marketing

It became hip some years ago to parrot the phrase "half of all marketing is wasted - we just don't know which half." Nobody knows which luminary deserves the credit for this bon mot. And it's a dangerous truism to buy into, for two reasons - it either gives you permission to be sloppy in your marketing, or it enables you to discount marketing's value. Both results are unacceptable.

Of course, if you market purely from gut-instinct (I know what looks good, this feels right to me, blah, blah, blah) then you won't even arrive at a 50% success rate. Marketing deserves careful attention and planning. This starts with strategic development and flows down into brand strategy, which ultimately yields advertising and marketing vehicles and promotions. Assuming you have done this other work already, I'll share an advertising development process I've used for years that works very well. I can't claim to have created it, and it's been used so well over the years that most of the identifying marks have been rubbed off. Some of it I learned from Katie Muldoon, some of it came from Ogilvie's writings, some of it I learned working at Foote, Cone & Belding, and some of it  I've made up along the way.

Step 1: Remember that to establish genuine competitive advantage you have to make an offer that is quantifiable and credible to your customers. So your first step is to gather your facts. You probably won't use all these facts in your marketing vehicle, but gathering them up front will provide incredible insight. Facts include units sold, margin dollars and percent generated, return rates, research statistics, customer feedback, internal feedback, growth rates, competitive data - any data relevant to the product or service you wish to advertise. This data can be gathered for one product or for an overall brand, but advertising that is created outside of an awareness of facts will miss out on important opportunities and will ring hollow to your customers.

Step 2: Decide what you want from your customers. If you can't figure out what you want from them, they aren't going to figure it out for you! State clearly your intentions for this ad. Do you want your customers to:

• Place an order for a specific product

• Place an order for any product from your company

• Remember your brand

• Compare your brand favorably to another brand

• Request additional information

• Something else

The type of vehicle you are producing dictates how many of these intentions you can choose. A trade magazine ad can only choose one effectively. A brochure may choose a few. A catalog can choose more. But even in a catalog, you have to focus on each page and ask what action you intend to motivate with the page. State your expectations clearly, because intention should drive the content and design of the ad.

Step 3: State your offer. Advertising is always telling customers to do something in order to get something. Rembrandt toothpaste tells customers to "buy Rembrandt" to "get white teeth." Avis tells car renters to "rent from Avis" and "stick it to the big guys" (what? Not to rent cars? Absolutely not - you can rent a car from anyone, but only Avis lets you get that frisson of excitement from helping out the underdog). If you want the customer to remember your brand, then you are telling them to "favor our brand" to "get ___________ . . . what?" That is what this step is all about. Once you define intention in the second step, you have to figure out what your offer is and be able to clearly articulate it in this third step. If you don't do this work, all subsequent time developing your marketing piece will be wasted.

Step 4: Describe the customer for this ad. Whether you are targeting a general group of your customers or a very specific segment, develop an image of a representative customer. Demographic labels (woman, age 18-34, single, etc.) are NOT what you are looking for here! Depict the representative customer as if you were creating a personality in a novel - thinking through characteristics such as likes, needs, wants, dislikes, and any other traits that would be relevant to selling to them. It's kind of like going on a blind date. You may be equally attracted to neurosurgeons or personal trainers, but chances are you will relate to each of them a little differently. This is true in your advertising as well.

Step 5: Gather any information that will give you credibility, such as testimonials, write-ups in magazines, or third-party research data. Consumers are risk and change averse and terrified of making foolish decisions. Anything you can share with them that will give them confidence in their decision to buy from you will be highly beneficial.

Step 6: Articulate the benefit to the customer. Sounds simple, but apparently it's not, because so few advertisements do this step well.

Step 7: Anticipate objections. Consider every objection customers could make to the claim you are staking. If you can figure out the obstacles to buying from you, you can take preventative action right in your ad.

These seven steps will give you three benefits.

There you have it - a seven step process for creating better advertising. Whether you create a new ad once a week, once a month, or once a quarter, this process will save you time and give you better results.

And now to replace that terrible 50% aphorism with something more effective. Consider a few creditable statements about marketing instead. David Packard (Hewlett-Packard) once said "Marketing is too important for the marketing department." And Jack Trout said "Financial success is a by-product of great marketing."

How you market determines how your customers respond to you. That's definitely not something to leave to chance.

Once upon a time, there was a new medium called the worldwide web. The people who knew how to use it were the same people who had been using the actually-not-so-new medium for some time – researchers, programmers, and tech geeks. When people who did not fit into those three categories developed interest in the worldwide web, they turned to the programmers and tech geeks who knew how to use it. And thus was born a strange world of websites that had little commercial value, websites that were weak (or downright awful) in their design sensibilities, and websites that failed to connect to the non-virtual brands with which they were associated.

Thankfully another category of folk became interested in the web – graphic designers. They became interested in advance of their usual partners-in-crime, the marketing folk. So the web improved visually, but not operationally. Because we all know what happens when designers design without good marketing direction. The result is usually commercial art that looks pretty, but which has no commercial purpose, is disconnected from the customers (what customers??), and goes off on a brand tangent of its own, thereby reducing overall brand value. But still, the web was at least beginning to look better.

Finally everyone got it together. Marketing departments began to include their web designers instead of relegating them to the IT department. They began to develop marketing strategies that included the channel and integrated it to all of their other marketing efforts. At last the web was being treated as an equal in a company's marketing mix – not better, not worse, and requiring of the full range of marketing resources.

With the mainstreaming of the web came the mainstreaming of tools to use the web. Just about anybody who can use a computer can now go to GoDaddy.com, grab a domain name, and using their super-user-friendly tool called WebSite Tonight develop their own web presence. The result? A bunch of poorly designed websites that do not connect to the rest of the business, fail to support the brand, and have little commercial value.

Don't get me wrong – I am a huge fan of GoDaddy, and I appreciate the service they provide – for everyone from sophisticated web developers to day-old novices. But there is a trap that business owners must avoid, and it is the everybody-must-have-a-website philosophy. A website can be an economic benefit, producing sales and increasing visibility for a business. Or it can be an economic blunder, creating operational demands that cannot be fulfilled, presenting an unflattering face to the public, and distracting you (for hours, days, even weeks) from doing the work that actually produces the revenue and profit of your business.

The problem lies in the temptation to get lost in the selection of colors and color templates, font types, pre-selected layout options, and free clipart. Sound like a problem for novices? Not really. Sophisticated graphic designers fall into the same trap – only they're doing it on $4,000 worth of Adobe software rather than freeware or MS Publisher. It's like running on a treadmill without the benefit of weight loss. You go and go and go and when you're all done you realize that you didn't get anywhere.

So before you sit in front of that user-friendly, anyone-can-do-this template designer for instant websites, do yourself a favor. Ask the following questions first:

1.  What is the purpose of this website? What do I want to accomplish? What do I want my customers to do, or know, when they visit? You should be able to answer this question in a one-sentence statement.

2.  How will I know if I am being successful? Will I measure it in dollars? Leads? "Visits" is not a measure of success, unless you are running a business that generates revenue for click-through advertising. Set a measurement that will satisfy your business goals.

3.  What messages must this website convey to achieve the measure of success I have established? These messages should be written before you do any website design – whether you are doing it yourself, or whether you are paying a designer to put your website together for you. A copywriter can make your messages more succinct and elegant if you wish, but they can't determine what the correct messages are. That's your job.

4.  What does this website need to provide my customers? What will motivate my customers to act in such a way that I am able to achieve the measure-of-success goal?

5.  Which tools, resources, information, and services must you provide to facilitate your customer once they have decided to act? For instance, if you want to motivate customers to purchase a product, have you provided a shopping cart, an easy pay method, and a guarantee to alleviate new-customer doubts? If you have only provided an #800, chances are the customer's motivation will disappear, because you've made it difficult for them to act. If you wish to develop sales leads, and you have motivated the customer to request information, have you developed a system that provides you with immediate notification so you can respond quickly to the customer's request?

6.  Now that you know what you want to accomplish, in both descriptive and measurement terms, ask yourself if you have the skills and knowledge to create the entire website experience, or if you need some assistance or training. Once you identify the aspects that are outside your abilities, you can prudently select the resources you require.

I am fond of the internet as a communication channel, and I believe the web can offer distinct business advantages. But failure to properly assess these six questions has damaged businesses small and large. Today's web development tools put the majority of web development tasks within reach of everyone but the most fearful of computer users. Put these six exercises to work for you first, and you will dramatically improve the odds that your website will deliver results.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

In the 1980s I cut my Direct Marketing teeth under the tutelage of Hank Johnson and Katie Muldoon, two of the giants of the catalog world. My previous business experience had been entertainment booking and promotion. Marketing in the entertainment world in those days was a rather blunt instrument. It just wasn’t difficult to get someone to a Heart or Prince concert, or to a major Hollywood preview. What I understood about marketing was wining and dining and printing billboards.

We were starting a catalog that sold videos to consumers at a time when consumers didn’t purchase video unless it was a Jane Fonda workout.  Blockbuster still had less than five stores, there was a video rental store on nearly every corner, and people waited in line on Friday afternoons to rent their weekend entertainment and return it by Sunday.

My primary responsibility was merchandising, and as it turned out, I had a lot to learn.

Early on a salesman came asking for me with a suitcase full of samples. He didn’t have an appointment and I didn’t know who he was, so I asked the receptionist to send him away with instructions to call for an appointment. We were one day away from a major print deadline and I was buried in final proofs.

The next thing I knew, my boss came through my office door with the salesman in tow. My boss proceeded to lecture me on the fact that if Lillian Vernon could sit on the back of a donkey cart traveling through China in 1972* to build the world’s most successful direct merchant, I could sure as hell take an uninvited salesperson in and see what he had to say.

Later, after making it through the sales call in spite of my shame and fury, I went to my boss. I was pretty tweaked. He’d embarrassed me. So I asked him, “How am I supposed to get anything done if I have to receive every salesperson who decides to drop by without an appointment?”

To which he replied, “How do you expect to be a successful merchant if you don’t live and breathe with the one goal of finding the most interesting, most relevant, most desirable products for your customers? Nothing else we do matters if we don’t get the products right!”

I had made the mistake of thinking that I knew how to merchandise movies and music just because I knew the output of the movie and music studios better than almost anyone. But understanding a product category – even loving a product category - is not the same as merchandising a product category. Eventually I would learn that being an expert on a product is primarily about the self. Being a merchant is about the customer; her wants, her needs, her expectations, and all the other things in the market that are vying for her attention.

So I became a student of Lillian Vernon. How she analyzed everything she offered for sale and the types of women who bought from her. How she honed her offering over time to thoughtfully satisfy needs her customers didn’t even know they had. How she was always scouting for something her clients hadn’t seen before and could get excited about. How she never sat on products that didn’t sell, but cut her losses and moved on quickly so as not to waste time on merchandise that was diminishing her brand and wasting precious catalog space. How she carefully managed the balance between evergreen products and new products so as never to become stale. How she established powerful relationships with vendors based on mutual trust and respect to ensure she always saw the most exciting products first. Lillian Vernon knew that the only way to keep her customers was to make sure they were excited just thinking about receiving a new catalog in the mail each month.

A recent commenter on one of my blogs noted that many of the companies today cannot change because of their fixed structures. Never mind that failure to change is the same as failure to survive. If a company is passionate about its merchandising; if a company is constantly taking the temperature of its customers and analyzing customer behavior; if a company is always testing new ideas, ditching the weak ones and building on the strong ones, that company can’t help but change. Outstanding merchandising is one of the pillars of business success.

Even Campbell’s Soup has had to constantly change throughout the years to reflect changing consumer tastes and expectations. If a product category as basic as soup must change to stay relevant, how much more important is the constant search for relevance to a company that sells non-essential goods?

Today the company Lillian Vernon has changed hands several times and is no longer what it once was. But Lillian Vernon the merchant, the intrepid explorer for products that would delight her customers and make her money, is still a strong role model for me. I hope she can inspire you too.

*I was never able to verify that Lillian Vernon ever rode a donkey cart in China, though she was one of the first business people to do trade there after Nixon's historic visit.

Are You Competitive?

One of the most important elements of business success is competitiveness. Business thinkers write about it, business owners talk about it, and entrepreneurs worry about it. I have received more than one phone call from new business owners worried that they are not competitive enough to launch a successful business. Which is simply confirmation that, despite all the discussion about competitiveness, very few people really understand what it means.

For most people, our exposure to competitiveness is related to childhood sports or academics. We grow up thinking that the people who train the most or study the hardest or are the most relentless are the most competitive. While there's no doubt that drive is a part of competition, the true definition of competitiveness is the differentiation. The person who can run the fastest is the most competitive in a footrace - whether she trained for years, or just slipped out of her high heels on a whim and took off.  While drive, discipline, or even aggression can sometimes be contributors to success, these attributes only matter if your end result delivers the desired prize.

Plan Your Race Carefully

Runners self-select into different aspects of the sport. Some are sprinters, some are jumpers, and some are long-distance. Most will excel at a few of these, but rarely are the sprinters also the cross-country warriors. You don't have to be competitive in every type of running to win a Gold Medal - you just have to be competitive in your chosen heats. The same is true with business competitiveness.

To be competitive in business, you must match your talents (services, products, identity) to your potential markets. If your talent is to create extremely high-end, scrumptious, gold and diamond jewelry, you know that your market will not be high school girls. But your target is not the "32 to 48-year-old female self-purchaser with a professional career" demographic either.  Even though that category is likely a closer match to your offering, it's still very broad, and made up of many many different types of women with different aspirations, values, and purchasing behaviors. You have to figure out which heat is yours to win.

And what does winning the race look like in this example? The Gold Medal is to achieve your sales and profitability objectives and to create a sustainable business with tangible market value. To be competitive, you have to identify the group of people to whom your product or service matters, and give them a reason to buy from you instead of from someone else. This is the heart of competitiveness.

Train Train Train

Here's where the discipline and determination that are powerful contributors to competitiveness come in. You can't just set your market target and then forget about it. Being competitive - i.e., winning the results you want - requires constant attention, correction, refinement, and practice.

I was speaking with a potential new client today, a luxury retailer in a very high rent market. I asked a lot of questions about his business performance, and he was able to answer each one with accuracy and confidence. When I asked about his customer profile he said, "That's where I think we need your help. Our customer profile feels less focused than it used to." This is an example of someone who is in it to win it. He is so aware of his own business that he can feel when he's off. He approaches every day as full-on training.

Your Race is Your Own - Don't Copy Anyone Else's

Another competitive mis-step is to copy what other businesses are doing. If another business in your competitive space is already doing something, the market doesn't need you to do it too. You have to do something else. Just remember, when you're playing follow-the-leader, the leader will always cross the finish line before you.

You Can't Win a Race Looking Over Your Shoulder

Some business-owners are so terrified that a competitor is gaining on them that they can't stop looking over their own shoulder. They vigilantly patrol their market space for copy-cats and encroachers, and they waste precious energy and business focus looking at the wrong things. Of course, if someone egregiously infringes on your business, you need to deal with it, but in most cases these caboose-fixated folks are trolling for the mere threat of competition. If you try to run while looking backward you're bound to fall on your face, and that's virtually what happens to business owners with this competitive problem.

If You're Not Having Fun, You're Not Doing it Right

The best athletes in the world compete for the love of their sport. No amount of money or prestige can make all that practice and sacrifice worth it. They may not feel like practicing every single day, but nine out of ten days they are doing what they love to do.  When I tell people they need to have more fun at work, a common impulse is to start doing Friday pot lucks or monthly pizza parties. Hey, food is fun, but that's not really what I mean. You need to love what you do to show up every day in your game clothes.

So to all of you out there who aren't particularly competitive (in the generally accepted sense), who don't feel the thrill of cutting throat, who are more likely to shed tears than shake your fists at defeat, worry not. Being competitive is about differentiating, practicing practicing practicing, and never looking over your shoulder. It's OK if you still let your older sister win at Monopoly. Follow these concepts, and you can still win at the competition of business.

Distilling customer relationship publishing into one simple blog post

I read dozens of business books and articles every month, and I look for common threads between them. Not surprisingly, I find more common thought than innovative or divergent thought in business theory. In general that’s good, because it means that ideas are being tested for practical application in business settings. But sometimes, the effort to repackage existing ideas as fresh, leads to making simple concepts seem complicated.

One good example of this is found in the literature related to customer relevance, relationship marketing, and customer loyalty. Every B-school has at least one professor publishing on the newest, greatest, latest methods for building customer relationships. Those ideas are then adopted by every POP and CRM software vendor eager to sell customer management tools, repackaged as gotta-have-it-or-risk-your-business enterprise solutions. No wonder business owners are perplexed.

Most of the information and solutions are quite good. Put them all together to gain insight across the spectrum of customer relationship management. The one remaining weakness is that business owners are frequently offered solutions for which they have not yet defined the problems. Problems are defined by asking questions. So let’s start there. The answers to customer relevance are found by asking these simple questions:

1. Why do my customers purchase my products or services?
2. Which features and benefits of my products are meaningful to customers?
3. How do my products stand out in customers' minds?
4. How do my customers use my products?
5. Are any of my customers using my products in a manner that surprises me?
6. What are the biggest hassles my customers encounter when buying from me, and what could I do to eliminate those hassles?
7. Are there any specific barriers to being my customer? If so, how can I remove them?
8. Which of my customers require substantially more or less sales attention than the others? Why? What insights can I glean from this? How can I find/develop more of this type of customer?
9. If my business were shuttered, to whom would it matter, and why? Which of my customers would miss me the most? How long would it take another business to fill the void?
10. If I were just launching my company today, would I sell the same things? What would I do differently?
11. What experience does my customer associate with my products, and how can I create an experience that adds value beyond the inherent value of the product/service?
12. Which methods of communication are most relevant to my customers?
13. How do those methods affect the messages?

Developing the answers to these questions is not difficult. It requires research, compiling existing customer data, and analysis. Some of the answers may require expertise you do not personally possess, but which you can access in your employees or business advisors.

It doesn’t matter if it takes a while to answer these questions – if you didn’t answer them, the time would go by anyway, right? And it doesn’t matter if you don’t know precisely how you will go about answering them, because just knowing they must be answered will lead you to methods for finding the answers. What matters is that you ask the questions, chip away at assembling the data, and start to make better decisions. Because when it comes to relationships, it’s best to work on them a little bit every day.

These questions were first posed in an article written by Andrea Hill in MultiChannel Merchant magazine, May 2008.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Note to my regular readers: My apologies for the long delays between posts! The challenge of keeping my arms around a rapidly growing business seems to push blogging to the bottom of the priority pile too often. I’ll try to be a little more consistent now that my most recent staffing challenges have been addressed. Thanks for sticking with me!

At my last company, we invited a strategy consultant to come assist the board with getting a tighter rein on our strategy. We had a board filled with conflicting objectives, and we stood to benefit both from the sound process and the outsider perspective of a good consultant.

Overall, the consultant's process was quite good, and we implemented the process nearly by the (her) book. She hadn't developed anything earthshaking or new. In fact, it was largely text-book strategy set to a rational and clear formula to assist with discipline and retention. This is a good thing. But there was one other aspect of her process that was also text-book that made me uncomfortable, and that's what we're examining today.

She took a traditional b-school marketing approach to customer lifetime value (CLV). That approach says that some customers are simply not as valuable as others, and a business should drop them and focus on the ones that are profitable. Now I'm all for dropping unprofitable customers! But the methodology for defining who those unprofitable customers are is largely incorrect, and leaves a lot of money on the table.

In the case of the consultant, she advised that customers who fit our strategic definitions should get first everything: calls should be routed to answer those customers first, they should receive the direct mail offers, they should receive all available attention. According to the consultant, we could serve the low value customers but only if we didn't spend any additional money or effort to do so.

The traditional b-school approach is called a standard CLV model. It demands that you calculate the net present value of all revenue and marketing dollars over a period of time (usually 1-3 years, but could be as much as decades, depending on the business) for each customer, and only keep the customers who show positive net present value for the marketing investment. Makes sense, right? Frequently, no.

You see, the standard CLV model is just a snapshot in time. There is a cost to acquire a customer, and a cost to maintain a customer. Once the customer is acquired, the maintenance cost can be leveraged over long or short periods of time – it just depends on when you decide to exercise your option to drop them. So at that static moment in which the measurement is made, it may make sense to drop a whole batch of customers, based on anticipation of their behavior in the upcoming time period. But if you run the same projection in a month, or even a week, you could get a different result. I always found the standard CLV model sort of frustrating, because while I felt in my gut that something was wrong with it, I had nothing more substantive to back it up.

Recently I stumbled across a study published in the Journal of Marketing in 2006 that explains the weakness of the standard CLV approach. First, the article confirms that standard CLV models present an overall biased approach. The study authors point out that the standard CLV model assumes that unprofitable customers will continue to be unprofitable. This is true for some presently unprofitable customers, and not for others. Once a customer is cut off, the firm can no longer exercise options to benefit from the opportunity present in that customer, so use of the standard CLV approach actually undermines the opportunity to exercise options in the future. Future options could include offering presently unprofitable customers offers that were not offered previously and which would benefit that group of customers, maintaining service to those unprofitable customers at low cost, and of course, cutting off those customers at a later date.

