Hiring Customers to Write Your Ads?

More Efficient Ways Exist to Involve Your Customers

October 2006 By Denny Hatch

multipage

“Ban’s new approach seems to be working,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “After a three-year decline, sales of Ban rose 13.6% in the 52 weeks ended November 27, according to market researcher Information Resources, Inc.”

Trouble is, the campaign seems to be working. Is it really? Or was it a hot summer and sweaty young women grabbed the first deodorant they saw on the shelf? In that case, the sale was the result of placement. Or was it point-of-purchase advertising? Or TV? Or the recommendation of a girlfriend?

The object of general advertising is to create awareness in the hope that the message will be remembered later at the store. General advertising is a fuzzy, inexact science.

Direct, on the other hand, is all about changing behavior—making an offer and getting a person to respond with an inquiry, order or donation.

For example, a direct marketer would add a $1 off coupon to the bottom of the Ban ad, count the coupons and know for sure whether or not the effort made money.

The word “seems” is not in the direct marketer’s lexicon.

Why Bring in Amateurs to Do a Professional’s Job?
The amateurs—mostly teens and kids in their early 20s—already are making little video movies about products that interest them to post on the Internet or creating audio files for use in iPods. Some are real while others are parodies. Some are raunchy, such as the variations on MasterCard’s “Priceless” promotion.

GM, Subaru, Nike and Procter & Gamble have tapped these fledgling marketers. “The power is with the consumer,” Procter’s CEO A. G. Lafley said. “Marketers and retailers are scrambling to keep up with her. We’re on a learning journey together.” Describing some consumer efforts he said, “Most of the experiments don’t work, but we have to be out there, trying.”

Video game manufacturer Electronic Arts invited 15 players to California to make films based on scenes from the games; these are scheduled to start running this month in print, online and on TV.

The Fallacy
Most of these consumer ads are created by very young people, presumably with time on their hands because they’re not yet in the work force. If you want to get into advertising or filmmaking, modern electronic technology is marvelous in enabling you to create a portfolio of work. It can be e-mailed instantly all over the world to prospective employers or producers—along with a cover letter and résumé—without the cumbersome business of coming to an office and doing a lame monologue while threading film into a projector.

But these consumer-driven ads by kids and for kids make up a tiny universe of advertising opportunities. They’re cute. They’re fun. But they cannot ever be big business.

In addition, these young people probably aren’t students of advertising and don’t know a benefit from a Benifer or the purpose of a headline, subhead and body copy. They don’t know how to write persuasive copy or make an offer. If the statistics about American education are to be believed, a large percentage of young people aren’t proficient in the English language.

Involving Customers: Focus Groups
I’ve observed many focus groups where selected consumers have discussed a product or service—why they like it and why they don’t.

Marketers who think they can run their own focus groups make as big a mistake as do advertisers who spend money on a campaign that’s entirely created by customers.

A focus group is made up of a panel of consumers who are usually offered an honorarium for their time. They gather around a conference table in a two-room suite—a meeting room and a hidden room where the proceedings can be videotaped and observed through a one-way mirror by clients, account executives and corporate management. Light refreshments are provided.

The key to a successful focus group is the facilitator, a seemingly neutral emcee who asks dispassionate, matter-of-fact questions with one object in mind: truthful answers that the client wants to hear and doesn’t want to ask about his own product or service and those of the competition. Above all, a successful focus group will come up with marketing ideas.

Good facilitators don’t use the subjective. Asking a consumer if she would buy such-and-such a product at this price or that price is a waste of time. The quiet comfort of a conference room with no interruptions bears no relationship to the real world, where buying decisions are made: a home with kids running around or a store in a busy mall with crowds of people pawing over merchandise.

Where focus groups can be enormously helpful is in articulating product benefits, copy points, unique selling propositions and user reactions—both to a product and its marketing.

