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Logical Analysis Leading to a Leap of Faith.

Updated 01/07/10    


Is this a good ad?

Every word is true.

Do the headline and picture make you want to rush out, buy a carton of Our Milk, and swig it down?  Gee, why not?

Every word in your ads and brochures is true, right? Do readers rush out and buy your brand?  Gee, why not?

Milk is a pure commodity.  Your brand, of course, is very, very Special.  Except that there are ten other Special Brands in your category that are, from the consumer's point of view, equally fungible.

If you apply my method of Logical Analysis to your own brand, you will be able to to write a solid, clear nuts & bolts strategy, and a brand promise that is uniquely yours.

Good strategy leads to Leap of Faith Ads.  Good ads get your story across quickly to Total Strangers who were just about to buy the Other Guy's brand.

"So why can't I just run ads that look like the Other Guys'?"

You can.  Most advertisers do.  And most advertisers waste at least half their ad budgets.  Fuzzy strategy begets fuzzy creative begets fuzzy brand image begets:

"We spent all this money on
advertising and nothing happened!"

This article compresses my experience on over 200 brands into a Two Step exercise.  Answer seven questions.  Write one sentence.  There's a Pop Quiz at the end, so read carefully. 



Step One.  Seven Easy Questions.

The Marketing Communication Process begins with the truth.  Answer these questions thoughtfully and objectively.  Try to think like a normal human being who neither knows nor cares much about your brand, your company, or you.

1:  Who Do You Want?
2:  What Do They Want?
3:  Why Are You Different?
4:  So What?
5:  Yeah, but... Why Not?
6:  What are the Other Guys Doing?
7:  Who's Counting What?




1. Who Do You Want?

Obviously you want people who drink milk or whatever it is you sell.  You know the standard demographics - age, income, gender, etc.  Now dig a little deeper.

Think about the last few dozen people you did business with.  What do they have in common?  Were they upbeat, intelligent, stylish, decision-makers, good credit risks, health-conscious fitness buffs?  Or were they lazy, low-brow, dowdy, timid, penny- pinching, overweight slobs?  The first rule of marketing is to clone your best customers.  You want your ads to appeal to people like them .

Now think about the last dozen or so people who either turned you down, or who you turned down.  Same routine.  Be specific. You do NOT want your ads to attract people you do NOT wantDon't let this happen to you!

Look at the stock photos of the lady drinking milk.  How would you describe her personality?  Active, on-the-go, health-conscious?  Anything else?  Look again.  The Marketing Communication Process is not all words.




2. What Do They Want?

If you remember anything in this exercise, remember this:

New Customers expend more emotional energy the first time they buy your brand than do your current customers, your sales force, or you.

To you and the rest of the crew, it's business as usual. More widgets. To them it's a Whole New Thing.

Now try to imagine what it's like to buy and taste Our Milk or use Your Thing for the very first time. What's going through that lady's mind at this very second?

First clue:  She is NOT thinking about your company, your sales goals, your quarterly EBITA, your ingredients, engineering specifications, or independent test results.

Second clue: Just a moment ago she was thinking about her job, her children, that leaky gutter, where to go on vacation, those extra five pounds, ("Boy, am I thirsty!"), did she pick up the dry cleaning...

Somewhere in the Daily Blizzard there may be a brief moment when your prospects need something like Your Thing.  Is there a specific problem your prospects are trying to solve?   Do most people buy The Same Old Brand every time?  How many people bounce from brand to brand?

The Steam Principle is a one-page read on When people buy your brands and how you can improve your timing. Scan it and return.



3.  Why Are You Different?

Most people don't care why you're the same as the brand they use now. The brain processes differences faster than similarities.  Do you notice any differences between the first two photos above and the picture on the right?

People expect Our Milk to be "white, cold, fresh, and from cows."  Perhaps your cows do feed on hydroponic hay, though.  Maybe you come in plasti-glass containers as well as cardboard cartons.  Maybe you cost a dime less. What else?

Write down any and all rational objective differences between you and the Other Guys.  Could be price, terms, location, product design & performance, customer service & satisfaction, quality of staff, or proven results. Differences! Not similarities.

Our Milk cannot be uniquely white, cold, fresh, or from cows.  Your brand cannot be uniquely generic either.  It can be uniquely.... what?



4.  So What?

Does hydroponic hay make Our Milk healthier, testier, or sweeter?  Maybe. If not, it's a difference without a distinction.  How about that plasti-glass container?  Could a packaging difference possibly benefit anyone?

Who?

Write down how each of your real differences benefit your customers.  Do any of those differences solve any common customer problems better than your competitors?

Is there one difference that solves one very important problem?

Very large brands make a lot of noise about small points of difference that confer unique benefits to their prospects.  Beginners usually make a lot of noise about anything they can think of.  Take a lesson from Proctor & Gamble:  hone in on the one thing you offer that does something uniquely useful.

If your ONLY difference is price, that could be a disadvantage if people think that cheaper = lower quality.  If your product is the same as everyone else's, what about the packaging?

Look at the four photos again.  Look for a problem Our Milk could solve.



5. "Yeah, but..." Why Not?

You can give prospects ten good reasons to try your brand.  They only need one lousy excuse not to.  

Most people are intellectually intrigued by anything new, but they emotionally resist change.  They fear the unknown, confuse you with your competitors, or reach down into deep memory for some excuse why your brand won't work for them.