At the heart of the standard CLV model is the idea that marketing resources are scarce and must be carefully administered. Well, all resources are ultimately scarce, though there is no doubt that marketing resources can be expensive. Because executives have a difficult time measuring and proving how effective their marketing dollars are, it feels better to cut them than to worry about spending indiscriminately.

The standard CLV model was developed in response to business culture heavily influenced by activity based costing (ABC). Developed by Robert Kaplan (who also developed the Balanced Scorecard), the method is intended as a tool for understanding product and customer cost and profitability. In a business it is rather simple to directly measure the time it takes to make, QC, pack and ship a widget, the time and cost involved in answering a phone call, the time and cost related to processing invoices, or placing a purchase order, or to hold a meeting. What is difficult to directly attribute is the value of any particular step. We businesspeople don't like ambiguity, so we lean hard on the things that can be carefully measured. Ask an engineer the measurement of one of her activities, and she can provide the answer with a tolerance measured in hundredths. Ask a marketer for a measurement of an activity, and you will get an answer that has a lot of qualifiers in it. So we create models like standard CLV, which gives us the satisfaction of certainty and metrics, and which turns the blind eye of denial on the idea of human psychology and market behavior.

The aforementioned business consultant actually had a reasonable rejoinder to my hesitance about making the less profitable customers wait on hold (in my opinion, a good business doesn't let any of its customers wait on hold). Her process accommodated an eye toward development of lower-value customers.

But in most businesses, there is an ongoing battle between what can be measured in operations – and therefore, cut in costs – and what can be measured in marketing. As we head into a recession in the next 12-24 months, there are some important marketing adjustments businesses must make. Managing a business in recession means feeding the quacking ducks – not cajoling the ducks into a new diet. But that still requires marketing, and marketing will continue to be difficult to measure. For the metrics geeks out there, I strongly recommend the article referenced here. It provides some interesting approaches to offset the inherent bias in standard CLV. Finally, let's all remember that a good handle on human psychology and an intimate sensitivity to and awareness of our customers may cause us to make decisions that the metrics can not assure us will be good decisions. Going with your gut is inadvisable when determining the safety of an electronics device. But it's an essential part of the toolbox when working with motivation and relationships.

Haenlein, M., Kaplan, A.M., & Schoder, D. (2006). Valuing the real option of abandoning unprofitable customers when calculating customer lifetime value. Journal of Marketing, 70, 16.

(c) 2008.  Andrea M. Hill

First of all, thanks to all my email pals who checked in with me to see if I was OK, and more to the point, where was my blog? I'm afraid customer travel/conferences got the best of me and I got behind. I'll get back on track now.

In a presentation earlier this week, I spoke with a jewelry industry group about a cost-tracking strategy. The format of the forum was a lot of fun. It was a panel presentation offering 75 Business Ideas in 75 Minutes. The downside was that if I went over a minute per business idea a normally mannerly fellow named Rich Youmans would honk a loud bicycle horn at me. Though I am not generally very rule-bound, that horn was a true behavior modifier. I knew this concept was hard to describe effectively, and I knew Rich would be holding a bike horn, so I had spent a bit of time prior to the panel getting it down to one paragraph. Now I’d like to give it a little more attention.

Here’s the tip:

Compare your company's cost curve with the industry's price curve. Costs and prices usually decline (looking at inflation-adjusted numbers). By comparing your cost curve with the industry's price curve, you can tell if your costs are declining at the rate necessary for your company to remain competitive. This doesn't mean you have to drop your prices – it just means you've maintained enough operating, supply chain, and management efficiency to do so if challenged. Keep your margin as long as you can, but don't price yourself out of the market simply because you have no other option. If your costs are declining faster than the industry price curve is declining, make sure you understand why! It's not unusual for a company to achieve a competitive advantage that they do not understand, and therefore, do not exploit.

Now that I have more than a minute, let’s break this down a bit:

“Compare your company’s cost curve with the industry’s price curve.” It is next to impossible to learn about competitors’ costs, but it is not hard to watch their selling prices. Anyone can monitor overall price trends in a spreadsheet and create a graph. The best way to do this is to select specific products and group them into product categories. If you and your competitors sell hundreds of products, you may want to monitor key products or products that are representative of groups of products. Conduct a competitor selling price analysis quarterly or twice annually, and plug in the selling price for each of the items you are tracking. Don't get caught up in trying to figure out what price your competitors charge for bulk sales. That information is important for your own sales negotiations. But for this analysis discount strategies lack value and can keep you from achieving your purpose.

Once you have collected competitor selling prices, do the same analysis for your own products, only this time, you're plugging in your product costs (not selling prices). Track only variable costs for this exercise. Yes, marketing, operations, and shipping all play a role in your product cost. But your purpose for doing this project is to see if your cost trends are mirroring industry price trends, to make sure you are managing your variable costs commensurate with the industry. If you are adamant about seeing freight costs, do a separate freight cost analysis rather than combining freight costs with variable product costs. Freight costs follow their own trends and can skew your understanding of your variable cost management. Variable costs include costs of raw materials, direct labor costs, and packaging costs.

Now here comes the hard part. You don't get any gratification out of this exercise unless you 1) go back in time and recreate all the information for previous quarters, or 2) wait until you have collected several quarters of data. Most people opt to start collecting data and do their first trend analysis at some point 1-2 years down the road. For those of you who think "That's crazy, why do it at all then?" . . . hey, the time is going to go by anyway.

To compare your cost trend with the price trend of the industry, calculate the average cost of your products and the average selling price of your competitors' products. If you are tracking a few dozen (or less) directly comparable products, you can compare product to product. What is more likely is that you are tracking generally comparable products. In that case, lump the competitor products and your own products into comparable product categories, then calculate the average for each category. Finally, create charts out of the average selling prices and costs. Your final analysis will look something like this:

What you are measuring is whether or not your cost trend mirrors the industry pricing trend. In the example shown, the trendlines for the baby doll category are roughly equivalent, suggesting that costs are not decreasing at a slower rate than competitive pricing. However, the trendline for the dollhouse category indicates that costs are decreasing disproportionately to competitor selling prices, indicating a need for deeper analysis.

One last possibility, not shown in the graph, is that your costs are declining more rapidly than competitive pricing. This would indicate an opportunity to exploit a competitive advantage through lower pricing, or even better, to rake in additional margin while the getting is good. I would only consider dropping selling prices if the product or product category was one that would lead to considerably greater market share and sales growth on related products for the effort. Too often, companies drop their selling prices and simply shrink revenue as a result.

It is not uncommon to be retained by a company to dig into why they are no longer competitive, and upon doing the analysis, find out that their cost-erosion problem began years ago. This simple method requires a few hours once every quarter or twice a year. When combined with other prudent cost management strategies, it will point out cost erosion rapidly and can set you on a path to correcting problems before they become devastating.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

For the first time in 20 years I had to miss the jewelry shows in Vegas. It gave me an interesting opportunity to observe the shows entirely through social media. At one point, in support of my (almost entirely female) writing brethren covering the shows, I started the hashtag #WomenWithPens. Shortly thereafter, Lorraine DePasque offered the insight that she wished the coverage had more depth than #WomenWithRingsOnTheirFingers, a thought that had already been very much on my mind.

You see, in my attempt to ‘experience’ the shows through social media, I was very disappointed. Oh, I love all the pictures of people and jewelry – and it’s great to see the smiling faces of so many people I care about. But I wanted content. I wanted analysis and insight. And that, I’m afraid, was in short order.

Why does this matter? Because the future of marketing is about content (here's an infographic that includes information on how Content fuels sales). In both B2B and B2C marketing, content is now a requirement, a minimum standard necessary to compete. If we’re not practicing the job of developing content with each other, if industry leaders and writers aren’t modeling this behavior for the brands, designers, and retailers, then we risk becoming irrelevant on the new marketing stage.

What is content? Content is information of interest to consumers – information that educates, entertains, challenges, creates respect and trust, and inspires – information that leads to the desire to engage with the brand. Yes, images are part of that, but alone they are insufficient. The mainstream jewelry industry is consistently out-Instagrammed and out-Twittered by consumers and hobbyists showing jewelry pictures.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize a few of the industry’s top next-wave content-developers and publishers. I am intentionally leaving out the style editors for this article. Don’t get me wrong – journalists Jennifer Heebner, Lorraine DePasque, and Tanya Dukes, PR Mavens Amanda Gizzi, Michelle Orman, Andrea Hansen, and Helena Krodel Wegweiser, and bloggers GemGossip, Katerina Perez, The Jewellery Editor (and quite a few others – these are my go-tos) all have a very important role in the promotion and understanding of jewelry – and their coverage is fantastic.  But I want to talk about the other writers for a moment.

Let’s start with Peggy Jo Donahue. Nobody does more to convey the thoughts and lessons of the jewelry industry via social media than Peggy. She captures the most valuable sound-bites from educational sessions and pushes them out to the rest of us – in fact, she was the only social media publisher doing so at the shows this year. Like the dyed-in-the-wool journalist that she is, Peggy Jo is always on the hunt for something new, something insightful, something of depth to share with the rest of the industry. She is a true industry treasure, and this year, my most dependable eyes on the show I had to miss. She is the reason I started the #WomenWithPens hashtag. Let me make this point one more time: Nobody else provided any significant body of non-stylist jewelry industry content from the shows this year. For the thousands of retailers and brands who did not attend the show, they saw lots and lots of style information, but very little information of business value.

Beyond the show, there are a few journalists and essayists who regularly publish content on social media that meets the definition of interesting, educational, inspirational, challenging, engaging. (Why do I differentiate between journalists and essayists? Both are equally important – but different in significant ways. Journalists sometimes write essays, but essayists rarely employ the disciplines of journalism. Click the links above if you’re curious about the difference.)

Sometimes people forget that Cindy Edelstein is not just the industry’s biggest mensch, but also a trained journalist. Though her day job involves much more than writing, Cindy uses social media platforms all day every day to develop, curate and share industry knowledge to her customer base. Very few days go by without something educational, thought-provoking, or industry-promoting from Cindy. She does this for two reasons: A) to model to the industry what we should all be doing, and B) to ensure that her important content makes it to every potential audience member.

Two relatively new writers, Monica Stephens (iDazzle) and Barbara Palumbo (Adornmentality) are helping take industry content-writing to the next level. They use social media platforms with the ease of the Millennial, and they use their pens to advance causes and thought processes. Late last year Monica published an article that implored the industry to stop differentiating between precious and semiprecious gemstones. It was important work, because it pointed out that the difference is just so much industry navel gazing, not relevant to the next generation of jewelry buyers. She made us think.

When JCK Magazine’s annual Top 50 Industry Powerbase article appeared this year with only 13 women in it, Barbara Palumbo made it a personal mission to correct the imbalance. Her #FiftyWomenOfJewelry series has been recognizing women who have made and continue to make serious contributions to the jewelry industry. As Cindy Edelstein said just last week (before she was ever included, by the way), "Barbara's choices for the series have been well-researched and right on all the way."

Two men, Rob Bates and Matthew Perosi, also regularly develop meaningful industry content and use social media effectively to expand their reach. They get to be honorary #WomenWithPens – but there is nothing ‘honorary’ about including them in this list of writers who are at the forefront of new publishing in the jewelry industry.

And here my list ends.**  No, seriously. It ends here. The industry has many terrific writers (please, acknowledge your favorites in the comments! The writers of industry are the thought leaders, and we need to celebrate them every chance we get), and several excellent magazines.

But as an industry, we aren’t maximizing our use of social media – yet – to get our stories across. For the magazines, having a strong website filled with constantly updated content is a minimum standard necessary to compete. I’m talking about going beyond that standard, for editorial and brand entities alike to proactively engage with readers in all the places they congregate - and with more than just pictures of jewelry.

I am regularly asked – by brands, jewelry designers, and retailers – how they can justify and maximize their use of social media to get business value from it. I tell them all the same thing. Find your story, your perspective, your specific angle on the jewelry business and create content about it. Tell stories, write blogs, publish images with interesting and thought-provoking commentary, engage in social media conversations where you can bring your unique perspective to the audience, and pass along content developed by others that is consistent with and expands upon your viewpoint.

Follow the people mentioned in this article. You will learn a tremendous amount about how to use social media to engage your own audience, and you will experience a constant supply of quality information that is suitable for passing on. And that’s how it’s done.

I was just on a conference call with three experts in digital design. We are preparing for a panel discussion at the Gold Conference in New York at the end of April (you really should join us! Here’s a link to learn more about the conference). We were discussing the transformative aspect of digital design and manufacture, and whether or not the jewelry industry has actually embraced that yet.

Many of us are talking about the struggles in the jewelry industry.  Here are just a few of the more comprehensive writings on this topic:

• What Will Become of Jewelry Retail Stores? Peter Smith (4/12/2016)
• Everything You Know About Luxury Has Changed. Andrea Hill (5/27/2015)
• The Jewelry Industry and Millennials: What do they want? Rob Bates (5/18/2015)
• Past Time for Change: A Post to the Jewelry Industry. Andrea Hill (6/2/2014)
• You Need to Attract the New Consumer.  Andrea Hill (3/17/2014)

And yet, the store closures (~750 last year) keep happening, specialty retail stores are stagnating, and the industry mood is a bit grim.

Digital Design has Already Transformed Industries

So let’s look at what’s happening elsewhere. One of the guys on my call this morning (Harry Abramson, Direct Dimensions) shared a story about his brother (brother-in-law?) who is in the custom t-shirt business. Whereas at one time, if you wanted a custom t-shirt, you had to produce or select a design, then order and stock it by the dozens in each size and color; today you can order one custom t-shirt at a time with virtually the same delivery time. The individual t-shirt may cost a bit more than the cost of each t-shirt in bulk, but there’s nowhere near the risk or inventory cost associated with the old way of doing things. To a certain extent this type of design customization is available today in jewelry stores using Stuller's Gemvision system.

I experience this in my own business as well. Often I receive calls from people asking if we sell any of my business quotes (the benefits of social media, I guess) on mugs, mousepads, desk art, etc. We can and do, one piece at a time, to order.

In the fashion industry, the CFDA has embarked on a significant mission to study how to remain relevant in the age of fast-fashion. In the “old” way of doing things, the fashion industry produced big shows in the spring and fall, showing fashions that will be available for sale at retail six months later. Today, consumers are snapping up those same design concepts at retail almost as soon as the shows are done. How? Fast fashion operations are producing their own versions of what’s hot during Fashion Week very quickly, delivering to demanding consumers the style concepts they saw almost immediately after they saw them.

Paint manufacturers figured out the benefits of fast, digital design long before the rest of us. Instead of stocking 100 colors of paint, your local hardware store stocks a few base colors, and dozens — even hundreds —of colors, all of which can be mixed on demand for each customer.

Publishing, music, printing, television, automobiles, vacation packages, the list goes on-and-on — all have been transformed by incorporating consumer-driven digital design into the process. And by “consumer-driven” I don’t mean consumers doing the design (though in some cases that has happened). By consumer-driven I mean taking into account the real needs and desires of consumers – expressed and yet-to-be expressed – and designing to meet those needs.

There's a difference between "embracing CAD" and  "using digital design for transformation"

I’ve written and spoken at length about how the industry needs to embrace the digital world and incorporate it comprehensively into the bricks-and-mortar world. This is still true. But internet marketing and selling aren't the only digital transformations we need to embrace. How can we bring to consumers the jewelry designs that turn them on — designs that are extremely well conceived, vibrant, contemporary — at retail? How can we achieve what the luxury automobile manufacturers are doing, bringing forward impeccable design and consumer-focused innovation at lower production and marketing costs than in the past?

The tools are there. CAD, 3D growers and digital manufacturing on the design and inventory production side; and advanced CRM systems on the sales and promotion side. But what we’ve focused on in CAD for the past 10-15 years is just getting people to pick up the tools and learn them.

Now that time has passed. It’s no longer sufficient to use the digital tools available to us to simply do the things we are already doing, only faster and cheaper. We need to be innovating new ways, more ways to apply digital tools in our businesses. We need to be so adept at using the digital tools available to us that we start coming up with big new ideas. It’s time to use the digital tools to transform our businesses and our industry. Either that, or let the new world of design, production, and retailing move on without us.

PS. There is still a very important place for hand craft. There always will be. And there should be more hand craft - not less - in jewelry stores. But hand craft alone will not solve the problems the industry is facing. Digital design must also be a big part of the equation.

I’m giving myself a subscription to Code4 Startup this year. Why? Because I need to learn a new programming language. Of course, I employ excellent programmers, and I don’t need to personally perform any coding for my job. So why am I doing it? For the same reason I learned to make patterns and sew when I ran an apparel company, and why I pursued goldsmith training when I ran a large jewelry manufacturer; because understanding the customer (business customer and end consumer) experience of any business is essential to business success, and I am very curious.

More than 70% of small businesses fail within the first five years, and that staggering statistic owes a lot to the failure to understand what customers need, how they need it, and why they want it. In other words, our economy loses a massive amount of capital due to a dreadful lack of curiosity.

I recently interviewed a fellow who had purchased a Seven Eleven franchise in a hot urban market, only to have the store taken back by Seven Eleven corporate after two years. I certainly felt bad for the guy, but there was no doubt he suffered from a significant customer-awareness failure. His reason for the business failure was that a QuikTrip had opened down the street and the competition killed him. But in that densely populated urban area there was more than enough market share for both businesses. The real reason for the failure was that the QuikTrip was new, bright, clean, and felt better to the shoppers. The Seven Eleven owner had failed to shop the competitor, see the difference through the eyes of his customers, feel the difference for himself, and take the simple – and relatively inexpensive – measures to brighten and freshen up his store.

What can we in the jewelry industry do to vigilantly pursue awareness of what our customers experience relative to our products and services? Fortunately, quite a bit!

The first level of awareness – usage of our own products – the jewelry industry excels at. Designers and manufacturers wear their own jewelry and retail store staff put on goods from the cases each day when they arrive at work.

An area that could benefit from more curiosity, however, is how the consumer feels and what the consumer needs from the buying experience. The last time this aspect of consumer awareness was explored at an industry level was nearly a half century ago when DeBeers initiated the 4Cs movement. For the most part, all jewelry industry consumer awareness training since that time has focused on some derivative of 4Cs knowledge.

But consumers need much more than diamond knowledge when buying fine jewelry. I regularly observe consumers in jewelry retail stores. They tend to be slightly intimidated, they are unable to experience the jewelry without help, and they lack visual cues to help them interpret the different things they are seeing. One of the reasons fashion magazines are so popular with consumers is that the vast majority of women feel insecure about their ability to put together a fashionable outfit without some guidance. That fashion magazine guidance is carried through to the clothing stores with mannequins and posters. In contrast, the jewelry store experience provides static displays of jewelry in a sterile environment. No wonder so many jewelry buyers end up at Macy’s or Kohl’s with all their department-store prowess at merchandising display! If you are in the business of putting jewelry into retail stores, you might want to consider ways to supplement your jewelry with in-case display elements that support the buying decision. Do things that inspire curiosity and engagement in your customers. I know this isn’t easy – retail store display requirements can be pretty rigid – but the manufacturers and designers who find ways to mitigate this problem are most likely to win at the sales register.

Speaking of putting jewelry into jewelry stores, if you are a designer, how much curiosity do you have about what it means to work in the retail store? Have you worked behind a counter? Have you set up and torn down display cases each day? Have you spent hours answering customer questions and helping consumers find meaningful jewelry? Working a trunk show doesn’t count; if you want to build awareness of the retail store staff’s experience, you need to get in there and do it yourself. Ask one of your retail clients to let you shadow their sales staff for a few days. You’ll be surprised at all the important things you learn that will help you do a better job providing marketing collateral, training materials, and display elements to your retail clients. Are you worried that nobody will let you shadow? Well, some won’t. When I first wanted to learn about jewelry retail I had to ask eight or nine different store owners before someone said yes. Just keep asking.

Learning the building blocks of jewelry business is a never-ending pursuit. To date I have learned every aspect of jewelry business from rough diamonds to retail selling. In my consulting role, technology is one of the essential building blocks of all modern business, and JAVA is a technology I haven’t added to my knowledge base. I won’t become a master in it any more than my goldsmith training made me into a master goldsmith. But I will have a clearer understanding of how to deliver the tools my customers need and greater empathy for my employees engaged in delivering it, and that deeper knowledge will continue to distinguish me from my competitors. Now it’s your turn to figure out how to do the same for your business.

At some point we all end up either writing our own marketing or working with someone who is writing our marketing. It’s hard work. If you have a talented copywriter already, you’re probably done reading. For the rest of us, here are some tricks for putting what we want on paper. First, the steps of designing an ad, IN ORDER, are:

1.  Express the idea for the ad in one sentence (if you’re working on a catalog or larger advertising work, the advice is different and not our focus today). Why one sentence? One thought is all you can effectively convey in one ad. Examples include:

• “This ad will generate traffic by promoting our visit-with-the-expert Thursdays.”
• “This ad will generate sales for a specific product.”
• “This ad will engender good will for my business by sharing the results of our community action project.”
• “This ad will generate new service contracts by making people laugh, which shows them how fun we are to work with.”Each example states what you want to accomplish (sales, traffic, good will) and how you expect to accomplish it. You have only a few seconds of your prospect’s attention, so make those seconds work.