For a copywriter, the focus group can be marketing gold. Hopefully, participants’ words and ideas can be shaped into a marketing campaign that will kick butt.

Involving Customers: Testimonials
The hierarchy of customer relationships is well known:

* Suspect—a person who fits the qualifications of a customer—a man, a woman, a kid, a boomer, someone who has some money to spend and isn’t homeless.
* Prospect—someone who evinces interest in what you have to offer.
* Customer—a first-time buyer.
* Repeat Customer—here’s where you start to make big profits.
* Advocate—a repeat customer who loves to tell others about the product and will give you a testimonial.

Direct marketers have in their brains a built-in checklist of the essential mechanical elements for a marketing effort: offer, response device, guarantee and testimonials.

Whenever I acquire a new client and am in the learning phase of the business, I always ask for customer testimonials. I cannot tell you the number of marketers who receive testimonials from happy customers and do nothing with them and aren’t even sure where they’re filed—if filed at all.

If a customer mails or e-mails a testimonial, you don’t own it and may not use it without permission. Under the copyright law, all the words—and the illustration, if one is included—are the creator’s property.

Here’s what to do when you receive a testimonial that you’d like to use:

* Write or call the person with effusive thanks for the kind testimonial and ask if you can use it in your advertising. If the answer is yes, mail a permission form.

* Have your lawyer draw up a permission form. At the top should be a warm thank you for the kind words reproduced below. The next paragraph is a statement—probably in the first person—saying that the person approves what has been written for use in advertising and marketing. Keep it simple, sans mousetype and legalese. Edit it lightly if you must, using the words you want and cleaning up the syntax. Provide a place under the testimonial for a signature.

* You also must gain permission to use the person’s name. Is it “Doris Smith” or “D. Smith” or “D.S.?” Can you use the city and state or just the state or no location at all? If B-to-B, can the person’s company be listed?

* Enclose the following: A warm cover letter, two copies of the permission statement—one for you and one for the person’s files—and a return envelope personally addressed to the signer of the cover letter with a First Class stamp affixed (not a metered indicia). This gives a sense of personal connection to the product and the company.

Involving Customers: Surveys
One of the smartest guys I ever worked for is Bob Doscher of Response Innovations. When he was marketing director at Historical Times Publishing outside Harrisburg, Penn., Doscher designed a series of customer questionnaires.

His marketing and creative team researched product ideas that were boiled down to a one-paragraph description of 250 to 300 words. Beneath these paragraphs were boxes to tick that rated the product: Would Order; Might Order; Some Interest; No Interest.

This survey was mailed to a select group of customers—presumably repeat buyers who recognized the company and liked its products. Included were a cover letter and a $1 bill.

When all the responses were in house, Doscher would practice his proprietary alchemy and come up with a list of products to produce, and, amazingly, highly accurate sales and revenue projections and the bottom line.

One year he handed me the specs for nine products and I wrote nine direct mail packages for these brand-new, untested products. Eight of them went on to be highly successful controls. The one that bombed was a needlepoint product where the design was at serious variance with what the survey described and never should have been mailed.

Involving Customers: Listen to the Marketplace
When my wife, Peggy, and I were publishing the newsletter, WHO’S MAILING WHAT!, we analyzed 1,500 to 1,800 mailings a month and listed them in the back of the publication. Subscribers could order photocopies—black-and-white folding dummies—of these pieces for a price.

Several subscribers stopped me at a DMA conference and told me they were suppliers to the direct mail industry. They would pay me a nice pinch of change, they told me, if they could get the names and addresses of the mailers of these packages for prospecting purposes. That was in March.

Three months later I heard directory expert Russell Perkins give a talk at the Newsletter Association conference in Washington, D.C. I introduced myself, briefly described my newsletter and what my subscribers told me.

“Is this a possible directory?” I asked. Perkins thought a moment and said, “Absolutely.” Together we published “The Directory of Major Mailers & What They Mail,” which is still in print today.