Very often your sales force or telemarketers will hear the same old "Yeah, buts..." over and over again.  Ask them!  Run a no-cost Brand Resistance Survey or do some Problem Detection Research.

Some objections seem insurmountable. The gentleman above probably won't be in the market for "Our Milk" for several months, no matter what we do or say.  Some objections are easier to fix.  For example, a milk bottle is easier to swig from than a carton, but some people might object to sharing their milk with anyone else.

If you can identify the most common "Yeah, buts..." up front and defuse them in the ads, you'll be amazed at the results.



6.  What Are The Other Guys Doing?

A blueprint for rigorous competitive analysis is beyond the scope of this article.  However, here's an exercise conducted by Very Very Large Agencies that you can perform in the privacy of your own boardroom.  It will pay a handsome return on your investment of time & effort.

Pin your competitors' ads up on the wall.  Put the biggest companies at one end and the smallest at the other.  Now stand back and look at the array.  What do see?  Do the leaders look better than or about the same as the little guys?

Who looks safe?  Who looks hot?  Does anyone stand out? Who do you look like?

Write down the graphic or stylistic elements they all share.  You'll want to include just enough common elements in your ads to look like you belong in the category. 

Next, write down the bare-bones  message for each player in the category.  Who are they talking to?  What are they trying to say?  Why are they different, etc.?

Point to the spot on the wall where you are today in terms of sales.   Point to where you want to be in a year to 18 months.  What do you have to do to get there?  Whose customers do you have to steal?  Whose Brand Personality should you emulate or improve on?



7.  Who's Counting What?

How will you measure and track the effectiveness of the communications?  The final score is net Earnings Before Income Taxes.  But how, exactly, will you get from production & media to profit?

In the Corporate world, it's often hard to correlate advertising expense with sales revenues.  So large agencies rely on focus groups, overnight recall scores, standard reach & frequency media plans...  They hope that sustaining Brand Image will generate Brand Preference and sales.

Retailers count ups and receipts.  All the money they spend on Thursday has to be back in the store by Sunday night.  Next week can take care of itself.

In Direct Response advertising you try to achieve a Target Media Cost Per Sale over time.   It's roughly the equivalent of the retail mark-up on a similar product sold in stores.  In D.R., the media is your store.

MCPS is always a function of three dynamic variables: Response rate, Media cost per thousand, and Conversion rate. We use GM/C=X to track and project all three simultaneously.

Of the three variables, Conversion is King.  Advertising can generate calls and clicks, but it's up to your in-bound telemarketers and web designers to convert Inquiry to Sale, and initial sales to repeat orders.  TMs are usually better at that than code gurus.

There a dozen or so articles on The Advanced Concepts of Radio page that might help you clarify your strategic thinking.  Open. Print. Read.



Congratulations!  You just got through the hard part.  The rest is easy. You only have to write one sentence.



Step Two: The Brand Promise


Truthful Answers to those seven easy questions lead to a short succinct Brand Promise.  Ideally, one sentence.  Something on the order of:

"If you are (WHO YOU WANT), who (WHAT THEY WANT), now you can (BENEFIT), because of (MAIN DIFFERENCE) and (DEFUSE OBJECTION)."

The shorter the better.  A Brand Promise is a contract between you and your future customers.  It's not a tag line, or a block of copy stuck at the end of the ads.  It's more like the recipe for Ultimate Sprinkle Glazed Donuts.  Ads are the donuts.

A Brand Promise for Our Milk could run something like this:

"If you're an active, on-the-go, health-conscious person and don't always have the time to pour and enjoy a whole glass of milk or don't like to drink from cardboard boxes, now you can get instant refreshment drinking right from our plasti-glass containers that are now color coded so everyone can keep track of his or her own bottle.

With a little effort, you can probably write a terrific Brand Promise that can improve all your marketing & advertising.  Remember, your competition is more than happy to rattle off why they're the same as everyone else.

POP QUIZ!

Here's where you get to prove to yourself how easy it is to whip off great ads.

Go back and read that Brand Promise for Our Milk.  Now write one simple Outdoor Board - headline + picture + logo - that makes people whizzing by at 65 MPH want to get off at the next exit and rush to the nearest 7-11.

One Picture. 28 to 36 Letters of Text.  Logo.  Easy!

Easy, huh?
One picture, one line!
Two second read.
How hard can it be?

OK, here are Six.



"Gee, this sounds like a lot of work.  Can't we just say something clever about my product?  It's only advertising."

Actually, it's only money.  Your media budget, to be precise.  How much of it do you want to throw away on fuzzy ads?  Half?  Two-thirds?  All of it?


People see about 2,000 ads, emails, and banners a day.  They ignore ads about things that are NOT on their mind. They pay little attention to "Me-too!" blather. Even if they enjoy your cleverness, they instinctively resist Doing Anything New that upsets the status quo.

I will leave you with a priceless comment by the late Bill Bernbach, founder of (the also late) Doyle, Dane, Bernbach:

"It is perfectly reasonable to suspend a man by his ankles and shake him vigorously if the purpose of the advertising is to demonstrate that his new trousers are made with pockets specially designed to prevent the escape of loose change."









© 2010 PETER A. BURKHARD   (407) 895-3092)    peter@burkhardworks.com