2.  Always write copy before designing or selecting visuals. Resist the temptation to do the reverse. Graphics and photos are gratifying. They make us feel as if our ad is coming together, they’re creative, and they’re fun. But graphics are intended to do three things: a) capture the prospect’s attention, b) amplify the message, and c) reduce the number of words required by translating them to a visual medium. If you haven't articulated the message, you can't amplify or refine it.

3. Write, rewrite, and rewrite, the words. Any capable writing teacher will tell you the nature of good writing is re-writing. If the words don’t flow from your pen or your keyboard, it’s not because you can’t write. It’s normal. We’ll come back to this step in a moment.

4. Once the words are written and edited, design the graphics. If you’ve done the hard work, you’re probably in love with your copy. Beware! The role of graphics is to further reduce the need for written or spoken words. If a graphic can convey the ad’s mood or personality better than adjectives, drop the adjectives. If a graphic can clearly and powerfully convey action, you might drop a verb or a directive sentence. If you’re too in love with your words, the graphics won’t be allowed to make their full contribution.

So let’s discuss writing and re-writing. If you’ve expressed your idea in one sentence (Step 1), you’re on your way. I recommend you begin by writing the ad without concern for the number of words, if they are the best words, or if your sentence construction and grammar are correct. Say everything you want to say in the expression of your one idea. Self-editing while writing is a common reason for not being able to write at all, so let yourself go. The editing will come next.

When you have one long, somewhat sloppy, not-quite-publishable thought, stop and get a cup of coffee. Celebrate! This is a big accomplishment.

If you are writing in long-hand, re-write (print not cursive) with enough room between the lines for editing notes and marks. If you are working on the computer, print a double-spaced copy. Editing requires uncluttered thinking. Approach editing with a clean desk and a red pen in hand to prepare your brain for the work you must do. You’ll also need a thesaurus and a dictionary. Now you will take four ‘passes’ through your copy.

Pass one: count your adjectives. I highlight them. Most writers clutter their writing with adjectives, turning a swift run around a smooth track into a jog through soft sand. Eliminate repetitive adjectives. Three adjectives in series are never as powerful as one perfect adjective. Use your thesaurus to develop a list of options and your dictionary to probe precise definitions. Avoid million dollar words. Keep it simple while conveying refined meaning.

Pass two: examine your verbs. Public advertising enemy number one is passive voice. Saying “our business was recognized by the governor for our contributions to state literacy” is passive. Saying “Governor Thomas praised our business for our contribution to state literacy” is active. Purdue’s online writing lab is a good resource for understanding passive and active voice.

Pass three: organization. Make sure your ideas are in the optimal order. Switch the sentences around to smooth flow or escalate energy. An advertisement is an argument for someone’s money. Build your ad as you would build a case, so by the time your prospect arrives at the call for action they’ve been primed to respond.

Pass four: grammar. Do you dread this part? Most people do, because they don’t feel competent. Tackling grammar after the first three passes is surprisingly easy. Read your copy out loud. Your ear will hear grammar and structure problems that your eye did not see. Still uncomfortable? Many online resources can help you. Try the Well Bred Sentence for starters.
If you have followed these steps you are either done with your ad or remarkably close to finishing. Is it perfect? Probably not. But it’s considerably better than it would have been, and you can trump writer’s block when you follow a process.

Advertising is communication. When you want to stop a child from running into a busy street, you instinctively choose abrupt, succinct, loud communication. If you want to convince your spouse to make an expensive but unnecessary purchase, you naturally choose conversational, persuasive communication. You already know how to choose communications styles. Combine the correct communication style with thoughtfully constructed copy that clearly conveys one idea, and your ads will be better than ever.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

We all know that responsive is good. Responsive means your spouse is happier than most spouses. Responsive means that your teenager is capable of doing what you ask of him. Responsive means the drugs are working.  Responsive is good.

Especially when  it comes to websites.

In February 2015 Google announced that it would change its search algorithm to give extra points to websites that proved to be mobile friendly.  What does that mean? A mobile friendly site is a site that:

1. Does not use Flash or other software that does not work well on mobile devices
2. Uses text that can be read without zooming
3. Sizes the content on the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or vertically to see it
4. Places links far enough apart so the correct link can be easily tapped - even with large fingers (or provides an automatic zoom feature to bring the link up for verification).

Google's Day of Mobile Readiness came and went on April 21, 2015, and guess what? Companies that previously enjoyed high search engine visibility - but which did not update their sites to be responsive - have dropped precipitously since that time.

Perhaps you figured you had other, more pressing business concerns to invest in. Perhaps you hate spending money on marketing. Perhaps your previous experience with website design left you with a bad taste in your mouth. But none of that matters, because mobile website traffic is growing at 3.5% per month across all sectors and industries, and mobile search will surpass desktop searches this year. So even if Google hadn't changed their search algorithm in April, consumers and B-to-B customers are already voting with their smartphones.

When is the last time you even looked at your website from your smartphone or tablet? If you have to scroll, pinch & pull, or squint to view your website, it's not mobile friendly. But don't take my word for it - take Google's. They've produced a Mobile Friendly Test that you can use for free. Just visit this site, enter your domain name, and watch the analyzer do its work. Go ahead and test it now.

If your website came back with a "mobile friendly" result, congratulations! Keep up the good work of keeping up with change on the internet. If you received a "not ready" result, it's time to make some changes.

There are essentially three different ways to make your website mobile responsive. The first (and oldest) approach is to offer a mobile version of your website, perhaps with the domain type of .mobi. This isn't a great option. It creates double-work for you and your staff, and it means that your SEO results get diluted across two domains. If your website provider suggests this, tell him no. The only person who will make more money doing this is him.

The next approach is something called Dynamic Serving. Think of it as a device sniffer. Someone calls up your website, the Dynamic Services sniff out what device is being used, and delivers the correct version. This approach tends to have a high error rate, and with devices changing constantly, it must be updated all the time. Like the previous option, tell your development partner no. This approach ultimately has a high cost-of-ownership.

The one approach you should use is a Responsive Design for your website. Responsive Design means you create and maintain one website. How does it work? Well, picture your website as a grid - which is how most websites are programmed. Here is an example of a grid from a website:

 Until fairly recently, these grids were always static, which means that the elements were in a fixed position to one another.  If you view a static grid website from a mobile phone, you will have to scroll to the right if you want to go from the logo to the header content.

In a responsive website, the grid elements are flexible. On a desktop, the grid elements will appear as in the drawing. On a smartphone, the elements will shuffle and become a vertical stack. You can even decide that some elements will only be visible when viewed from a desktop or tablet, and create specific alternative elements that show only on mobile phones.

If your site isn't mobile ready, it's critical that you invest in updating it as soon as possible. It is next-to-impossible to compete in the current business climate without a good website, and consumers increasingly disregard businesses that are falling behind on the digital marketing front. Until you do, Google will penalize you in their search, though you can earn your search position back once you update your site. And don't think this is just affecting you in Google. The only way a search engine makes money is if the people using it believe they get good search results. Being sent off to a website that offers a bad user experience reflects poorly on the search engine, so all the search engines - Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. - are highly aware of the fact that mobile search is where consumers are driving the internet.

If your site is built on a hosted engine like Shopify or Etsy, you are already covered. If you have a stand-alone site, move away from custom website design if you can. Using a website platform that is constantly being updated (think WordPress, Joomla, or Magento) is a far superior approach that will keep you up-to-date and save you money in the near and long-term.

Modernizing your website may seem daunting, but it's a good thing. A responsive website will better meet the needs of your customers, which means you will ultimately experience more foot traffic, website sales, and loyalty. Sure, the Mobile Bandwagon may have just passed you by, but with a bit of an effort you can catch up again.

When Jackson Pollack was alive and painting, the art/critic world divided in two camps: those who thought his work was beautiful but couldn’t understand it, and those who thought his work was not art. There wasn’t much room for discussion because nobody could explain, really, why Pollack’s paintings were so noteworthy. How does one argue with “I know what I like when I see it?” Only with “you don’t know diddly.”

In 1975, 19 years after Pollack’s death, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word fractal, which is an irregular geometric pattern that repeats itself at many degrees of magnification. A snowflake is a fractal – its smallest element is roughly the same shape as the finished snowflake. It turns out that nature’s patterns are largely fractals and that the human eye is finely tuned to fractal patterns. This idea was – and continues to be – tested heavily by Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon. In 1995 Taylor produced a painting using wind, rain, and tree limbs, which unexpectedly led to something that looked remarkably like a Pollack painting. Intrigued, he scanned Pollack prints into his computer and analyzed the patterns. It turns out that Pollack was painting within nature’s most common fractal range (this story and much more can be found in Matthew E. May’s In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing).

It took nearly 40 years for someone to articulate the reason that Pollack’s work is so gripping, but the patterns were there all along.

The Internet presents a similar problem today. It feels like a lot of noise. It’s difficult to sort the valuable information from the muck. At the low end of participation, small business owners and corporate communications staff monitor Internet conversations about their companies, celebrating the endorsements and dreading the oh-so-public complaints. At the broad-sourcing end of the spectrum, companies collect customer feedback on social media sites, ask the masses to participate in product naming and design, and put software development bids out to the public.

What are businesses doing with all that data? Data isn’t information. As a high school debater, I quickly learned that one could find a fact – complete with citations – to support any position one wished to argue. Later I worked with a woman who would regularly mobilize entire corporate departments to make sweeping changes because of a single customer complaint. “Ah,” you say, “but we’re turning that data into information.” But as I’ve mentioned before, if indeed information is power, librarians should be the most powerful people in the world.

Never before have so many conversations taken place in one forum. So much information is startlingly present at our fingertips, and there is significant temptation to read too shallowly, give credence too readily, and draw conclusions too quickly.

The actual value of all that data, the beneficial information that could be gleaned from it, is presenting itself to a select few individuals and companies who examine the conversations on the Internet in the way Taylor examined Pollack’s paintings.

Perhaps we would all be wise to view the Internet as a new kind of fractal. Step very close and observe only an inch of it. Back across the room and take in again. Business must develop the ability to recognize complex patterns in broad conversations, to comprehend their meaning, and to develop appropriate responses. The value is in the patterns.

People who know to look for the common threads, who have trained themselves to read a little deeper, listen a little harder, who have honed a skill for seeing patterns, these are the people who are figuring out why the Internet is beautiful. Do you know who these people are? Probably not the guy with the degree in statistics or the young lady with a PhD in computer science. Not unless they also spent considerable time learning to interpret literature and poetry, studying art and art history, or have deep knowledge about history, anthropology, or psychology. In this new renaissance that is the Internet, only the richest collaboration of arts and science will yield its ultimate benefit.

Do you know it when you see it? Only time will tell I guess.

© 2010, Andrea M. Hill

originally posted on LinkedIn

The nature of business is competition. There can be collaboration – where businesses team up to compete together. There can be good will, and there should always be ethics and character. There can be tremendous respect among competitors, and in the strongest industries there is. But competition is at the core of business. And yet sometimes I wonder – do we understand the nature of competition well enough in the jewelry industry?

Competition isn’t about putting another company out of business. Smart companies know that strong competitors make them better, smarter, faster, more profitable. About six years ago a new company called Flourish and Thrive Academy jumped into my competitive space and started doing smart things on the internet that I wished I’d done first. But I hadn’t. So what did I do? I got better, thanking the owners of F&T (Tracy Matthews and Robin Kramer) every step of the way. Why? Because a business segment is only healthy if the players in it are growing it. When the automobile industry became complacent, overall auto sales got soft, because consumers were not excited. Once the big auto makers got their groove back, people started buying more cars more often. Sometimes Ford is on top, sometimes it’s Toyota, and the competition keeps it all fresh for consumers. Good competition means everyone makes more money.

As my favorite competitiveness guru Michael Porter likes to point out; in war, or the Superbowl, there’s only one winner. In business competition, there can – and should be – many.

When Blue Nile hit the scene, we had a bit of an industry freak-out. What we should have done is paid more attention, learned from them, and competed with them. Not with prices (which is what happened), but with value. Not with one kind of value, but with many different kinds of value. Because Blue Nile is the right diamond seller for some kinds of diamond buyers, but certainly not for all kinds of buyers. Many people said this very thing, but it was rarer to find companies who went out and made their case to consumers with compelling and persuasive marketing and messaging.

We had a similar reaction to the ‘Big Boxes' cutting in on our turf. In commerce there is no turf. There are just customers, and customers don’t care about your perception of your turf. Customers have needs, and the companies that think hard and fast and jump in and meet those needs win their business. This is exciting, because customers don’t share the same set of needs. So to be competitive, you identify a group of customers with a specific set of needs, and you get ambitious about meeting them. Good competitors know that you don’t need all the customers – you just need the right customers.

Competition isn’t about doing what the company next to you is doing. It’s about turning your attention to the customers you serve, and challenging yourself to find new ways to give them what they want the way they want it. It’s about finding ways to meet needs that your customers haven’t even articulated yet. And while you’re at it, go find some new customers and turn them on to what you do.

Competition isn’t comfortable. Competition is about innovating and taking risks, and those things are inherently uncomfortable. Competition makes you sweat, makes you train, makes you dig deep and come up with new ideas and new skills. It's not about coming up with new ideas once every few months or a few times a year. It's about trying new things every week — every day. Competition favors the curious, the smart, the hungry, the enthused, the finishers. Without competition we wouldn’t be closing in on a cure for Alzheimer’s or driving affordable electric cars.

Competitors welcome the disruption that is always and forever coming their way. Good competitors create the disruption. I was told recently when speaking at a jewelry industry event that we weren’t supposed to use the word disruptive, because that word scares people. Consumer needs change and our businesses must change with them — and ideally, a step or two ahead of them. Change is inherently disruptive. Go be disruptive.

So sometimes, I worry that we are an industry that fears competition instead of embracing it. Closed systems tend to shrink, and any system that fights to keep innovation and competition out is closed. Systems that work hard to protect territory instead of working hard to expand it are playing a zero-sum game. Our industry requires people with a drive to create new kinds of value and find new customers. People who don’t want to do things the way they’ve always been done, but instead, have a powerful urge to carve new paths and discover new opportunities. People who understand that serial failure precedes most success. We have some businesses like that. Retailers that are quietly pursuing ambitious agendas. Designers finding new ways to reach consumers. Manufacturers thinking more like aeronautics companies than jewelry workshops. But not enough. Not yet.

Competition can be tiring. It doesn’t care if you’re overwhelmed, or sick, or out of ideas. It’s not personal. Competition isn’t personal. It’s just people, with needs, directing themselves toward the businesses that do the best job meeting those needs. That’s probably why entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. Because for every beautiful thing we make, there has to be an even bigger effort to connect that thing with a consumer, and that part is competition. Competition doesn’t care how hard you worked to make that thing. It cares if that thing – and the way you deliver it and service it – fits the customers' needs and interests.

We are not entitled to market share. Customers don’t owe us any loyalty. But we owe it to each other to keep raising the bar, invite in new voices, learn from other industries, try new things and fail, try again, and again. We owe it to each other to learn faster and better and make new things happen. We owe it to each other to challenge each other and accept those challenges. We owe each other an industry charged with the energy of competition. We owe each other an industry with a competitive mindset. Why do we owe all this to each other? Because that’s how we’ll once again expand the jewelry industry and create more opportunity for everyone. That saying “may the best person win” . . . that’s not a threat. That’s an invitation.

One of the challenges with relying on email marketing is that so many people hate receiving email. When you consider just how much SPAM is flying around these days, it’s not hard to understand why. Most of us work hard to keep our email communications interesting and relevant, and we watch our mail frequency. But even the most careful email senders ran into difficulty sending email during the months of October – December, 2021.

This is because the email services have implemented “rate-limiting policies.” You can expect email delivery and open rates to go down and bounce rates to go up. Here’s what we know so far:

The Big 5 Are All Experimenting with Rate-Limiting

• Yahoo
• AOL
• Google
• Microsoft
• Apple

They have decided to rate-limit all mass marketing emails from ANY large sender of mass emails:

• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign
• Keap/Infusionsoft
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Etc.

Why Are They Rate-Limiting?

They want to reduce and prevent spam and mass-marketing emails coming into their systems. Email limiting used to be based on blacklists, wherein a domain could be blacklisted for sending too much unsolicited or SPAM email. The new rate-limiting policies are not based on blacklists. Instead, this was a decision made by the Big 5 companies themselves. It’s not just bad actors being limited anymore.

Yahoo was the first to implement rate-limiting. If you sent an email in the early autumn of 2021 and suddenly saw a bounce rate of 31% or higher, this was the reason why. Yahoo was pleased with the massive reduction in mass-marketing and spam emails, and now the other companies are copying their rate-limiting policy. As of the end of December, bounce rates were generally down to the 13% range, but that’s still very high compared with the 2% - 5% bounce rates that were the norm before these new policies were implemented.

So How Many Email Can You Send?

Single emails will almost certainly be allowed through without rate-limiting. But any email broadcast is at risk. It all depends on how the individual companies' receiving policies are set, and so far at least, the Big 5 aren’t publishing those policies.

If you’re a WerxMarketing customer, you’ve already been transitioning to more and more drip-style email, and that’s a good thing. Using marketing automation to send targeted messages to specific customers enjoys higher response rates overall, tends to have experience better response rates, and will not trigger the email system receiving policies the same way that broadcasts do.

Broadcast Time Spread

Yahoo has shared some details of their rate-limiting policy. At Yahoo, mass-marketing emails sent from from one marketing account (Constant Contact or Keap for example) attached to your domain will be watched over a 12 hour period by Yahoo. If you send two broadcasts within 12 hours, they will be counted cumulatively, and will be rate-limited. The watch time frames for other email services are still unknown.

How This Affects Your Marketing

Depending on the policy of each company, this could mean significant delay in the delivery of your email, or even non-delivery in some cases.

Here’s how we think it will work (“think,” because nobody is sharing their policy. This is based on monitoring email sends and what little information we can glean through online research). It appears that a high percentage of emails sent through broadcasts will be “soft bounced,” which means they aren’t turned off for future email campaigns in your marketing system, but that the recipient will not receive the email for that particular broadcast.

It’s also possible that an entire broadcast could be blocked by the receiving mail server. In that case, the receiving mail server may request the sending mail server to send the (broadcast) emails again. This would likely be handled entirely at the server level, and could lead to delays in your email delivery. In these cases, the email services are interested in determining if the sending mail server was a mass spam source, and the assumption is that if it is, they most likely will not try sending again. On the other hand, a legitimate mail server will try sending again (up to a certain number of times / over a certain time period). So on the second send attempt the email may get through. Getting through still doesn’t mean the email won’t be classified as junk/bulk but at least the client will receive the email somewhere.

As mentioned above, so far only Yahoo has been willing to communicate with the marketing services about what is going on and why. Apple has always had a strict delivery limitation on mass emails, so we may not notice much change to Apple recipients. Microsoft is currently implementing the rate limiting in a light way but will almost certainly implement more fully soon based on what we’ve learned from people in conversation with them. Google also appears to be implementing a similar rate-limiting policy, which is consistent with their migration toward more privacy and less spam in general on the internet.

What Can You Do?

Here are a few ideas that may work, based on the limited information we have so far.

1. Strongly encourage all your email recipients to whitelist your domain. There’s no guarantee that this will help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
2. Look into making your email more constant, less broadcast-y, by using drip and automation techniques. This has other marketing benefits as well, but it does require campaign planning and list clean-up and management to implement.
3. You could try timing broadcasts to be sent 12-24 hours ahead of when they will need to be received. If you’re good about sending messages to be delivered during the “most likely to be opened window,” this will feel like a step backward. But getting delivered at a less-than-optimal time is better than not getting delivered at all (or late).
4. Review your data to see how much delivery delay is made by each of the Big 5 providers, which will help you determine the lead times needed for broadcasts. Ask for feedback from cooperative customers with some test sends. Some deliveries will go through without rate-limiting and some will be rate-limited, and there’s no way to anticipate or know which condition you are sending email into.
5. Final sale, webinar reminders, and other timely messages may not be effective. This is another area to test and monitor. Consider using text messaging for time-sensitive messaging. Or consider having an alternate service just to send time-sensitive emails.
6. Ask your domain/IT support to increase the strictness of our domain DNS SPF record. Most SPF records are set to “loose” by default. Apple apparently likes to see strict settings on domain email related records regardless of whether an email was sent as part of a broadcast or individually.
7. Ask your marketing service (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Keap, etc.) about their list and email collection policies. If your emails are sent by a service that mass distributes a lot of SPAM email for other customers due to loose policies, rate-limiting policies that punish your marketing service will hurt you too, no matter how careful you are with your lists.

This isn’t the best news. 2021 saw an increase in the cost of reaching customers through advertising, and now email efficacy is going down. But this is the nature of digital marketing. The various service providers and technologies keep evolving, and we must stay on top of the changes and make smart evolutionary changes of our own.

The good news is that customers are happier when they receive less SPAM, and they’re happiest when they receive email that is interesting, relevant, warm, witty, and feels very personal. If you work toward delivering on those characteristics, you’re likely to stay out of the rate-limiting filters too. So let’s focus on doing better marketing, and everybody wins.

