If you read the case histories above, your Ego probably said, "Hmm,
good thinking. We could use some of that around here." 
Then your Id
whispered, "Yeah, but...our clients are in different
categories, it might not work, we couldn't try a new marketing strategy, we need somebody local..." See how the mind
works?
If
you skipped the case histories and scrolled directly to You, you
proved the original premise. Most people are less
interested in rational features and benefits (yours or mine!) than in their own
hopes and fears. See how the mind
works?
On to Turf Wars.
Write Marketing Strategy Seminar