I’m a bit of a history buff. I particularly enjoy stories about people who took chances and accepted new ideas, approaches, or technologies despite social pressure to stick with the status quo. Why? Because progress depends on groups of this type or person–risk-takers and visionaries—to propel the rest of us into the future. But just as there must be early adopters to champion new ideas, there always seem to be people who avoid mastering the new ideas for as long as possible.

Don’t Be Left Behind

The internet as a sales and marketing medium has reached critical mass. Consumers across all age groups look to the internet for brand, quality, customer satisfaction, and product information, using every type of device from desktop computers to phones to tablets. Yet I am still frequently asked, “Is it really important for me to have a website?”

And then there’s the question of social media. Only last month I had dinner with a group of jewelry industry leaders where I heard one executive rather forcefully express his opinion that he did not see the value of social media to business, nor did he believe that computers had a significant role to play beyond increasing efficiency and data management.

If you want to increase the value of your business, you must embrace and master internet technology as an important part of your marketing, selling, customer communications, customer service, and brand management strategy.

The Next Wave of Cottage Industry

The publishing and video industries have much to teach small business. Both industries were transformed by big-box retailers—small retailers simply could not compete on inventory or on price. And now, as the behemoths of books and video crumble under their own scale, high-service, high-quality bookstores and video stores are returning to serve discriminating consumers.

But they are not returning in the same configuration as before. New stores offer more knowledgeable customer service, special order services, engaging social media experiences, rich websites to offer a breadth of inventory they cannot afford to carry in the stores, mobile apps to engage with consumers wherever they are, and in-store online technology to supplement the store experience. The stores are staffed with collectors and impassioned readers and film viewers who bring true expertise to their customers.

These changes have created opportunity for independent producers and publishers, who both sell to these more creative independent retailers and sell directly to consumers. Using the same tools, independent producers can now service more dealers and reach more consumers than ever before and sustain those relationships without creating expensive corporate infrastructure to do so.

You Can MustDo This

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. You must have a website that looks and feels current, and offers more than just a few pretty pictures.

About 10 years ago during the first big go-round of website building, many companies got stung by creating websites that were expensive to build—and even more expensive to maintain. Today you have better options. Both technology and the people providing and servicing it have evolved. Here are some tips to help you fully embrace internet marketing technology and all its benefits:

• Unless you can program using HTML, HTML5, CSS or PHP yourself, do not let someone create a static website for you that requires programming language to add content, images, or pages. Today you have an abundance of options for building a CMS (content management system) site, from richly designed Wordpress environments to Joomla, Drupal, Radiant, Silver Stripe, and CMS Made Simple.
• Have a professional website designer design and produce your website using a mainstream CMS tool. Then have her train you how to use the back-end for your day-to-day operations. After that, you need to use your website professional only for more complicated tasks, such as adding new functionality or changing your design on an as-needed basis.
• Yes, you need a Facebook page. If you’re not sure how to set it up yourself, this is a great task for a social-media-savvy college intern. Just getting a page up and running, adding pictures regularly, and beginning to have conversations with your customers is an excellent start.
• If you want to add more exciting options to your Facebook presence, such as integration with your website, catalog pages you can sell from, newsletter signups, promotions, forms, surveys, and campaigns, you may need to hire a professional. But you can add these features to your Facebook page as your customer list builds, so you can be sure to reap the benefits—and have the development pay for itself—as quickly as possible.
• Using a tablet computer, such as an iPad2 or a Droid device, is a fantastic way to show your work without carrying your entire line. But…you need a full catalog of quality images for this to work. You can download images directly to your device or create an online image catalog to which you can easily connect.
• Unless you are a retail store—or are doing a high volume of online sales—you probably don’t need a mobile app right now. But custom mobile apps will be considered as commonly required as websites in a few short years. Right now, spend your time using other companies’ mobile apps and getting comfortable with how the world of mobile marketing works. When the time comes to do it yourself, you’ll know what to expect.

The internet has moved off the dirt roads of its infancy and is now offering a smooth interstate experience at high speeds. If you’re still driving a horse-drawn hay cart and trying to keep up, you’ll not only be left far behind, but also be engulfed in your own dust.

Quick. Take out your smartphone. Open your website. What do you see?

If your website seamlessly reconfigured itself to be easily readable on your phone, you're in good shape. This automatic sizing is called responsive, and it's what website visitors demand today. If, however, your reading panels are too wide, if you have to move your phone into landscape mode to read the text, if your pictures run off the sides, if you have to squint . . . you have pretty much demoted your own site to the nether regions of Google search.

Why? Because 98.3% of smartphone owners use their devices to access the internet. So Google - which has a vested interest in delivering good search results - is taking its belt to sites that haven't upgraded to responsive design. If your site won't automatically reconfigure itself to any device of any size, you need to fix it now.

Consider this more of a PSA than a blog post. Let's get on this folks.

When you run a business, your job is to produce and sell value. It is both as simple and as complicated as that. When I see businesses getting value wrong, I have a physical reaction to it – it’s like watching a starving person eat cardboard. So that’s what we’re going to focus on today: Getting value right. Because if you can do that, you can make money.

Let’s start with a few examples.

Getting Value Wrong

I was recently in a family-owned jewelry store, consulting with them about how to make improvements to their business. Their traffic is down to almost nothing, sales have declined for five years in a row, and the staff morale is abysmal. When I asked the buyer and store owner to explain their merchandising strategy to me, they focused entirely on price. Or, specifically, low prices.

“The big boxes and online retailers are kicking our behinds on jewelry prices,” they said. We’ve done everything we can do to lower our prices, but we just can’t compete at that level. They’re obviously buying a lot better than us.”

Of course, when you drop prices and your traffic drops, the only predictable result is that your revenue goes down. Even if your traffic stays the same, if you drop prices and do nothing to increase the number of purchases, your revenue goes down.

In this store, the merchandise looked very similar to what the merchandise would have looked like 15, 20, even 30 years ago. Lots of classics, lots of bread-and-butter. Nothing new, nothing exciting.

This is a classic example of getting value wrong. The assumption this store owner made was that the only “value” his buyers wanted was low prices. He didn't ask the customers. He was reluctant to invest in new products that are more exciting, fresher, and unlike what is offered at the discount jewelry outlets. Low prices aren’t the only value customers want, and had he discovered a different value proposition to offer, he could actually grow his business. So we’ll work on that now.

Getting Value Right

One of my very first jobs was at a major advertising agency, and I’m pretty sure this was the experience that taught me about value. I was in a meeting with my project team discussing an unhappy customer. The project manager was leading the meeting, and our VP was attending. The project manager kept talking about how to “showcase the numbers.” He spoke of using the most positive data, reflecting the highest possible viewer statistics, and painting the rosiest picture we could to help the customer see how much impact we were having.

The VP – a guy who never spoke very much – finally asked, “What does this customer really want?”

The project manager said, “Great service and great advertising!”

“No,” the VP said. “He wants sales. And all the inflated statistics in the world won’t make sales happen. What we need to do is give him a campaign that drives sales. Then he will be happy.”

It’s easy to get lost in the details of our businesses, but value comes down to a few simple things:

1. Know what your customers actually want and need from you.
2. Give it to them - in the right way and at the right (which isn't necessarily low) price.

Of course, these two concepts are simple, but their execution is not. What people want and how to deliver it can be very nuanced, and it is ever-changing. But if you keep these two points top-of-mind at all times, you will find they guide your work in new – and possibly unexpected – ways.

Shopping on sale in the midst of a recession is akin to indulging in a delicious vice. You know you want to do it, indeed, you’re going to do it. But you also know it’s wrong.

OK, maybe you don’t think that shopping on sale is wrong. But from my perspective, it’s like smoking a cigarette or having an affair. Why? Because every business that drops its prices to get customers in the door is doing so at the expense of their business safety and future. Who among us would decide to go into the sugar, flour, facial tissue, or copy paper business? Yet that’s what we do when we reduce our business premise to offering the best price. Price sensitivity is the nature of a commodity business.

Margin is essential to survival. Without margin you can’t pay the vendors, pay the rent, pay the taxes, pay your employees, or pay yourself. Every sale price you mark comes at the expense of margin. This is not to say that there’s never a good reason to have a sale. To score big wins, business owners must take regular measured risks, and those risks frequently result in excess inventory. Eliminating such inventory while making customers happy is smart, and sales based on those conditions are wise.

But the sale prices we see today are the desperation moves of companies that have run out of ideas for getting customers in the door. Margins are essential to survival. Always.

There are two ways to maintain margin. If a company wishes to compete on price and still maintain margin (note: if a company wishes to compete on price and NOT maintain margin, that company is out of business), it must reduce costs sufficiently to protect margin while reducing the selling price. Make sure you know how to reduce those costs before you reduce the selling price! One of the most common business mistakes is to assume that once a company has additional volume, the costs will come down accordingly. They drop the selling price to build the volume. Voila! They shrink the business. Make sure you have purchase commitments from customers and cost reduction commitments from suppliers prior to making that move. Even if you have figured out a failsafe way to play the price-reduction-with-margins-game, learn what Wal-Mart already knows: cost reduction is ultimately a zero-sum game.

The second way to maintain margin is to (drumroll here) maintain your prices. What? Not reduce them? But everybody’s reducing prices! How are we supposed to compete if we can’t get the customers to consider us because we’re not as cheap as everyone else. 

The only way to maintain prices is to offer something that makes not only your products, but your business, worth more to your customers. The phrase, “you cost more, but you’re worth it” has always been music to my ears. It is the ultimate compliment, an endorsement of a company’s value and a commitment to help the company stay in business.

The biggest impediment to achieving that valuable customer endorsement is the ubiquitous industry trend. Actually, the trends aren’t the problem. If all your competitors get caught up in the trends – and you successfully avoid them – it would be good. For you. Which industry trends are a problem? All of them. Product trends and service trends represent ideas that are being offered simultaneously by everyone in the industry, and when something is offered simultaneously by everybody, it leads to price trends. Instant commoditization.

Bucking industry trends is not easy. It requires an understanding of the concept minimum standard necessary to compete. As each industry develops, standards evolve over time. These standards relate to customer service levels, speed and quality of delivery, and quality of products. Every business must operate at the minimum standard necessary to compete. A good example of this is shipping times. In the early 1980s it was common for direct marketing businesses to offer 6-8 weeks for delivery. Within a few short years, same week delivery was the standard, and any company that could not offer the new standard lost market share. 

Every company must honor its industry’s minimum standards necessary to compete. To buck the trends and maintain margin, it is essential to offer something unique, something beyond the minimum standards. Each business must analyze its strengths, consider unmet or poorly met customer needs, theorize on emerging market conditions, and find a way to set itself apart. At one time, product differentiation was synonymous with corporate differentiation. Today, differentiation depends increasingly upon creative ways of building relationship value with customers.

The biggest danger to a business owner is lack of originality – generally demonstrated by virtue of getting trapped in his or her industry’s trends. Industry trend following simply turns your business into a commodity business. Avoid the trap and maintain your margins. When you do it well, your customers will gladly trade the guilty pleasures of sales prices for a superior offering.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Do you have a wine snob in your life? Everyone should have at least one. Wine snobs are important, because they teach important lessons about perspective, lessons which we all need from time to time. Right now is a good time for some perspective.

My favorite wine snobbism is that of the correct wine glass. Never a rounded rim, which drops the wine dully on the wrong location of your tongue. Large bowls to allow red wines to breathe, narrow flutes to retain the carbonation of a good bubbly, gently tipped out rims to properly deliver a young white to the correct area of the palate. All good advice of course, meant to enhance the bouquet and taste of a fine wine – or even improve the performance of a lesser wine. But a truly obsessed wine-snob-with-a-glass-issue can turn a simple dinner into an embarrassment of instruction if given a poor choice of glass – and woe to the restaurateur (or host) who does not have a better glass to offer. At this point, one would hope the expostulating oenophile would simply accept that the glass is but a delivery device, and that the true value of the wine can be found in the wine itself – even if you’re drinking it from a jelly jar.

Which brings us to social media. Social media is but a delivery device. For only a very few will it prove to be actual content, and most of those people are already in play. For the rest of us, social media is a delivery device. A marketing delivery device.

Back to the wine for a moment. My nephew and his wife are 20-somethings with two small children. They don’t have much money, but they love fine wine. Not long ago my nephew (while handing me a glass of his newest discovery) said, “Every time we have a little extra money we mean to buy good glasses. But then we decide to spend the money on the wine instead.” He said this as an apology, but I acknowledged that his priorities were in the right place. Given a choice between delivery devices and content (assuming the delivery device isn’t required to get at the content) one should choose the content! I would have been concerned had he offered me Boone's Farm in a fine crystal goblet.

So, back to social media. Right now the internet is rife with Boone's Farm in crystal goblets. It takes very little talent or skill to establish a Facebook account or post what you ate for lunch on Twitter. It takes very little time and almost no money to download your Yahoo mail addresses and send an invite to everyone you know on LinkedIn. In fact, not only can your middle-school student do it – they led the way.

But it takes a great deal of thought, planning, and discipline to integrate social media into your online presence in a way that is meaningful to your customers. It takes time to build customer relationships, and it requires sincerity and genuine concern for getting to know them. Beyond social media, it requires discipline to develop a marketing strategy that delivers relevant information in a timely manner to the right customers.

The fact that marketing media options continue to expand is directly related to the evolution of customer experience – not product superiority – as the surest route to competitive advantage. It is exciting to have so many choices, from radio, TV, newspapers, direct marketing, and events, to websites, blogs, video and podcasts, and yes, social media. But your responsibility, oh marketer, is to take great care in defining, refining, and crafting your message, then selecting the medium that is best suited to each message and your overall brand image.

The ideal wine collection includes different types of glasses to accommodate different wines. But where would you rather spend your time – at the wine bar with gleaming glass racks and substandard wine choices, or in the company of a terrific little bottle of Cabernet Franc and four juice glasses?

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

You'd pretty much have to live in a burrow to have missed that Apple was suing Samsung, or that they won a billion-dollar judgment for their efforts (pending appeal, of course). I have a lot of reservations about our 18th century intellectual property laws and their ability to serve today's technology community well, but that's a subject we won't dig into right now. Rather, this whole experience does offer important insight into the disciplines of innovation and differentiation.

This weekend Cassidy James wrote an excellent article in The Verge on how Google avoided Apple's trade dress in its Android devices (read the article here). What struck me most about the article (other than the fun and well-written history therein) is the important lesson for strategy that serves all of us, whether or not we are interested in technology.

Google is so knowledgeable about Apple's patents that they were able to willfully, creatively, innovatively avoid imitating Apple's products, and in the process, they created interesting, different, highly useful devices for the community of tech users for whom Apple just doesn't do it.

This is what all product developers are challenged to accomplish. To know the competition so well that they know what not to do, and then to bring so much creativity and intelligence to the table that they are able to create something entirely different. Whether your product is a designer good, a service, a retail store experience,  a taste or scent, or a software product, this is the work of differentiation.

Remember - you don't need all the customers, you need the right customers. And genuine innovation is one sure way to reach an audience that is currently not being well-served.

Update 5/6/2015 - you can now download an update of this article and a 24-page tradeshow planner free when you sign up for our email list.

I’ve worked a lot of trade shows. Until 2007, I exhibited at 3-4 major trade events per year for 30 years, most of them for at least a week each. I’ve worked trade shows in the apparel, electronics, publishing, video, and jewelry industries. Since 2007 I’ve worked just as many trade shows, but it’s been on the other side of the exhibit – walking aisles, watching exhibitors, and finding new sources. All that time, measured in foot-years, has given me important insights about what to expect from and how to work a trade show. I teach these concepts a few times a year in seminars, but here are a few of the main take-aways for those of you frantically preparing for the next event.

Is there a Return on Investment for Trade Shows?

Yes, but to be successful you need to understand what trade shows are good at.

Tradeshows are good at providing exhibitors with qualified leads. That is the trade show’s most important function.

The second most important function of trade shows is to create a personal connection between a company and its qualified leads. This personal connection provides a more tangible foundation for marketing and sales follow-up.

The third most important function of trade shows is on-site sales.

That third bullet may surprise you. Most exhibitors measure their trade-show success by at-show sales. Some of you remember to add on immediately-after-the-show sales as a success metric. But trade shows aren’t always a great place to engage in the sales cycle – particularly if your sales cycle requires a certain amount of trust-building, which takes time.

Remember that the primary goal of buyers at trade shows is to take in as much information as they possibly can in a condensed time-frame. The larger the show, the greater the pressure to keep moving. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make appointments and sit down and write orders. It just means that there is even more value to be had at trade shows if you know how to work them. Here are 10 important pointers for how to get even more out of your trade show experience.

1. Set lead goals and daily targets. You probably already set sales goals, so I don’t need to tell you that. But have you set lead goals? Have you identified how many new potential customers you want to make even brief contact with, contact sufficient to yield their contact information for future marketing efforts? Head into every trade show with a lead goal. Make it a contest among your staff and award a prize to the person who captures the most qualified leads. Have a tracking system in place, and measure your lead-collecting success each day relative to your goal.
   
   
2. Be more focused in your pre-show and at-show promotions. Many companies offer a small gift to everyone who comes by their booth. Consider shifting some of that budget to a special gift available only to your most valuable prospects and buyers. Let them know that you have a gift for them, tell them what it is, and make sure they know they must visit your booth to receive it. Even if you only spend a few minutes with each customer and prospect on your high-value list, those few minutes will reinforce your face, your brand image, and your relationship in that person’s mind.
   
   
3. Be specific in your information gathering. Do you know which customer information helps you most when trying to sell to them later? If you don’t, think about it now! If you’ve taken my strategy course you already know about the Critical Customer Questions that matter to your brand. If you don’t, here’s a quick exercise: Identify the characteristics that are common among your top 20% performing customers. Are they in particular geographic zones? Do they serve particular types of customers? Do they share similar needs? Once you identify those characteristics, frame questions around them. These are the questions you should slip into conversation with your trade show visitors. This will help you separate the cool leads from the hot ones. 
   
   
4. Be interested! Start by asking questions rather than immediately showing your product. Draw customers in by showing interest in them. Not only will you have a greater impact on your visitors, but you will also be able to quickly identify those who are not viable leads.
   
   
5. Be interesting! Unlike other marketing media, trade shows offer you a face-to-face experience with prospects. Learn to use this to your advantage! Consider offering demonstrations, experiences, stories, or other captivating elements that will engage the senses and draw your prospects in. Standing there and smiling is lovely, but rarely sufficient.
   
   
6. Work on your trade show skills. The most successful lead-gatherers at trade shows are the most sophisticated sales people. This doesn’t happen by accident – it takes practice. Prepare in advance the types of open-ended questions most likely to engage a walk-by or to keep a visitor in conversation for a few moments longer. Commit your line details and your prices to memory (make sure your show staff is equally trained). Role-playing builds muscle memory, and you want even your fist hour to be productive. Practice your trade show sales technique with a friend before the show to hit the ground running. Trade show success requires that you be able to gather information quickly and effectively, so do your trade show training.
   
   
7. Master Trade Show Graphics. I walk several jewelry shows each year and every booth features pictures of . . . wait for it . . . jewelry. Well, yes, of course you sell jewelry. You’re at a jewelry show. While some jewelry is clearly more differentiated than others, product pictures alone are insufficient to draw trade show attention. Trade show attendees are notorious for glazing over quickly. Make sure your trade show graphics include a few critical bullet points of information, or a question, or a statement; anything that quickly and clearly spells out your differentiation. Use your booth space as a marketing vehicle, not as a decoration.
   
   
8. Manage your image. Standing, smiling, out front when possible, greeting, and gathering are important trade show behaviors. In all my years of working trade shows from inside the booth I had one rule: No booth staff sits. Ever. Is it difficult? Yes, it’s definitely difficult. Is it worth it? Yes, for both the booth staff and the customers. Trade show days are long and even physically painful. If you have ever sat down at 2:30 in the afternoon – with three-and-a-half hours to go before the end of the day – you know that your energy crashes the moment you sit. This means the rest of the day is even more painful for you, and you lose energetic engagement with the customers during those last hours. You probably spent a lot of money to be at that show. Don’t sit down 20 feet from the finish line.
   
   
9. Have a data plan. You need tools – either at the booth or at your office – for managing the data you gather. Think about them ahead of time. Customer ran out of business cards? Snap a picture of their last one. Snap a picture of a badge and compare it later to the attendee report the show provides. Even better, snap these images in Evernote, where you can also add notes about your conversation or observations. Best – make voice notes in Evernote throughout the day. It’s faster than typing, you can keep your eyes out on the attendees, you’ll have less risk of forgetting an important insight, and you’ll have a treasure-trove of valuable data to mine when you return to your office.
   
   
10. Analyze your leads every night. Do this before you head out for dinner and drinks. Why? Because by tomorrow morning you’ll have forgotten all those conversations. It’s best to do this throughout the day – making notes about people you spoke with, their answers to your questions, and your observations about the interaction. But in addition to real-time note taking (and sometimes we know that’s just impossible), go over your lists of leads each evening and make any additional notes you can remember. You won’t remember everything, but you’ll have a lot better data than if you skipped this step.

When you return home from your trade event, begin the follow-up activity immediately. Sort your leads into ‘hot’, ‘warm’, and ‘cold’ categories. Schedule time in the next week to call the hot leads. Put the cold leads into your marketing database for some priming before you try pursuing those sales more actively.

If you follow these steps, you’ll see your RTS metric (return-on-trade-show) increase dramatically. And that’s good, because after aging eight or nine foot-years in a single week, you deserve the success.

As the jewelry industry heads into its biggest American show of the year, designers are questioning the best way to price their lines. What follows is a reflection on some important considerations when establishing a pricing strategy for a designer jewelry label.

Designer and brand jewelry lines must be very careful to avoid commoditization. Whereas non-differentiated manufacturing concerns price based on the current precious metal market, to do so as a brand or designer will reduce the design aspect of the jewelry to the equivalent of ‘labor’, which can only precipitate a race to the bottom. This is tantamount to saying that two paintings that required 22 hours, oil paints, and 17 brushes to produce hold the same value, though one was painted by Gustav Klimt and the other by a technically competent reproducer of others’ original works.

Designer and brand jewelry executives must consider a number of concerns – some of them conflicting – when establishing pricing strategy. This topic can hardly be covered in the space of a blog, but I will address the high points in the hopes of launching a meaningful discussion within the jewelry design community.

On Avoiding Commoditization

The only defense against price competition is differentiation. Though it is difficult to differentiate on design – and I strongly encourage designers to include elements of differentiation in addition to design – differentiate you must. Let Cindy Edelstein’s be the voice in your head on this point: Cindy preaches that all the designers in an aisle at a tradeshow should be able to commingle their jewelry in the aisle, and she should be able to tell from design characteristics alone to which designer each item belongs. Without a distinctive voice the buyer will ultimately force you to differentiate on price because you will have given them nothing else to work with.

At the risk of seeming like I am downplaying the difficulty of finding good retail accounts, remember that you don’t need all the customers, you need the right customers. A retailer who only focuses on the price of your product based on the metal and gemstone content is not an ideal target. If he can’t see the design value for himself, what is the likelihood he has trained store staff to see and sell design to jewelry consumers? But once you are pulled into the retailer’s non-design-focused pricing strategy, it is nearly impossible to charge the right price when you encounter the right sort of retailer. You will do better working your tail off to find designer-focused retailers than to try to convince generic jewelry retailers to pay the right price. Sound difficult? It most certainly is. But that is the challenge of going into a designer business. If you had decided to be a high-volume producing manufacturing business, your big need would be the capital to invest in the production techniques and technologies necessary to produce in volume. The challenge for a designer business is the creative strategy, brand identity, intensive marketing research and analysis, promotion, and sales activities necessary to find the right customers.

On Variable Costs

You must know your variable costs to protect your margins. Variable costs include the raw materials and labor to produce each piece. Obviously, the first time you produce an item will take longer than subsequent production efforts, so you want base the labor on standard production. Estimating variable costs is, well, a big no-no. If your estimates are off and you negotiate a large order at the wrong price, you may run completely out of cash before you discover your error. Know your exact variable costs.

Metals are the big worry right now. Should you price gold at a $1300 market or $1500? Everyone has heard a horror story of $2000 or worse. Here are a few thoughts to consider when deciding what market to base your pricing strategy on:

• Investment demand for gold continues to hold at fairly high levels, bolstered by concerns about inflation and investor worries about the European economy. On 5/17/10 Kitco projected that gold could go up to $1700 this year, and most forecasts are eyeing the $1350 - $1500 range.
• Johnson Matthey is projecting platinum prices in the $1600 - $2000 range for the balance of the year.
• Silver has been experiencing market resistance in the $19 range, but if it manages to break through that resistance it could track up sharply and take many people by surprise.
• You must be aware of how other designers are pricing their lines. If you are at an $1800 gold market and everyone else is at $1300, you’ll likely be priced out of the market. Watch Cindy Edelstein’s blog this week for her report regarding current designer market bets.

Some will argue that it is better to be safe than sorry, and will price their lines at a specific market and tell retailers that orders will ship at the actual metal market the day of shipment. This may be fine for commodity-level manufacturers and distributors, but I advise against it for designers. As I said before, once you train the retailer to think about your line as a commodity + labor offering, you have thrown your design value out the window. I recommend a harder – but ultimately more sustainable – road for brands and designer lines.

Pricing for Margin and Value

So what’s a non-financial-analyst designer to do? Start by considering what price your target consumer is willing to pay for your line, and what margin your target (i.e., ideal) retailer wants to get. This involves market research. Trade shows are a terrible place to do consumer market research, because you can’t assume your competitors have done their consumer research. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing, but don’t fool yourself into thinking this is a replacement for consumer awareness. Listen to actual consumers, study what they are buying, find comparable items to your designer line, and learn what consumers are willing to support with their debit cards. This is where the real value of social media exists by the way. At any given moment hundreds of thousands of conversations are taking place, and many of those people are talking about what they buy, how much they spent, and where they bought it. These conversations are yours for the eavesdropping. Learn to listen in and you’ll begin to understand what consumers really think.

Once you have a sense of what consumers are willing to pay for jewelry like yours, subtract the target margin of the retailer. Now cost your line at a $1350, $1500, and $1700 gold market. Answer the following questions:

1. Can you meet your financial obligations and generate organic cash flow to cover your growth requirements at each of those margins?
2. If the answer to #1 is ‘no’, do you have outside financing available (already committed) to you?
3. If the answer to #2 is ‘no’, how will you fund the metal purchases, labor, and operational costs necessary to keep filling orders?

To generate organic cash flow, you must have margin. If you give up significant margin, you must generate so much additional volume that you can produce the number of dollars necessary to fund growth. If you can’t support the demand operationally once you get those additional orders – or if the number of dollars you need remains persistently out of reach - you’re out of business. Landing a few choice accounts won’t keep you in business. The key to remaining in business is producing more dollars. So giving up margin to snag a few choice accounts is rarely the road to success.

Look, if you’re going to put yourself out of business anyway, it’s probably worth your time and effort to get on the phone and call every retailer in the country yourself, just to find the 15 or 20 retailers who get it about designer jewelry and understand that it is not a commodity. There are more than 20,000 retail doors in this country, and most of them (sadly) are treating jewelry as a commodity these days. But not all.

Enlightened retailers exist. There are (dare I say it) more than 15 or 20 of them. There are at least several hundred retailers who understand that the key to turning consumers on about jewelry is being turned on about jewelry themselves, and training their sales and purchasing staff to be turned on about jewelry. They are using this advantage (yes, differentiation) to put their retail competition out of business, and because they understand love-of-margin, they are charging the right prices and doing the hard work necessary to find the right customers and encourage those customers to pay those prices.

Does this mean that when you find those retailers you will automatically solve your price problems? No, it doesn’t. You still must have tremendous control over your production, you need to know – not estimate – your variable costs, and you need to do everything in your control to keep your costs down so you can enjoy healthy margins after some reasonable negotiation with your retail partners.

You already know being in business for yourself is hard work. But working this hard for no money? That’s just not worth it. So don’t take your need for margin off the table. Differentiate. Do your variable cost homework. Do your consumer research. Price according to consumer demand and make sure you turn a profit. Strategize, brand, market, promote. Find the right retail partners. Sell your intrinsic value and differentiation (not your materials + labor!).

Make some money. You’re worth it.

(c) 2010. Andrea M. Hill

One of the most important tasks of a marketer is to take the company's secret sauce - its special blend of products, services, and personality - and find the customers to whom it matters most. This is the work of marketing relevance. And we have better tools than ever to do this work with social media, email marketing, and website analysis.

Which is how I found the modern world's newest form of rejection. The Unsubscribe.

That unsubscribe is a killer, isn't it? Rejection-in-an-email. I used to catch my breath a little bit every time it happened to me. But that's when I realized that the unsubscriber is doing me a favor. He (or she) is giving me notice that he doesn't find my product, service, message, or method of reaching him to be relevant. He is opting out. And rather than seeing it as a rejection, I now recognize it for what it really is: the opportunity to not waste my precious resources talking to the wrong people.

The unsubscriber is an honest soul. He doesn't want something, and he tells you so. How many people receive email after email from a company and simply delete it without reading it? The company is left with the impression that they have an interested, albeit slow-to-engage, person on the marketing list. The unsubscriber says "stop including me in your thinking! My habits and responses (or lack thereof) have absolutely nothing to teach you about your messages, products and services!"

Now I don't let it get to me when someone unsubscribes. I send them a silent thank you and continue building my marketing lists, searching for those who find my business's secret sauce an irresistible addition to their business diet. The search for marketing relevance is filled with unsubscribes and SPAM complaints (really? Like, I just met you at a trade show, you gave me your business card and told me to let you know when we were offering another class, I send you an email to let you know the schedule, and you make a SPAM complaint??). But that's OK. Because once those people are off the bus, I can focus my time and energy on the ones who stay on board for the ride.

• Individuality is in, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses is out.
• Environmental stewardship is in, unconscious consumerism is out.
• Social awareness is in, ostentatious wealth is out.
• Thoughtful acquisition is in, conspicuous consumption is out.

No wonder luxury jewelry is having a hard time.

Which isn’t news. We’ve been watching the closures, consolidations, and down-sizings of luxury jewelry stores for years now. But it’s still newsworthy, because luxury jewelry hasn’t carved a new, meaningful path yet, an approach that responds to these changing values which not only refuse to go away, but instead, continue to build momentum.

Hedda Schupak conducted a very important interview in the Centurion Newsletter this week with third-generation "überluxury jeweler” Jonathan Dorfman, who recently closed his ultra-luxury jewelry store in Boston. Everyone in the jewelry industry should read this interview (read it here). The article addresses the issues of changing consumer tastes, social awareness, and values. But it also points to an element that has been masking the true impact of the changes in the US consumer. Societies where ostentatious wealth and social competition still have some oxygen — China, Russia, and oil-rich Arabic nations — are now suffering economically. During the past ten years these populations have bolstered the luxury jewelry market while the American consumer was turning her attention to other things. Now, as this foreign buyer steps away from the cash-register, the dramatic changes in our domestic market are painfully obvious.

The Solution is Already Here

There is a jewelry offering that is highly individualistic, often pays greater attention to sustainability, and delivers an experience of art, hand-craft, and the type of preciousness that is handed from generation to generation. It is designer jewelry, art jewelry, jewelry made by master jewelers in their studios. For the conscientious consumer, the story of fine jewelry made by artisans who still get their hands dirty is a compelling story; a story of skill built over years, a story of craftspeople who opted out of the more typical salaried/hourly path to pursue a life of art and creativity, a story of artists who have a passion to create beautiful, wearable things.  Craftsmanship is in. Stories are in.

Retailers totally focused on selling pearl button earrings, 1.0 tcw white diamond studs, 3-stone rings, and 4Cs-driven engagement rings cannot engage the new consumer. Manufacturers focused on creating the same designs they always have, en masse in China, can’t either. And by new consumer I don’t mean just the Millennials. I also mean the women my age (50s – 60s) who have changed right along with our young adult children, who often look at life very differently than we did when we were first starting out.

The Jewelry is Out There

Of course, artisan/designer jewelry is not new. It’s out there; online, in boutiques, in museum stores and specialty stores . . . . and sometimes, in jewelry stores, though the list of jewelry stores that truly focus on artisan/designer jewelry is small. Everyone in the artisan/designer segment of the jewelry business shares the same list of about 200 stores that truly get how to sell artisan/designer jewelry. There are several thousand more jewelry stores offering personalization of jewelry through customization and/or original design, many of them using CAD. Still, as an industry we are doing a poor job of telling this story to consumers, so unless they stumble into the store or onto the website, they just don’t know how exciting, beautiful, meaningful, and relevant jewelry can be.

Let's Tell the Story of Artisan/Designer Jewelry

The dairy industry suffered badly after the low-fat movement began. Suddenly, dairy was out due to a change in consumer values. The industry realized that it had to respond with a broader message, and they did, with “Milk. It does a body good.”

As an industry, we should shift to talking about jewelry in terms of art. We should be talking about its hand-made aspects, and how exciting it is when we combine the newest technologies (CAD, scanning) with old-world techniques. We should be telling the stories of the people who make and design jewelry.

We must be investing in and committed to sustainability, protecting the environment and the communities dependent on mineral and metal extraction for a living. And then, when this aspect of our industry is authentic, we should be telling that story loud and clear.

Am I suggesting one of the jewelry industry associations or magazines should step up and do this for us? No. I think they can play a role, an important role, but I believe that all of us — retailers, manufacturers, diamantaires, designers, consultants, everyone — need to embrace where consumers are now, get on board, and start telling a different story.

Individuality is in.

Social awareness and environmental stewardship are in.

Thoughtful acquisition is in.

Craftsmanship is in.

Stories are in.

Artisan jewelry is in.

Let’s all get out there and stay relevant.

A few years ago someone wrote an article that proclaimed through its title “PR is Dead!” But businesses that buy into that statement miss out on an exciting world of exposure to their customers – exposure that is generally taken more seriously than a paid advertisement. If you are underestimating, or worse, not even considering, the value of public relations efforts, I encourage you to think again. There are a lot of aspects to a good PR effort, but let’s limit our discussion to the press release – the one PR element most companies at least know about.

It’s hard to make generalities about the cost of advertising, because depending on your market and if you are B-to-C or B-to-B, the costs can be very different. But everyone agrees that advertising can be expensive. A press release is an attempt to get free mentions in the publications in which you might otherwise be advertising. If you have a good handle on who your customers are, what you want from them, and where you should be advertising to find and communicate with them, you have a good handle on where you should send press releases. In most cases, publicity is an important supplement to a paid marketing strategy, but in some cases publicity alone is sufficient, and in every case the balance of publicity to paid advertising could be shifted in favor of more publicity.

You know you have to spend time working with a copywriter and/or graphic designer to put together your ads, and that the quality of your ads determines whether or not people actually read them. The same kind of attention must go into your press releases. Editors of magazines are looking for content of interest and value to their readers. Who would expect them to run a lifeless news blurb of little substance, or a simple product promotion? Writing a good press release involves finding the interesting story (most often the human interest story) about your business or something a member of your business is involved in, and tying it to a news event or other timely public information. The thing most editors want to see in a press release? It’s easy – quotes. People like to read about what other people observe and feel, and quotes provide that.

Even if you are not interested in hiring a professional PR firm (which for small companies can be hard to justify), hiring a professional writer to produce your press releases is something you should consider. When a freelance writer wants to get a writing assignment with a particular magazine, they pitch their idea to the editor. An editor knows right away if the writer has taken the time to understand their publication, the publication’s voice, and the publication’s audience.

The same care and attention must go into press releases. Press releases can be broader in appeal (in terms of voice and style) because they are going to numerous publications. When you send editors material they would never run because it is irrelevant to them, they start ignoring everything else you send. They won’t take the time to rewrite it or even polish it, though they will likely cut it. Be sure it’s well written, and make it easy to cut from the bottom up – because that’s what they’ll do.

Editorial contact information is easier to find and compile than ever before. Most magazines say who their editors are right on their websites. Simple web tools make it possible for you to monitor your own internet mentions without spending $500 - $800/month on clipping services. Very savvy business owners seek opportunities to build relationships and network with the editors of publications of interest to their customers, gaining important insight about the type of content those editors are seeking and their particular business challenges. You’d be surprised how your PR efforts mature once you understand the world from the editor’s perspective.

There’s a lot more to a good public relations effort than press releases, and we can talk about some of those things another time. But for now, consider the interesting things that have happened to you, your employees, your co-workers, and your general business in the past year. What types of stories could you have written, and which publications would have been interested in running them? Which customers would you have reached if that had happened, and would how many customers would have to have responded in order to have justified the time and effort of writing the release?

Publicity is not really free – there is a cost to the effort. But in a world where branding, where telling our stories and connecting to our customers (beyond price, selection and service) is essential, it’s a powerful way of making meaningful contact. And it’s sort of free.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

I have been following Sony BMG's advertising campaign for the 25th anniversary of the Thriller album with a great deal of interest. I think it's a brilliant marketing effort. In case you've missed it, Sony BMG has melded new marketing media and traditional marketing media to introduce a remake of the highest selling album of all time. The company has a particular challenge in introducing the remake of the album. The average consumer thinks Michael Jackson is a freak at best and a pederast at worst, and Jackson's financial challenges can be credited in part with Americans' faint disgust with him as a human being. The music world still considers Jackson to be a genius, but while they regularly incorporate his work in their own work – either directly or through significant inspiration – that influence is less obvious to the public. So the typical approaches to a 25th anniversary album – a tour, appearances on all the talk shows, etc. – were not an option. So in a brilliant display of their understanding of new media options, the company challenged professional dancers to perform Thriller's zombie dance in public venues from London's Chinatown to Cophenhagen's busiest train terminal. In each case, the audience for the dancers was 100 people or less. But every performance was posted on YouTube, and the videos have been downloaded nearly 1.5 million times so far. Every YouTube viewer of a Thriller promo is also exposed to the Michael Jackson YouTube site, where a promotion of the 25th anniversary album has been viewed over 600,000 times. The story received so much viral play that it was picked up by the New York Times and other major papers. In the first week of release the new album rocketed into the number one spot on Billboard's Top Pop chart and placed in top five or better rankings in music markets around the world.

Marketing continues to change. Today's marketers absolutely must understand not only what these marketing tools are and how to use them, but also the social implications of the new marketing tools. A reflection on the recent history of marketing and its evolution over the past 60 years helps illustrate this point.

Marketers who came of age in the 1940s – 1960s were selling to a very different consumer than are the marketers of today. From a social standpoint, there was little deviation from what was deemed conventional behavior, and deep social conformity led to conformity of taste and product usage. This was reinforced commercially, because product differentiation was expensive to achieve. Individuation of taste and access to unique products was reserved for the wealthy. From the marketer's perspective, the communication venues were limited (though significantly expanded from prior decades). Print, radio, and television were the primary means of reaching consumers, and all three mediums were focused on addressing mass audiences. This led to programming and advertising that was overwhelmingly homogeneous. How were the major social issues of the time influenced by the dramatic rise of the television as a communication medium during those years?

The 1960s-1990s saw dramatic change in cultural and social tastes reflective of the nonconformist predilections of baby boomers. Not surprisingly, direct marketing came of age during this time, bringing to a society that was still treated homogeneously by mass media a refreshing ability to cater to diverse tastes and interests. By the 1980s cable television ushered in the segmentation of America on a large scale, replacing the big three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and their virtually indistinguishable programming perspectives with literally hundreds of alternatives – many of them geared to comparatively tiny segments of the population. Cable television was the gateway to today's internet world – a world in which consumers take for granted the expectation that they can control the content they consume. The PC revolution was aided by the launch of Compuserve and AOL, delivering the ability to customize a media content experience. From that point it was a small leap for customers to begin to expect they could also control the marketing messages to which they were exposed.

Today's marketer faces a complex array of marketing choices. Email, wikis, social networking, personalized search, user-generated content, blogs, streaming video, vertical search engines, targeted communities, web enabled phones, location-based services and mobile search, participatory advertising, RSS, and VOIP are all new tools in the marketer's toolbox.

Marketing is simply the business of communication. The proper definition of communication involves two or more parties. Traditional approaches to marketing, limited by the technology and social perspectives of their times, reduced marketing to a one-way method. Today's marketers have the opportunity to embrace genuine communication with their customers. And this opportunity comes with a significant learning curve. But the learning curve is somewhat more than the average marketer may be realizing. Yes, a big part of the learning curve is simply mastering all these new tools – remembering your log-ins for the different services, and figuring out how to use them, which customers are attracted to them, and what purpose they serve. But in fact, those things are the easiest part of the learning equation.

Remember the book – and the saying – the medium is the message? Marshall McLuhan, author of the saying and of the 1964 book of the same name, theorized that every message is not only influenced, but defined, by the medium by which the message is delivered. McLuhan died in 1980, before any of these new digital marketing mediums were possible, let alone conceived of. Yet his work is as relevant today as it was back when he was worried about the ultimate social impact of the television. McLuhan argued that at the intelligent, rational levels of perception, human beings take a message and consider its content carefully. However, at the empirical – experiential – level of consciousness, the medium itself is the message.

As we have discussed numerous other times in these columns, humans are not all that skilled at critical thinking. When you consider this disjunction between intended content and medium, it's not hard to understand why young females suffer from a variety of eating disorders, young males begin to suspect that their role in life is to be sexy and adolescent for ever, or young children find it difficult to differentiate between cartoons and real life. The subtext of every advertisement is at least as powerful – and sometimes more powerful – than the intended content.

Maybe Sony BMG stumbled into this idea through sheer luck, but I prefer to believe they carefully considered all the aspects of this challenging marketing situation. They took the product of a once-great but now sullied star and removed the taint. By highlighting the creativity, gumption, and sheer fun of young people with talent providing impromptu performances in public places, Sony BMG created focus on the music, how it made us feel in 1983 when we first heard it, and how it still makes us feel today.

Marketers today would be well-advised to expand their thinking well beyond the typical questions of features and benefits of products and services. Features and benefits continue to be of significant importance, but they are only the starting point. Marketers must also consider the mediums that are most relevant for the delivery of the message. That evaluation needs to be expanded beyond the questions of who is using this medium and what is the expense of using this medium. The evaluation also needs to include an assessment of how the medium itself influences the message – both from a message efficacy standpoint and from an ethical standpoint.

Sound complicated? No more so than when McLuhan first started publicly exploring these ideas in 1951, in his book The Mechanical Bride. Society may seem more complicated to us now, but it seemed plenty complicated
to those who were our age in the 50s and 60s. And though we may be the first generations to experience the explosion of digital marketing, I daresay the rise of radio and television felt every bit as earth shaking in their time. At the end of the day, marketing is a social effort, informed (hopefully) by history, and both defined by and defining of current cultural norms. When marketing is approached with respect for all the disciplines involved – analytics, verbal and graphic arts, psychology, sociology, and ethics – it can be a resoundingly satisfying career choice.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

OK, apparently me as a "very busy business woman" is the same thing as "me as a very bad blogger." I keep trying to figure out ways to reclaim time for my blogging, but as you can see from the date on my last post, I've not been terribly successful!

So I'll try something new. I dole out answers and advice to my customers all day long - via email, chat, social media, phone - however the questions come in. It might be useful to share some of this information with the rest of you. So when I get asked a question that might have benefits for others, I'll just stick the question and the answer in here and see if it helps. It's worth a try, right?

If you have a business question you want answered - something you think others would benefit from as well, what the heck - just send me an email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I'll answer - even if you're not a StrategyWerx client. If it gets too crazy, I'll let you know. But let's try this for a while. It might be fun.

Selling is hard. So hard, that unless you know some facts about it, you might just think you're terrible at it! It may be comforting to you to know that the struggles in selling are real and universal. The good news? Once you understand these facts about the sales cycle, your confidence will increase and so will your selling success.   To see a full-size version of the infographic, click here.

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The things we can do to stay sane and stay in business during this sort of crazy time today, I'm going to talk with you about a handful of marketing things that you can do right now that are pretty safe to do right now. But a couple of housekeeping things. First, there will be a webinar tomorrow, Thursday, what is the date? Tomorrow, March 20 26 at 11 a.m. Central Time. And it's part of my majesté webinar series, which we will now be doing free for everyone every single week.

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Tomorrow's session will be with jewelers mutual, several people from the jewelers mutual team and also with Sarah Yood from JVC. And we'll be talking about insurance and legal issues you need to be aware of. OK, so what are some marketing things that you can be doing right now? Because we're trying to think in five day increments and business can't stop entirely. So you need to market. But how do you do that? Well, in this moment. The first is that you can sell, but you need to sell with some caveats.

[00:01:06.630]
So you need to be aware that tone and message are very important right now and also that the population at large is very much in conflict about should we shut down, shouldn't we shut down? And there are opinions on both ends of that spectrum and everywhere in between. And you need to make sure that you are not setting out a tone deaf message when you do this. So when you're selling, I wouldn't be doing a bunch of promote, promote, promote products right now.

[00:01:39.820]
I don't think that's the best use of your marketing time or energy. And also, it risks making it look like we're in business as usual and everybody knows we're not in business as usual. And they they expect you to recognize that we're not business as usual. It's OK to say things like, look, we're here and we're available. If there's something you need, those kinds of messages are great. I would advise that you have some sort of a safety manifesto on your website or as a link that they can get to to see what you are doing, because there are a lot of landmines that you can step on when you're selling.

[00:02:18.240]
Right now, for instance, we've had people's customers tell them, well, fine, you can ship it to me. Don't you care about those UPS and FedEx drivers? But how are you treating your employees? Are they safe? Is your bench jeweler safe? So people are thinking about a lot beyond just the jewelry delivery. So share what you are doing. If you have staff that's working with you, share what you're doing to protect them, share what you're doing to prevent the spread of infection yourself.

[00:02:47.370]
How are you behaving so that you don't contribute to a problem, share how you leave things out for your delivery drivers instead of encountering them face to face, how you've arranged with them to pick up with having to interface with you directly for shipping jewelry. This gets challenging because there are signature requirements and things like that. But work with your shipper and with your insurance provider to know exactly what you can do to avoid contact and still be covered and then share that with your customers so that they know you are thinking about more than just earning money for yourself, because that's that sort of don't be selfish message is out there.

[00:03:28.710]
And for the people who are paying attention to it, it can really affect their perception of you as a brand. So sell but sell with some caveats and a lot of communication about how you are selling as a responsible citizen. In today's moment. It's also really important to stay in your lane. If you're not a medical professional, then it's not a very safe thing to be talking about covid-19 as a in a marketing type of presentation. So if you are, you know, if you have decided to do a certain practice and share the link to the resource that you used for it, share where you got your information from, be transparent.

[00:04:15.270]
Transparency is really important right now because information is changing constantly. So you can say this is the best information I have right now and this is where I got it from. And then that way you're staying in your lane. You're referring to professionals who have given you advice and it just it protects your brand and it protects you. And it's the right thing to do more video right now. You could be doing a lot of promotion on video, just like I'm doing now with this little twenty dollar camera and the microphone that's built into it.

[00:04:48.480]
So it doesn't have to be a great production. You can see no one did hair and makeup here, but communicate with your community a lot more using. Or social media channels or using one to one meetings there. It's a great time for you to have conversations with your customer using Zoom or Vector or go to meeting. I've noticed Google Hangouts is really buggy at the moment. I think there are just way too many people using these free channels that the channels aren't accustomed to this much traffic.

[00:05:24.660]
So I'm noticing that we're not getting great reception on our Google Hangouts channel. There are lots of affordable one to one and group meeting tools that you can be using and you can use those with your customers. So share video on social media. Do Facebook live if you want to do LinkedIn live. That's a great option also. But you have to sign up for it. You have to go to LinkedIn. And if you type in the search term for LinkedIn live, it'll show you the directions to a page where you can share what you're going to use LinkedIn live for because it's not automatic, like anybody can do Facebook live, but not everyone can do LinkedIn live and then put little videos up on your social channels talking about what you're working on and what your challenges are right now.

[00:06:08.250]
And those are all really good ways to connect. But video is a powerful way to connect in this moment. Oh, if you are using social media schedulers to have, like, meet Edgar or HootSuite or any of those, if you've got content scheduled out, go look at your content. Q It may be time to clean up that queue or even suspend the Q or replace some of the information in the queue because messages that made sense, you know, even three weeks ago may not make sense today.

[00:06:39.870]
They may be tone deaf today. So, you know, make sure that you take a look at that. Q If that's something you use, also make sure all of your messaging is in brand. Now, that is a very individual thing. Your brand is specific to your presentation. So if you're typically funny, be funny. If you're typically quirky, be yourself. If you're typically serious, be serious. If you have a tendency to be political and people know you for that, then don't stop being who you are.

[00:07:09.540]
Just make sure you're in the brand that you've already established with your customer base. If you have been very careful not to share sort of a personal or personality with your community before and now you're starting to do video, your personality is going to come through. So make sure you think very carefully about who you are and how well your customer base already knows you so that you can stay in brand and not, you know, slip off into some messaging or some portrayals that actually won't work for your customer base.

[00:07:45.810]
And finally, in your marketing efforts right now, this is a really great time to be about your community. We're all trying to think of ways that we can help or improve the current situation, make that part of your communications, share what you're doing. Like Lauren Harper, they're making masks and they're shipping off batches of them to places that need them. And that's part of her marketing, but it's also part of her brand and part of her personality.

[00:08:11.520]
So as a designer, that really works. I've noticed that models find Glaucus is doing the same thing. They're deep into making masks because that seems to be where the greatest addressable need is at the moment. So find an addressable need and work on that just because it's the right thing to do. We all need to pitch in right now and then also share that information with your community so that they can participate with you if they want. They can share more ideas with you.

[00:08:38.070]
If they want, they can just cheer you on if that's what they've got to offer. And it helps us build connections for later. So sell with caveats. Stay in your lane, watch your messaging. Don't be tone deaf. Be aware of the fact that there are lots of people out there who may view this whole experience differently than you do. Keep the messages within your brand. And if you haven't thought about what your personality is as it relates to your customers, hone in on that right now and try to do things that are community focused.

[00:09:07.680]
And those will be very good marketing activities for right now. Remember, we're working in five day increments. So that's something you can do right now that will be meaningful. And again, please join us at the webinar tomorrow where we're going to be talking about your insurance requirements and some legal questions. And at work start world. You can also see the rest of the webinar series that we're about to offer. So that's it for the moment. Thanks bye.

In the middle of the 20^th century, marketing and advertising were easy. Three major television networks directed us to a handful of brand choices at the grocery store, and big box retailers were decades away. Simplicity ruled. Simplicity of communication channels. Simplicity of product choice.

Today market advisors encourage companies to actively engage the newest forms of communication, because the old forms of communication no longer suffice. New social media demands that we all say something to our customers in order to stay relevant and top-of-mind. So small-to-midsize business executives that still can’t figure out how to operate their computers without calling the IT department for their own personal MacGyver are now trying to figure out how to make friends on Facebook, tweet on Twitter, and add their work history on LinkedIn. I suspect that many of them – unless they pay someone to monitor their social networking for them – end up with 14 friends on Facebook and a profile on Twitter that looks like 150 following, 72 followers and 4 posts. Big corporate executives don’t even struggle with this step. They assign the marketing department to set up accounts on all these services. But they fail to share strategy goals in a meaningful way, so the marketing department approaches social media as another form of advertising. And the tweet goes on. 

There is something significantly different about marketing now than marketing 40 years ago – something beyond the plethora of channel and brand choices. Back then, we all watched the same primetime television shows, during which we were told which products we could and should trust when cleaning, feeding, and caring for our families. Our social relationships were fairly fixed. We generally lived near not only our families, but also the people we went to high school and grade school with. We worked with the same people for 15, 20, 30 years. Why does that matter? Because what we bought, used, and displayed had influence on our friends, neighbors, and family – they knew us enough to trust us.

So when Donna Reed told you to eat Campbell’s Soup, it came, not from the star of a reality show you may never have watched, but from the personality of a home-town girl you had grown to love after watching her movies and television shows. When your father said “we don’t buy Cadillacs, we buy Fords,” that statement informed your personal identity. And when the sugar your neighbor lent you was G&H, you realized that it would be important to lend the same thing back when she asked.

In other words, we had inferred relationships with the products we purchased because we had relationships with the people who sold them to us.

But even as the iconoclast Marshall McLuhan tried to warn us about how media would ultimately shape our understanding of the world and indeed, the world itself, the economics of globalization were creating confusion between the concepts of comparative advantage and competitive advantage, and the result was an explosion of just-like-me products and undifferentiated services. Unable to sell any inherent value, marketing became about selling. This was when SPAM actually began.

Marshall McLuhan’s argument went beyond how media was changing the world. He demonstrated that the decentralization of modern living would ultimately thrust human experience back to the life of the tribe.

Our customers no longer trust marketing, which they perceive to be synonymous with advertising. It’s not. But as we stretched our understanding of business communications to encompass progressively more media channels, we thinned its content to a mere schmear of superficiality. Nearly all modern advertising presents product, price and place, with a superficial nod to style, design, or sex appeal. None of which contribute to relationships. 

Without the support of wild growth based on expansion, we must return to offering things of inherent, comparative value. Relationships are once again essential to business success. Relationships within the business, and relationships with the customers, vendors, and communities the business depends on. But has our understanding of relationship become superficial as well? Is paying on time a good relationship, or just a component of a good relationship? Is delivering on time at the promised price a relationship, or a common courtesy? Is giving the customer in-depth product information a relationship, or a savvy business move?

Each industry, community, and business must manifest this concept in different ways. Before I offer specific suggestions for marketing through business relationships, I’d like you to have a chance to consider these ideas for yourself. I hope you’ll join me tomorrow for Part II of this discussion. 

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Note: This is the second entry in a 2-part series. You may want to read them in order for the sake of clarity.

What things of inherent, comparative value do you sell? If you’re 20^th Century Fox that’s easy – you have Slumdog Millionaire. But for most businesses, highlighting a certain thing requires significant narrowing of focus, to a specific design sensibility, an extremely low price point, or something that is nano instead of micro. And unless you’ve figured out how to hermetically seal that product in patents, you won’t be able to claim such tenuous value for long.

The corporate approach to value has become a competition for eye-level shelf space (whose eye-level, one wonders), end caps, brand associations (ad dollars), celebrity endorsements (steroids anyone?), sex appeal and its ugly step-sister snob appeal, and market lockout (Gannett). The problem with these approaches is that there is nothing valuable about them. They are all superficial attempts to secure a place in a buyer’s mind and heart.

Superficial beings don’t recognize that others do not love them, because they are so busy loving themselves. They eventually look around in their dwelling-space, find it empty, and wonder when everyone left. This is the plight of most business – a plight that finds many scrambling in desperation to the one measure that remains. . . a lower price.

Are all business people foolish? No. We are victims of recent and overwhelming success. Though we cannot do justice to a post WWII cultural and economic overview in two paragraphs, I’ll try to briefly illustrate the trajectory that delivered us here.

First consider the dramatic cultural impact of the evolution of the media we depend upon to deliver nearly all our marketing. What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said (in 1960) that the new world of media would return man to the experience of the tribe? He was drawing a distinction between literate man, educated and informed in the era of books, and a new tribal man, educated and informed in the era of media. Literate man, in McLuhan’s view, was an isolated being, experiencing new meaning and ideas in private, one line at a time. Books are a form of private imagery. In contrast, the explosion of new media would cause world populations to experience new meaning and ideas at the same time. McLuhan called it tribal, because tribes do their sense-making collectively, publicly. He defined media as corporate imagery, meaning it is for public consumption. Previously, the only imagery consumed publicly, en masse, was liturgical in nature. McLuhan was warning us that media was becoming the new forum from which people would seek meaning. 

Now consider dramatic shifts in economic production. Before the 20^th century, the comparative abilities of regions and nations were fairly static. Isolationism was the most common trade theory (i.e., stout protection of comparative advantage), and the United States took advantage of it to build the world’s strongest economy. The (primarily Western) age of making and selling products of convenience to classes lower than the uppermost had begun. But after two world wars and a devastating international depression we found ourselves faced with a world in crisis. It was in our national interest to help rebuild devastated economies, to sell our goods to their people, and ultimately, to reduce prices for our own citizens. As we transferred technology to other countries, the comparative abilities of regions and nations changed dramatically. Combine new international competitiveness with our own accelerated technology development curve, improved infrastructure leading to superior transportation systems, and a wildly reproductive media market insatiable for advertising, and it is not surprising that we have an explosion of products and services that cannot be differentiated from one another except by price.

What happens when the social structure of the nuclear family (opposite of tribal man) and its insularity (including the comfort of knowing what to buy and from whom) loses some of its influence? What happens when this cultural shift occurs simultaneously with an explosion of products and services? What happens when these things occur alongside the serial introduction of new technology media – so much media that we can watch multiple cable channels while internet surfing and texting our friends, receiving advertisements on all of them? When happens when populations begin to look to commercial enterprises for meaning and do not find it?

We tune out. 

This is the challenge facing the modern marketer. The challenge to do something other than advertise. The challenge to do something other than reduce the price, show more skin, or try to figure out a way to be heard amidst the sounds of marketing bombardment. It is the challenge to be relevant and to relate. 

Understanding how to market to our customers – existing and prospective –begins with the etymology of the words relevant and relate. Relevant comes from medieval Latin to raise, or to lift up. Relate hearkens to early Latin, meaning to carry or to translate.

At one time simply buying a Cadillac raised up one’s perception of their own status – in both their eyes and in the eyes of their neighbor. Using Donna Reed as a spokesperson helped to translate Campbell’s Soup from an inferior – because store-bought – version of something your mother should cook to the trusted and delicious soup your mother was cooking. And the implied social pressure of which brand of sugar your neighbor buys no longer carries over as a suggestion for your own purchasing behavior.

One more semantic sidebar. The word market comes from the word trade, when trade literally meant to do so, to barter one thing of value for another.

Simple exchanges of cash for product are increasingly about price. That may be fine for Wal-Mart, but the rest of us need margins. If all products are similar, what nuance will you offer that increases value? What can you do to raise up, carry, and translate for your customer – to offer in trade beyond the item? Let’s look at it through the use of examples.

One corporate marketing campaign that did this well was Sony’s 2008 promotion for the 25^th anniversary version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. They hired dance troupes around the world to stage impromptu, public performances of the Thriller music video dance. This created instant communities of people sharing a surprising experience of public art. They filmed each performance and put them on YouTube. At this point they were reaching out to two different tribes in highly relevant ways. People my age lived the novelty and drama that was Thriller all over again – carrying us back to our 1982 selves for a moment. Much younger people experienced Thriller in their own medium and performed by people their own age, translating the experience from one generation to the next.

Recent decades of presidential politics had turned off swathes of voters as political persuasion was reduced to the level of a sales pitch. President Obama rode to the White House on the tails of an electorate that had been electrified. By what? By being invited to participate. His campaign was a miracle of modern marketing. He organized a community, primarily using new media. He traded – for votes – the promise of involvement (raise up), a commitment to carry issues of importance to the national stage, and an ability to translate generalized angst into clear talking points.

Good marketing doesn’t require million dollar budgets or a national stage.

Gary Dawson owns Goldworks Jewelry Art Studio in downtown Eugene, Oregon. He has been in business for over 25 years, and is currently having a fantastic growth year in spite of the recession. Part of his current marketing strategy is to offer a monthly wine & cheese evening for his customers. He organizes a segment of his customer base into a group of people with common interests in jewelry and wine. He invites local wineries to do a wine tasting and he provides the food, the gathering place, and the atmosphere. Gary has created a trade environment where his customers make new acquaintances (tribe/community) and obtain new knowledge and experiences (raising up). The wineries contribute wine for the tasting, but benefit from the wine sales and future customers (carry/translate).

Ganoksin and the Orchid Forum – the brainchild of Hanuman and Charles Lewton-Brain – is another jewelry industry example of new marketing. An internet forum, their marketing premise is to actually be a community – a tribe of jewelry artists. They exist solely to educate their community. Contrast this with other social media venues where jewelers gather – like Twitter or Facebook. Those environments offer a gathering place, but Ganoksin turns its content into a searchable jewelry-making encyclopedia shared by all. Member organizations who sell to jewelers have the opportunity to use Ganoksin in a new marketing way – or in the old way. They can buy an advertising banner and be done with it. Or, they can buy an advertising banner and participate in the Orchid forums, answering the questions for which they have expert answers to provide value to their customers. 

To manifest your marketing is to make your unique offering of value obvious to your customers. Sony did it by showing that their value wasn’t just Michael Jackson or Thriller, it was art, entertainment and nostalgia. President Obama did it by moving the presidential conversation away from the dead ideas of conservative and liberal (yes these are dead ideas) and into value concepts like participation, health care, the environment, and opportunity. Gary Dawson does it by serving up new friendships, knowledge, and community-focused business growth. Orchid does it by investing in the intellectual capital of an industry. All these winners offer products and services remarkably similar to their competitors. But it’s the rare 25^th anniversary rerelease of an album that reaches #2 in the US charts and certifies gold in 11 countries.

To raise. To lift up. To carry. To translate. To recognize the importance of community, and seek meaningful ways to organize customers – by which I mean meaningful to them. To use new media adroitly, as it befits your value proposition. These are the challenges - and opportunities - facing today’s marketer.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Your Marketing Strategy Will Be as Good as Your Insights

The best time to create your marketing strategy for the following year is in September and October,  so the marketing plans can be included in the company budgets. But invariably I get a dozen or more frantic calls in December from companies that want to make marketing plans in a hurry. I don't judge - I can procrastinate with the best of them.

Rather, my concern is that most of these professionals want to decide what to do without first analyzing what they have done. Failure to analyze past marketing data will lead to weak marketing decisions in the future.

For today, let's look at the following questions and how to answer them:

Who is buying your stuff, how often do they buy it, and how much do they spend?

If you don't understand your current buyer behavior you can't determine how to improve it. The issue I see most is that customers do not return for repeat purchase. If you spend your time and money finding customers but never see them after the initial purchase, your marketing strategy is pouring money down the drain.  You can't guess at this number - you have to do the math.

• Figure out how many customers from 2011 bought from you again in 2012. How many times did they buy in 2012?
• Figure out how many new customers bought from you in 2012.
• Figure out how many bought 1X, 2X, 3 or more times.
• See if you can determine any important differences between the 1X and the 2-3X (this is in a year, not in a lifetime) purchasers. Look for similarities/differences in gender, income bracket, zip code, types of things they purchase - examine every clue at your disposal to come up with patterns.
• Try to determine why the 1X purchasers did not come back (a phone call to ask why is a really direct way to do this, and is often quite well received if it's framed as an I want to improve my business call and not a sales call).

Next, figure out the average transaction size of your customers. This is a simple number:  Total revenue over a specific period of time divided by the total purchases. The lower that number is, the harder you'll have to work to make a profit.  Now break it down further: What is the average transaction size of 1X customers versus 2X and 3X?

Once you have asked and answered these questions you'll be armed with a lot of new insights, insights that are valuable to creating a strong marketing strategy for the year to come.

 The transcript is not yet available for this video.

You know the saying No Pain, No Gain, but here's a little different way to look at it.  I have been reviewing/refining 2014 sales & marketing strategy for several clients yesterday and today, and the pain or gain aspect of market planning is really resonating with me right now.

One thing we understand about selling (and therefore, marketing) is that every purchase someone makes is either to eliminate a pain or to create a gain. If you can resonate with the potential buyers' emotions associated with either eliminating pain or experiencing gain  (or both) you can use that in your marketing messages, images, and strategies.

The way to figure out what pain you can eliminate is to ask. Just ask your customers for the list of things they are frustrated with relative to what you have to sell. Then figure out a way to express what you have to sell as a solution to a pain.

The gain aspect can be a bit more challenging to define. For many purchases, the gain is simply that it makes the buyer feel better. Savvy marketers dig in and try to understand why and how the product makes them feel better. They also look for ways to make the experience of buying the product feel like a gain - not just the purchased item itself. When selling business-to-business the gain is often outside the actual product. The gain may be in the services, brand cache, terms, or other support you can provide.

What pain are you alleviating, or what gain are you providing, with the product you sell? Think about it for your business!

When you're seated at a restaurant, hungry, enthusiastic about eating, you don't turn away the wait staff, right? You might ask for a few minutes to decide, but you don't put them off indefinitely.

When you go to the salon for a haircut or a blow-out, and they call your
name, you don't tell them to wait a while so you can finish a few tasks on your phone, do you?

When your pipes have burst and you've been waiting for the plumber for 36 hours, and he finally shows up at the door, do you send him away because you were just getting ready to serve dinner? No. You welcome him in.

Know Your Needs

Of course each of these examples is obvious. When we have a strong need, we don't ignore, put off, or avoid the provider of the goods or services who will fulfill that need. We schedule the time, we keep the appointment, or we clear the schedule to make sure these needs are met.

By definition, a retailer is a merchant who sells goods at retail.  Unless that retailer makes all the goods he sells, he needs to acquire them from somewhere. One can not merchandise with nothing, right? Of course, the retailer also must have someone to sell those goods to; the consumer. What I have observed is that most retailers in the jewelry specialty retail space are far more focused on who they sell the goods to than on from whom they acquire goods, and this leads to a serious lack of balance in the business.

The partnership between retailer and manufacturer/designer/distributor is one of the most important partnerships a retailer can have. Together the retailer and supplier create opportunities for the retailer to merchandise goods that consumers want to buy. Furthermore, the retailer should always be cultivating relationships and opportunities to learn about new, different, unique goods, because that is how the retailer can differentiate himself from other retailers and create ongoing excitement for his customers.

In too many situations, the retailer views the supplier as a nuisance, an interruption, or even an adversary, and not as the partner the supplier can and should be. There is a tendency to think in terms of "managing" vendor relationships and not "cultivating" vendor relationships.  But the best retailers - the most effective merchants with the most devoted clientele and the strongest growth trajectories - are building strong vendor relationships with current suppliers and actively seeking new vendors. When a vendor shows up unannounced, these successful retailers take at least a few minutes to see what is on offer. The small risk is wasting the 10 minutes it takes to recognize the products don't fit with the retailer's Merchandising Point of View. The huge risk is missing out on a merchandise opportunity that could have been dynamite.

Weak retailers feel relieved when merchandise sells, simply glad that it is gone. Successful retailers remain in contact with their vendors, placing immediate reorders to replace sold goods, but also responding to inquiries about current inventory positions and collaborating with their vendor partners to keep the merchandise offering fresh and balanced.

We all understand that the designers and manufacturers of jewelry need the retailers to carry the lion's share of the consumer sales. But I'm not sure we're all as clear that the retailers need the vendors just as much.  When the vendor relationship is undervalued, the result is the same as sending the waiter away instead of ordering, sitting in the waiting room of the salon instead of heading to the stylist's station, or sending the plumber away when he finally arrives.

Take a moment to evaluate your relationships with your vendors. If they are not as strong as they could be, invest in them personally or - if they're not the right partners to work with - find vendors with whom you can have a more productive, more profitable relationship. Stronger vendor relationships will help you meet the product needs of your business. This is vital, because those needs are very real and will ultimately determine your success.

 Transcript for this video is not available yet.

We humans aren't particularly fond of change. The status quo feels safe, and it allows us to operate on auto-pilot. But while auto-pilot is excellent for basic functions like breathing and walking, it's generally not a terrific way to navigate one's life.

On a personal level, living too much on auto-pilot means we miss out on living in-the-moment and enjoying the beauty, enlightenment, and humor that comes from experiencing (and not just passing through) the every-day. On a business level, living too much on auto-pilot is more dire; at some point, a business on auto-pilot simply dies of its own apathy.

Some businesses can't avoid change. If you own an electronics store, if you are a software developer, if you own an apparel boutique - you've had no choice but to embrace change. For one thing, the products keep changing. For another, the customers have demanded new sales channels. But somehow the jewelry industry has successfully insulated itself against change - not all of it, but too much of it - and it's now time to come late to the party or to fade out like dinosaurs. It's past time for change.

There are many reasons why jewelry stores have rationalized change avoidance. The inventory is expensive! But can you imagine walking into a Lexus dealer and not finding the new models, colors, and options? Their inventory is certainly expensive. Our security requirements are high! But Apple products have a high street-value, and still they found a way to make their products completely interactive in the store. It takes a long time to become an expert in selling jewelry! Though one doesn't learn to sell cars, complex software, or computers overnight either.

I think the worst thing that ever happened to the jewelry industry was that it was an island for so long. Lack of competition makes one complacent. And when competition started becoming more of an issue, the jewelry industry reacted by carving out regions for exclusives, demanding that suppliers not sell on their own websites, and competing on price. All recipes for a deferred disaster.

If I have totally irritated you by now, then I am not writing this column for you. If I have scared but energized you, then there is tremendous potential for your business.

I have spent the past week in Las Vegas, at the JCK and Couture shows. I have had dozens of meetings with clients and prospective clients, walked the floor, hung out at booths, and observed from corners. One thing is abundantly clear. The time for change is past.

If you're curious about what must happen now, in order to maintain an industry that has an independent retail core and continues to define what makes fine jewelry fine jewelry, here are a few things for you to consider implementing and embracing:

1. Stop commoditizing! We've turned jewelry into the sum of its parts, and that's tragic. If you took a pile of metal, leather, plastic, and electronics to a Mercedes dealer and asked them to make you a Mercedes for the cost of the labor, it would never happen. That paragraph probably barely makes sense to you! Yet we do that every day with jewelry.  The entire industry is complicit in this activity. How did we get to the point of competing on price? Because we didn't effectively execute the next 5 points, so price was all that was left.

2. Respect Brands. Your own, and those of your vendors. There was a time when a jewelry store could take in loads of generic merchandise and play it like it was all the store's brand, but the store's brand may have been weak to begin with, and anyway, that doesn't fly any more. Consumers look for and want to engage with brands. Build a brand for your store that is one part sales and service, two parts merchandise, three parts stories, and four parts character and identity. Your merchandising strategy needs to celebrate the brands and designers you have available to you, and you need to be energetic and creative enough to build a brand for your  store that goes beyond the basics.

3. Leverage technology. In the shop (CAD/CAM, Laser Welders, growing models, and soon - powdered metals!), in your marketing department, in your merchandising, in your management, and on the sales floor. You are no longer competing with the jewelry store on the other side of town. You are competing with jewelry stores across the country. And yes, you are competing with your own vendors. Jewelry is everywhere! You can fight a losing battle to hold onto exclusive products and territory, or you can jump into the action and find out how to be your target customers' preferred supplier no matter what. You need technology to do this. If you are just focused on a narrow, local market you can probably (possibly?) get away with antiquated systems. But remember that even if you don't feel like competing with the rest of the world, the rest of the world feels like competing with you.

4. Get educated. For generations it has been possible to DIY small business. But not any more. Small business owners are increasingly the products of large corporate management environments with MBAs, exiting corporate life to pursue their own dreams of business success. So you're not just competing against big businesses, you're competing against ever-more-sophisticated small businesses. It's never too late to get business training or formal education in business. If your business is heading into a second, third, or fourth generation, make sure your successors are getting terrific educations, and encourage them to work for demanding corporate environments and get rigorous training (from someone who is not a parent) before they step back into the family business.

5. Be a Merchant. Retail has always been about building a shopping experience, and the products are a defining part of that experience. Merchandise selection must be exciting, constantly changing, fueling the perception of the brand, and compelling. Is that difficult? Sure it is. But if you wanted easy you'd be doing a 9-to-5 in a cubicle somewhere. Is it challenging? Yup. You'll have to get creative about turning inventory, just like auto dealers and high-end luxury environments have to do (all retailers, really).

6. Be a Marketer. If you're spending less than 6% of your retail sales volume on marketing and sales efforts (not including salaries and commissions), then you're underspending. Truthfully, if you want to just maintain your current volume and visibility, the spend should be more like 6% - 9%. Do you want to expand your market and grow? Plan on 10% - 13%. That means you must have a brand that creates desire and mitigates price competition (see #2 above), you must have an exciting merchandise perspective (see #5 above), and you must have decent margins (see #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 above). Marketing is expensive, yes, but so is going out of business.

I was part of the video industry from the very beginning when it was filled with Ma & Pa retailers. I participated in opening the first two Blockbuster stores. I watched the independent video owners disappear, largely due to similar conditions we see in the jewelry industry today. Over a decade later, I was part of a group that was brought to Blockbuster to help it figure out its next thing (which looked a lot like Netflix), but they passed on that. Apathy, failure to market, failure to differentiate, failure to brand, and failure to embrace and use technology (and keep changing with it) all played a role in that industry's rapid changes.

But that's not the change we want. The change we want is the opportunity to define our future as a jewelry industry. And we can. Let's get to it.

One of the biggest changes of the internet age is hardly ever mentioned: people without formal training in graphic design produce a huge percentage of all the visuals we see today. That's not necessarily a good thing. 

It started when computerized design became accessible in the mid '90s. Soon, everyone who could figure out the software started calling themselves graphic designers. But one can know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator without any understanding of the principles of good design. The situation became more dire in the mid '00s, when tools like Visme, Stencil, Canva, and Crello became available. Don't get me wrong — there's nothing wrong with those tools  At my company, we subscribe to the Adobe suite for all marketing staff - but we also use Visme. Cloud-based design tools are a great way to quickly create graphics, and if you use the templates, you also have some built-in guidelines for good design.

Just last week I was helping a client interview for a new marketing staff position, and the fellow we were interviewing was presenting himself as a graphic designer. So we asked about his training, since his degree was in computer science. There are lots of great graphic design certificate and online programs that he could have attended, or he could have trained at the side of a skilled graphic designer. But he didn't have any graphic design training. What he was basing his skills claim on was deep knowledge of Illustrator and Indesign, and the fact that he makes websites. So, we looked at some of his sites together, and while they were functional, they didn't demonstrate knowledge of visual design principles. He wasn't even aware that such a thing as graphic design principles exists.

Becoming a skilled graphic designer takes a solid education and years of practice - ideally working with mentors who are skilled themselves. And working with an accomplished graphic designer is a true delight. The best of them are visual problem solvers, capable of taking the words and intention of a message and turning it into rich expression.

But if you don't have a graphic designer on staff, or the budget to work with a professional — or maybe you do, but you still need to create a lot of additional graphics for demanding social media channels — then you need a basic understanding of the principles of graphic design. Even if you don't do any of your own graphics, understanding these principles will make you a better collaborator with your professional designer. So here you go: 36 minutes of graphic design principles, for a topic that merits months of study and a lifetime of practice. 

 Transcript

As more and more business owners create their own advertising using tools like Canva and Visme, it’s become clear that most people do not understand the components of a good advertising layout.  Though the internet and digital advertising are relatively new, and rules have been adapted to accommodate new media, the principles of good design remain consistent, and have been studied and refined over nearly 100 years of practice. Color theory, the use of shapes, eye-path (sometimes referred to as “movement,”), and composition are all elements you must understand to make your ads effective. There is a huge difference between putting information on a page and creating information that is visually appealing AND effective.

Let’s start by defining design. 

When we design something, we are creating it for a particular purpose or effect. If you design kitchen utensils, you are concerned about form – how does it look, how will it look in a certain type of décor – and function – how does it work, how well does it do the task for which it is intended?

When you design a room, both form (how does it look, how does one move through it) and function (does it serve the purpose for which it is intended) matter.

And when you design jewelry, you are expressing those same ideas – form and function - in a wearable medium.

This idea of designing for a purpose – of requiring that you meet both form and function – is the main thing that separates design from art. Art can disregard function, can turn function into farce, or can be entirely without function. Art is all about form. Design must include function.

The main purpose of graphic design is communication.  Communication. The essence of good graphic design is that it uses both form and function to bring someone to understanding something they did not understand before, or to be interested in something in which they were not interested before.

The fundamental purpose of graphic design is to make something easy to use or easy to understand.  Yes, we can do that with words, but when we take those words and make them into visual images, they can be so much more powerful, not to mention accessible.

Some graphical elements are obvious without previous exposure. For instance, CLICK the handwashing sign and the wheelchair access sign are clear without any further explanation. Other signs, CLICK like this Bouy sign, need some imprinting. If you’ve spent much time around water, you’ve probably seen it and know what it is.

In fact, one of the earliest forms of modern graphic design was signs. Signs are a form of universal language.

Most of the discipline of graphic design is wrapped up in the elements of visual hierarchy,  because visual hierarchy plays a primary role in planning the structure of any ad (or environment, like a website) you create. Good visual hierarchies guide the viewers through the information you want them to see in the order you want them to see it. Good visual hierarchies ensure that if a viewer only retains a small percent of the ad, the part they remember is the part that is most important to you as the advertiser.

The best article – and related infographic - I have ever seen on the 12 principles of visual hierarchy was done on the design software Visme’s blog, written by a graphic designer named Samantha Lile. I share some of their content here, but you really need to read the full article and save the infographic for yourself. The link is on your slide.

The first rule in visual hierarchy for graphic design is that size – and more importantly, RELATIVE size, is the fastest, most effective way to emphasize visual elements.  Sizes determine the order that the human eye follows in an ad. It helps the viewer to recognize some things faster than others, and to retain some information better than others.

Here are two more excellent examples of how to use size in creating visual hierarchy. On the left, you see an advertisement for Bentley. If this had been a consumer ad for cars, there’s no way the car would have been so tiny and the word “next” so large. But the intended target for this ad was people interested in the research & development and production capabilities of Bentley. The ad was perfectly structured to put the attention on the right element – the innovation and forward-thinking behind Bentley automotive. In the second example, the use of size perspective helped drive the message home that no trash – even small, biodegradable items – is “small” trash (no hay basura pequeña).  The lime image is also a great example of the use of perspective, which is our next visual hierarchy example.

AS they point out in the Visme blog, the use of perspective creates an illusion of depth. Just as a visual element, that’s interesting. But depth is more important than simply creating visual interest. We can also use the sense of depth in an ad to make ads more relatable to the viewer. Depth can change the feeling of an ad by making it more dimensional. Images that are more dimensional are more visually interesting and more memorable – and we want ads to be both. Also, as in the lime ad in the previous slide, perspective can take something that would have been an afterthought in a more typical image, and turn it into the main point.

This is a brilliant example of perspective (also from the Visme blog). Most shoe ads focus on images of the shoes (from the top, naturally), or of people running in shoes. Pirelli used perspective to make the walking the focus of the ad. The ad instantly makes you wonder how the shoes feel as they hit the ground. It makes you wonder what type of ground the shoes are hitting. It does more to put you IN the Pirelli shoes than any shoe commercial I’ve ever seen. Perspective can make you FEEL the product, and that’s why it’s important in visual hierarchy.

The next visual hierarchy example in the Visme blog is about color and contrast.  It doesn’t take much explanation to understand that using contrast and color make focal content pop out. But we use color and contrast for more than providing direction and readability. The use of high contrast also aids in RETENTION of information, and retention is a precious commodity in a world where the average viewer sees 5,000 ads per day.

We are all aware that colors have psychological import - though be cautious about your color interpretations – they are not uniform across cultures.  The interpretations shown here represent the primary western interpretations. So thinking through

Of course, color goes far beyond the basic Hue, which is where each color sits on the color wheel. Hue refers to the origin of the colors we can see. Primary and secondary colors – yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, and green are hues, as are the tertiary colors – which are mixed colors where neither color is dominant.

But each color also has a broad range of moods which can be expressed through different levels of saturation and value.

Saturation defines the brilliance and intensity of a color. As saturation increases, the colors appear to be more pure. When you lower the saturation of a color, it becomes progressively more gray.

Value has to do with how light or dark a color is. You can add black to a color to shade it darker, or you can add white to a color to tint it lighter.

Understanding color, and specifically, how most people interpret color, is very important for anyone who plans to communicate a message using graphics – a message they want the target to visually and mentally engage with, and once engaged, to understand the way you meant them to understand it.

As you’ve already seen, fonts can be used as part of size and perspective in visual hierarchies, but they also matter on their own. Each font is itself a design element, and can express ideas and feelings in addition to the words they spell out.

Fonts as a design element could be the subject of an entire presentation all by itself – well, that’s true of each of these elements. But I’ll focus on just a few important points for this discussion.

First, every brand must have a brand guide that dictates which fonts to use for the brand. Those fonts should be used in every situation EXCEPT for when a different font is required to get a message across. For instance, If you recall the Bentley Megafactory ad we looked at earlier, the font in that ad isn’t the font in Bentley’s brand book. But if you go to Bentley’s website, their fonts are used throughout the website.

So for larger format advertising, like a website or an annual report, the brand fonts should be used.

For ads, use fonts that best express the messaging of the ad (which could mean the brand fonts, if you’re sending a pure brand message). But it could also mean some more expressive fonts related to the point of the ad.

Finally, when it comes to fonts, less is always more. An well-designed ad can certainly express the idea of “chaos,” but the ad itself should never be chaotic – and one too many fonts can take a perfectly coherent message and make it messy and even unintelligible.

One of the biggest mistakes most non-graphic designers make is the mistake of filling up all the space. Space in an ad isn’t an empty place that needs filling. Space IS a graphic element, and it can be used to direct the eye, influence emotion, and emphasize your message.

The most basic understanding of space in advertising is that you want to use the space around content elements to draw attention to particular elements.  As you can see in this example from the Visme blog, where your eye focuses on the image in the left is a tossup between the astronaut and the moon. It’s not clear where the ads “wants” you to focus. But the image on the right makes it pretty clear that the focus should be the astronaut. They didn’t make the moon smaller – they just created much more space above it, which drew the eye to the astronaut and the idea of “space” itself – rather than the moon.  Of course, size and perspective are also used in this example.

Space can also be used as a message itself.

One of the most referenced examples of this graphic design technique is the FedEx logo, where the space between the E and the X is used to create an arrow – a very literal, and cheeky, reference to FedEx moving packages. The graphic designer of this element must have been particularly pleased with her or himself, because the arrow also aludes to the graphic design principle of “movement,” which is also achieved by thoughtful use of space.

The use of negative space can be quite elegant. It’s another way of using space to create emphasis. In my experience, it takes a particularly refined awareness of the relationships between items and space to create strong negative space image.

As with everything in graphic design, less is more. You want to strip down your elements to only the most important for conveying your message.

Another important consideration in your graphic design is where elements appear in relation to one another.  In its most basic sense, it helps the viewer make sense of the relationships and their relative importance to one another. Either of the images in the above graphic could be “correct”. If you were trying to make a point about female employees relative to make employees, you might use the image on the left. If you’re trying to make a point about teams of employees, you might use the image on the right. As with everything in graphic design, the intention of the message is what matters here.

Here’s another excellent example of the use of proximity, with a strong assist from the element of perspective. This map sends a strong message about how close together two continents actually are when you use FedEx. It also is yet another reminder of how great the graphic designers are that work on FedEx campaigns.

If you want to make your viewers uneasy or uncomfortable, fail the alignment test in your graphic design. Even though most people can’t tell you why it makes them feel uneasy, they feel it. Alignment provides order to your design. It relates to everything from how elements are arranged in space to how text is aligned.

There is no rule that suggests one type of alignment is better than the others. Text can be aligned to the left, center, or right, with or without “ragged” edges on the unaligned side or sides (both sides are going to be ragged in center aligned text. Graphical elements can also be aligned with left, right, or center orientations. What’s important is that the elements not look completely scattered and random like the image on the left. If you go out and look at nature, you will find that its patterns are remarkably ordered. Our human eye seeks alignment to guide it, and our psyches seem to find some comfort in the order that comes from alignment.

The rule of odds – which can be applied to a remarkable array of things, not just graphic design or photography – suggests that using an odd number of options or elements can create more focus and “stickiness” than using an even number.

You can apply the rule of odds to the number of elements in your graphic, or you can use it as a rule of thirds, and separate your palette into three equal sections.

The example here is about using odds in your composition of elements. This is one of the illustrations from Ed Verosky’s excellent tutorial on still-life photography. Each one of these elements, even if it includes an even number of objects, uses the rule of odds to create balance and focus. The relationship between objects conveys a lot of information very fast – beyond the objects’ relationships to one another, the relationships also suggest mood, energy, and movement. Using the rule of odds helps make your message more coherent, no matter what you’re trying to convey.

This example is also representative of the rule of odds – only instead of dictating how many objects are used in the design, it uses the 3-part grid to compose its message.  A similarly beautiful photograph, cropped less thoughtfully, would have far less energy and movement.

AS I’ve mentioned already, the average person sees 5,000 ads in a day, which means anything we can do to increase retention is extremely important Repetition can achieve that – it can increase comprehension and retention.

Repetition isn’t just something to use on one page though. It can be used in design to create cohesion among elements that are essentially different in shape or kind, things that otherwise would be hard to see as grouped together. For that reason, repetition is one of the favorite graphic design elements of packaging designers.

Shapes, objects, and font treatments like chapter headings and subheadings all  benefit from repetition to increase both focus and retention.

Some of the best graphic designers I have ever worked with shared a similar trait of drawing dots or lines through their sketchpads  before dropping elements onto the page. Once they had conceptualized the message, they had an idea of how they wanted to direct the viewer from their first encounter to comprehension. They used lines and grids to get that initial thought on paper.

As you saw earlier in that fabulous beach image, and can see again here in this illustration from Visme, lines can be literally present on the page, or they can be used suggestively through the use of a grid. In the first image, we can tell the man is running. In the second image, we FEEL like the man is moving. The imaginary line of the design is moving him right off the page.

In his excellent book on graphic design for children, Chip Kidd gives the  best example for understanding form. He suggests that you try to imagine yourself as a tiny baby without language. All you can do is perceive forms, and you try to interpret them. Colors, sizes, intensity, relativity – it’s all there, but what to make of it?  Eventually, you put language with form, but in the beginning, everything is just form.

As a graphic designer, you try to back away from the implicit meanings of things and experience the forms without the words.  How do the elements on the page, on the screen, or on the billboard make you feel? What is your impression of how things look?

Beyond visual hierarchies, there are some other things that must be considered in all graphic design activities. One of these is the idea that form follows function.

This is a graphic from Chip Kidd’s book . It’s the best example I’ve seen of how to understand the relationship between form and function.

Function is determined by solving the design problem. You ask the question “What is the content’s purpose? What is it trying to do? This purpose is called function. And once you determine it’s function, then its form – or what it is going to look like – should follow.

Graphic design is visual problem-solving. I need to get a message across, and I need to find the fastest, most impactful, most memorable way to do it. There is also a discipline called “design thinking,” which evolved out of many different design disciplines, and is a cross for creative problem solving. On this slide, you see the main 5 questions of design thinking. I like to keep these questions in mind when I am trying to solve a design problem – graphic or otherwise.

And that’s it! Those are the principles of design I wanted to talk about with you today. With these principles in mind, you can do a much better job of creating graphics to promote your business. Even if you aren’t the person doing the design, even if you’re working with a graphic designer, understanding these principles will help you give them better direction, and it will also help you better understand what your designers create based on your direction. And remember – just because something looks pretty, doesn’t mean it’s good design. And just because something looks plain, doesn’t mean it’s bad design! I hope you enjoyed this information, and thank you for your time and attention!

One of my retail clients was just pitched by a local marketing firm on paying for text marketing services. For $1,000/year, the retailer can send unlimited text messages to their consumers. My client wanted to know if it was worth the money.

Here's how I responded:

Regarding text marketing, the jury is still out. While mobile marketing is definitely where marketing is going, I do not believe that text marketing will be how mobile marketing ultimately evolves. Research indicates that youth users of mobile are as offended by text ads as their parents are by getting telemarketing calls at the dinner table. Youth text users view text the way their parents view phone conversations. So text marketing is a good way to alienate the youth crowd.  While their parents aren't quite as offended by text messages (which isn't to say that they aren't offended - they just aren't AS offended), they are also much less likely to use text messaging than their kids.

When does text marketing work? When it comes from within the community - to tell their peers to gather for events, parties, etc. Mass texting is happening, but in a social context rather than a marketing context.

I know the agency said the text users would be "opt in," but part of the problem with building an opt-in text list is all the people you irritate while sending out texts to them to see if they want to opt in! I haven't seen any case studies yet to indicate that text marketing is actually yielding strong sales for any given retailer. All we have at the moment is a lot of testing.

Your reach as a local brand would be better focused on building social media relationships, doing opt-in email messages to people who have provided their email address to you in the first place, and hosting lots of events and other reasons to come into the store. I think it is more likely that a mobile app is in your future than that we want to do text marketing a'la telemarketing.

Two of my grandchildren are under the age of two. Active little boys, they give me such delight as I watch them develop and grow. They also make me gasp in fear on a regular basis.

Just the other day, I looked up and saw the 21-month-old carefully walking down the stairs from the 2^nd floor, holding a fairly large (for him) wooden box in his hands, and therefore not holding on to the railings. We’ve been teaching him stair safety, which involves sitting on his little bottom and scooting safely down the steps. But apparently this box (absconded from his older sister’s bedroom) was just too absorbing. He forgot about scooting entirely.

I managed to keep my cool, walked up the steps, and hovered in front of him while he successfully navigated the stairs one foot at a time. At the end of his trip down the stairs, he was very proud of himself and I was sweating.

But I realized that he was ready for the steps. He has been practicing walking up and down our miniature dachshund’s stairs (yes, she’s 14 years old and needs them to get on the couch) for weeks. Before that, he had mastered running. Before that, walking. And before that, he crawled.

This biological and intellectual advancement follows a very set pattern. We’re watching his 7-month-old brother go through the same developmental steps now. As they get older, they will do some things earlier, some things later than each other, but the pattern of human development is pretty well set.

As it is with business development.

Unfortunately, many people who start and run small businesses don’t understand that there’s a sit-crawl-walk-run-stairs progression to business. They jump in wherever they are most comfortable –usually making or selling something – and just go from there. It’s no wonder so many of them fall down the stairs.

The strategic process was probably not as important to a grocer opening a store in a small town with no competition 70 years ago. But with each passing decade and the associated improvements in technology, the disciplines of strategy, establishing competitive advantage, branding, marketing, and operations have become more and more important. Today it doesn’t matter if you are a very small business or a very large one – these skills are critical to sustainability and profitability.

The Strategic Process Flow

The good news is, if you follow a logical, tested, practical process, you can implement all the strategic building blocks your company requires. Explaining all of those building blocks in one blog post – or even one book! – would be ambitious. Today, I just want to share with you the crawl-walk-run-stairs order of business.

1. Every business success starts with a strategic plan; a plan that lays the groundwork for a company’s competitive advantage and differentiation. Without this plan, a business is just spinning its wheels on ice — it burns lots of energy and wears down the tires, but goes nowhere.
2. The strategic plan actually provides all the information needed to create a brand identity. That’s right – brand comes directly from strategy. The strategy is more than numbers; it is the expression of the businesses most fundamental purpose, goals, and objectives. These are the things that inform your brand.
3. Once the strategic plan and brand strategy are done, the business process forks into two roads that run parallel to one another and can be driven at the same time. On the outside track are the external business elements:
   1. Sales Plan: sets goals for sales numbers and rate of sales growth.
   2. Marketing Strategy: establishes the direction, goals and objectives for achieving the sales plan.
   3. Marketing Plan: the monthly/daily/weekly implementation elements of the marketing strategy.
4. On the inside track are the internal elements:
   1. Business Plan: the strategic plan covered the why and what of your business - the big picture. The business plan covers the who, when, where and how. It always looks out 2-3 years.
   2. Operating Plan: The operating plan is your annual plan to achieve the business plan.
   3. Cash Flow Plan and Budget: These are the tools that will keep you in control of your cash and resource allocation.

Each step informs the next step. The sales plan must come after the brand (which came after the overall strategy), and you need the numbers from the sales plan to complete the business plan (which is running roughly parallel to it). Staying with the external track, once you know your sales plan, you can create marketing strategy to achieve the sales goals, and the marketing plan is the month-to-month playbook to achieve the marketing strategy.

The inside track has the same sit-crawl-walk-run-stairs progression to it. Once you complete the business plan, you can make your operating plan, and once you have your operating plan, you can create a cash flow plan and budget.

But what if your business is already in full gear and you realize that some of these pieces are missing? Back up to the first missing element and start filling in the blanks. You will gain new insights, correct business problems, and come up with new ideas along the way.

Do you remember when answering machines first hit the market? Even as early adopters raced out to buy one, the rest of the conversation went something like this:

“What do we need an answering machine for? If nobody answers, they’ll just call back!”

“Who wants to return a bunch of messages? I have enough to do already!”

Sixty years later, it’s inconceivable to most of us that we would live without voicemail (even though now most of us prefer texts).

Every technological advancement presents both new opportunities and new demands— and today’s social media conversations are remarkably similar to the answering machine conversations. Some of these technologies fade away, but social media is here—if not to stay, certainly for the near future.

Most of you have already incorporated social media into your business marketing in some fashion, but some are still wondering what benefits it provides, what the true costs are, and how to measure the results. This little primer will help you frame the issue for further consideration.

Social Media (Mostly) Doesn’t Sell, It Promotes

If receiving a check from a customer is ground zero of your business, then selling is one step away from ground zero: It is the activity that leads to the check landing in your hand. Promotion is two steps away: It’s the activity that creates awareness and affection or respect, which supports the selling, which lands the check in your hand. With some exceptions (big consumer brands, lower price points), social media doesn't drive a lot of direct sales. 

Here’s how you can use key social media venues to promote your business:

Facebook. Selling products on Facebook is a lot like trying to get people socializing in a bar to pay attention to a Public Service Announcement. They just aren’t interested. So what is Facebook good for?

Conversation and play. If you plan to have a Facebook presence, fill it with interesting information that will get your customers talking. Offer fun contests and participation games to maintain engagement. If you do it right, Facebook promotion will keep your brand top-of-mind and help your clients feel more connected to you, which in turn should make the selling process faster and easier

Soliciting advice. Anyone who has ever had to buy a present for someone they do not know well understands how painful that activity can be. It is much easier to buy gifts for those whose tastes and interests are known to us. Carefully facilitated Facebook conversations and interactive promotions will yield insight about what your customers want and need from you.

Twitter. A form of promotion (not selling), Twitter moves faster than Facebook, like a scrolling news ticker at the edge of one’s daily consciousness. Just how many people see any one posting is highly speculative. Twitter does not lend itself to the type of community that Facebook engenders, and as a result it is a less impactful business tool (unless you are selling breaking news, are a gossip columnist, or are in the business of selling personal expertise). So is it worth it to have a Twitter account? My advice to jewelry companies is that if you have a customer base that is Twitter-focused, and you are the type of person who comes up with witty, entertaining tidbits of information throughout the day—every day—then Twitter might be a venue for you. If not, then Facebook is likely to be more beneficial.

LinkedIn. Unless you are in the business of selling services (real estate, insurance, business services), LinkedIn is not a good promotional tool; however, it is an excellent networking tool. If you want to find out if you know anyone who can give you a personal introduction to Michelle Obama, go to LinkedIn. The more contacts you have, the more likely you are to find that link.

Is that all? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? For a jewelry company, yes, that’s pretty much it. Many other social media environments exist, but they cater to people who develop content for a living or to small niches with very specific interests.

Costs and Benefits

The primary costs of social media are how much time you spend engaged in them, and the opportunity costs of spending that time on social media versus something more beneficial. The only way you can measure those costs is to record and track how much time you spend on social media.

Benefits are harder to measure. The easy thing to measure is the level of engagement, as follows:

• Total Followers, Likes, or Friends (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
• Friends of Fans (Facebook, LinkedIn)
• People talking about your posts (Facebook, Twitter)
• Weekly Total Reach (Facebook, Twitter)
• How influential you are (Facebook, Twitter), as measured through services like Klout.

To translate engagement into benefits, measure how many new customer inquiries come in through these social media venues, and then track how many of those inquiries translate into sales. If you find yourself with more prospects of higher quality as a result of social media, then it is working for you. If you find your re-buy rates are higher among social media friends and followers than among those who are not participating in social media, then it is working for you.

But a note of caution: It’s easy to lose sight of what business you’re in—what actually makes you money. Make sure you use social media as part of your marketing strategy and no more—unless you love it so much you want to close the business you are in and do social media full time.

One of my earliest jobs was at advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding back in the late 70s. I wasn't a management trainee or even an intern. I was a Kelly Girl, a temporary secretarial services worker, brought in to cover a maternity leave. I took minutes in meetings, typed volumes of communications, ran art boards and interoffice envelopes between departments, fetched supplies and prepared coffee. When the person I was covering for returned, they made room for me at the next desk and kept me on, making it possible for me to learn one of the more important business lessons of my career.

It was my first exposure to advertising and to the individual specialties required to create it: Writing, graphic design, photography, film, layout (this was the era of x-acto knives, rubber cement and adhesive wax) and account planning. As I silently transcribed often heated discussions among creative teams and account executives, I discovered the world of designers who reverentially referred to the works of Saul Bass and Massimo Vignelli, copy writers who studied David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz and Claude Hopkins, and a building full of people who had read (and re-read) Marshall McLuhan the same way medical students study the Atlas of Human Anatomy and law students study the U.S. constitution.

I arrived at this job already knowing about music and music theory, art history and art theory, and the different styles of writing. I knew that great success in artistic pursuits was almost always preceded by studying masters, learning the rules before one broke them, and practice, practice, practice. What I learned during what turned into working on and off at the agency over the next three years was that advertising is equally a profession, and that you can't fake or luck your way into effective promotions.

Since that time I have enthusiastically embraced each of the advances that make it easier to execute advertising, from the advent of digital design to the ability to communicate directly with audiences online. And as McLuhan pointed out in 1964 when Arthur C. Clarke was first predicting the internet, the digital age has not only changed how we create advertising, it has also changed what we can create.

But there is another, insidious aspect to this evolution: Digital tools and publishing have also changed who can create.

At this point you may be thinking I’m a bit of a snob, and I’ll own some of that. I appreciate good advertising. I want to see graphics that are not just visually appealing, but which are also clearly designed to achieve a purpose. Grammatically correct isn’t sufficient to be considered good copy. Good copy is compelling and works within the larger design and media to be greater than the sum of its words. A bad photo crop can ruin composition and distract the eye. Professionally produced advertising should make you think. It should stick with you.

This doesn’t mean that one can’t create great advertising without study or experience. Every medium has its savants and prodigies and all of us land on an amazing idea now and then. But savants, prodigies and luck are exceptions, not the norm.

However, the predictable outcome of lots of bad advertising isn't my reason for calling the democratization of design insidious. Bad advertising has always existed. I don’t even say it because bad design leads to waste of advertising dollars (though it does). I say it because producing mediocre advertising has become a distraction for businesses everywhere.

I Can Do it Myself

Most people couldn’t afford a printing press, so developing the knowledge to set up, maintain, and use one didn’t occur to the average person. But Microsoft Word and — worse (much worse) — PowerPoint have made it easy for anyone to assemble pages that look like graphic design. Comfort with those tools led to the confidence to try a variety of digital design tools, including complicated software like Photoshop and Illustrator. Into this opportunity stepped Canva and dozens of software look-alikes; design programs that make it possible for anyone to create advertising.

All these developments are good. Even Canva (and its ilk) have a role to play within professional marketing departments. What’s not good? Business owners spending their precious and limited time creating advertising instead of spending that time doing the strategic and technical work of their businesses: Producing and delivering the products and services they sell.

Before easy-for-anyone-to-use digital design tools, a business owner had no choice but to hire a professional to create their advertising. In most cases the result was a professional advertising message. But even if they lobbed the advertising creation off on the local newspaper or a less-than-effective advertising resource, the resulting advertising still didn’t take up the business owner’s time and distract them from the business at hand.

The “I can do it myself” movement in business advertising isn’t reducing the cost of advertising. It’s reducing the effectiveness of management.

I Can Direct a Team

What about the business owner who has a large enough organization to afford hiring a marketing person? Is that better? Not necessarily.

The person hired is almost always expected to write copy and blog posts, create graphics, manage social media, take photographs, and manage the website. These are all distinctly different skills. Again — not being a snob here. I know many people who do an admirable job of managing all these tasks. But who is developing them? Who is helping them hone their skills as an advertiser and marketer? Because invariably the do-it-all person who assumes this role is not the more senior advertising professional who has been developed over many years by many mentors to understand the theory and practice of each of these specialties. No, it’s the entry level or lower management person who appreciates the flexibility and creativity of the job and is happily making it up as they go.

This scenario is still better than the business owner themself producing the marketing. In this content-driven marketing moment when volumes of creative and writing must be produced just to try to penetrate the noise (even while contributing to it), a do-it-all marketing team member can play an important role.

If the work they produce delivers a measurable positive outcome.

If the do-it-all marketing person is successfully (and measurably) producing new leads and helping to deliver those leads into the hands of salespeople, or guiding those leads down the sales funnel to close sales, or inspiring repurchase behavior and loyalty, then having an in-house advertising department makes sense. But if this person, which often becomes a team, is costing one, two, or more salaries to produce lots of satisfying visuals without leading to increased sales sufficient to pay for their salaries and deliver profit, then the business is simply wasting money.

The problem with the average in-house marketing/advertising/creative effort is that most business owners are not trained marketing or advertising professionals, nor do they hire seasoned marketing or advertising professionals to run the department. The result is too often a cost center that produces volumes of low-yield work.

I Don’t Like It: The Misplaced Insertion of Personal Taste in Advertising

“It’s hideous.” I remember the first time I heard an art director proclaim this, curling his lip at a presentation while simultaneously crushing the soul of the graphic designer presenting it. I didn’t see the problem with the graphic; in fact, it looked pretty good to me. But instead of sending the graphic designer out of his office to wallow in her shame, the art director proceeded to dissect the presentation, explaining why it was off message and how the elements of the presentation failed to deliver the intended result. He made suggestions about elements that would work better. It reminded me of one of my professors dissecting my poetry, explaining why the word choices and cadence might work for other forms of writing, but not for the work at hand.

When an untrained business owner directs, criticizes, corrects, or rejects the advertising efforts of an untrained employee, the only basis they have for argument is personal taste and opinion.

Without technical knowledge about why the color orange might be the correct color for a certain psychological response, why a line wrap might matter (and conversely, when it shouldn’t), when illustration might be a better convention than photography, how an eye moves across a printed page compared to a digital device … without technical knowledge, the decisions will be based on what colors each individual prefers, how certain shapes or graphics affect them personally, and whether or not that person would use a certain word choice in their own speech.

As Christine Catarino, marketing director at E.A. Dion recently said to me in a conversation about this topic, “When people who are not in that world (advertising) put all of their subjective feelings into that world, it becomes really difficult to achieve a great result.”

There should be discussion between the person commissioning the advertising and the professional creating it – lots of it. But the conversation should be anchored by reasons and intention, not taste and opinion.

The past decade has seen a significant in-housing of marketing creative across corporate America. Much of this is driven by the sheer volume of online marketing that must be produced and the commensurate need for speed and flexibility. In 2021, at a time when marketing budgets had plummeted to 6.4% of overall company revenue (down from 11% before the pandemic), a Gartner survey of 400 marketers revealed that 29% of the work that had been previously managed by agencies had been moved in-house since 2020.

But that trend appears to have slowed significantly as corporate managers discover the risks associated with in-housing creative. Chief among those risks is recruiting the right people. Even when a company manages to recruit strong creatives, retention can be difficult given that this workforce typically thrives on new challenges and creative diversity. And there is a bigger, more difficult issue as well: No matter how abrasive the feedback might be, talented creatives would rather take knowledgeable criticism from a skilled art or creative director than from a boss suggesting arbitrary changes based on personal taste and opinion.

So what is the average business-owner to do?

Start by recognizing that the creation of effective advertising requires professional knowledge and experience. A massage therapist can help you address back pain, but if your disc needs repair, you don’t ask the massage therapist to cut you – you go to an orthopedic surgeon. If the orthopedic surgeon recommends something you’re uncomfortable with, you’d be wise to check with a different orthopedic surgeon, rather than arguing for a treatment plan based on your opinion and research you did on Google (though medical specialists will tell you that even this is changing. Apparently now everyone has the same knowledge as their doctors).

You may need an in-house person or team to crank out constant content, but give them access to professional guidance and support. This will make their work product more effective, and it will also help them develop as marketing professionals. Most agencies are accustomed to collaborating with in-house teams, which can keep your agency-associated costs down and can significantly improve marketing employee retention.

Finally, make sure you have access to professional marketing and advertising guidance as well. A true professional will share the reasons and experience behind their suggestions, allowing you to rent years of professional knowledge on very favorable terms rather than having to purchase it … or do without. 

If you have ever looked at a couple and wondered what one saw in the other … if you have ever looked at a famous painting and realized that it does nothing for you … if you have ever discussed the likability of cilantro … you know that taste is not universal. Stop basing your advertising creative on taste. Stop thinking the customer sees things the way you see them. Stop believing that opinion is the same as experience. Instead, look for an adviser, agency, or resource that can guide you — or better, your team — to create the kind of advertising that cuts through noise, grabs attention, and inspires response.

Don’t worry. You can still apply your preference for blue to your home décor and you get to choose what to hang on the walls of your office. But when your focus is appropriately placed on how much return your advertising dollars deliver — and not simply on how much you spend or if you personally like it — your bottom line will thank you.

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