Marketing Gaffes

Talk radio advertising

Yesterday I listened to NPR on the way to work and conservative talk radio on the way home.  A little bit of both worlds.  At any rate I heard something that made me think GM - yes, General Motors - is starting to understand marketing in a more modern sense.

Listening to the Sean Hannity show on the radio, he announced that listeners to his show would be able to win a car by registering on his show and listening for their names.  Those that called in - or had a friend listen and alert the person whose name was drawn - would be eligible to win a car.  What's more, Hannity and GM were going to do this over several weeks, and each week two or three cars would be featured.

What's interesting about this is that it returns radio to a more prominent national marketing media, which it had been before television, and targets a very select and specific audience.  I don't know the profile of the Sean Hannity show, but I am willing to bet it is conservative, white, "middle america" 25-49 age group, mostly single men and married couples, probably more suburban and rural in nature.  GM is targeting this group of buyers through a channel that receives great loyalty.  Fans of talk radio tend to love or hate the main celebrity and often use products and services the celebrity recommends.

GM is reaching a very targeted audience, and one it was probably starting to lose to foreign imports and getting a chance to align itself with a person who is popular and credible with that audience.  Again, this takes us back to the time when radio and television personalities would advertise automobiles and other consumer goods.

What I like about this approach is that it is very targeted, very specific in nature, GM aligns itself and gains credibility and audience support from a celebrity, and it completely flies under the radar for the rest of the population.  If you aren't a talk radio listener, you probably don't know about the contest and it does not matter to you.  This is an example of GM moving from mass marketing to niche marketing, which I suspect will be more successful and less expensive.

What may hamper the campaign is that the Sean Hannity show is only on for three hours a day, so listeners may not tune in enough to hear the advertisements, but most talk radio listeners are very loyal and tune in regularly.  Hannity wins because he provides his listeners with another reason to tune in - and even encourage their friends to listen.  GM doesn't care so much about reach in this campaign, mostly about affinity.

I think GM is demonstrating some real marketing ingenuity in the automobile industry.  Now, let's see if the cars they deliver are interesting and valuable enough to validate the marketing efforts.

How much of your advertising is wasted?

Listening to Marketplace on NPR tonight, I heard an interesting interview with Rex Briggs, who runs a marketing consulting firm called Marketing Evolution.  His argument is that marketing for many years has been a black hole - money went in and it was hard to measure the impact.  His firm has differentiated itself by trying to set metrics and measure the impact of marketing.

He's just written a book, which is being published this month.  The book is called What Sticks, and looks at what marketing expeditures work and which don't.  The really telling statistic that was discussed during the interview on Marketplace was Rex Brigg's assertion that over $300 Billion dollars is spent on advertising each year in the US, and, according to his research, almost one-third of it is wasted. 

This is something I suspect many of us in marketing have recognized for years - there is a big investment required for marketing and advertising and often the returns are hard to identify.  In television and other mass market advertising, I suspect the investments are rarely worth the investment.  More likely, finding small, niche audiences and growing loyalty and word of mouth credibility probably creates more value than repetitive marketing.

The Marketplace story used Coke as an example of a firm that uses a lot of advertising.  Interesting, because while I see Coke ads all the time, I never drink Coke and won't unless I absolutely have to.  I am Dr. Pepper drinker and have been for years.  Dr. Pepper has a much smaller ad budget, and I think could grow its market and customer base by creating loyalty and reasons for me to become an ambassador for Dr. Pepper to my friends.  Word of mouth and brand loyalty are much better uses of marketing dollars than repetitive marketing.

So, the billion dollar question - literally - is:  what value are you creating with your advertising dollar?

General Motors - Flying Cars

General Motors has a new ad out for its entire suite of cars, which is unusual since most GM ads are about a specific brand or a specific car.  For once GM has decided to make a statement about its products as a whole.  The message they are trying to convey is that GM cars are well-built and reliable, and GM is out to prove it with an extended warranty.  GM has finally recognized, 20 years after firms like Toyota and Honda made good, high quality, inexpensive cars available in the US, that drivers want reliability and dependability from their cars.

Who is the target for the ad? That's somewhat difficult to say, since GM has the problem of too many cars and too many brands.  Clearly the ad is targeted at people who want good, reliable transportation and felt they had to go to a Japanese, German or Korean manufacturer to get a car backed by a long warranty.  Since this is a GM ad rather than an ad for any of the specific brands or cars within those brands, it will remain to be seen if the relevance trickles down to the individual cars.

What's good about this ad?  The ad sets a great tone, showing thousands of cars in what appears to be a traffic jam, when suddenly some cars seem to float above the others.  What is it that makes these cars different?  At first it is hard to tell that they are GM cars, but eventually we get the point that the GM cars are rising above the other cars.  This allows GM to say, without saying, that the GM cars are better than the competition.  Actually, GM is just catching up to warranties offered by other manufacturers, but this ad demonstrates that they are starting to understand what the car buying public wants.

Also, I like the music in the background.  It gives the ad a bit of swagger and some edge to it that might not have been there otherwise.

My take: Will the car buying public understand that GM - General Motors - is offering extended warranties and is by extension saying that its cars are reliable?  Will that claim transfer to the brands and the individual cars themselves?  Note that GM is inferring its cars are more reliable and have higher quality - but no other car manufacturer is singled out as the comparison.  That's because GM still ranks relatively high in new car defects.  GM does not make an overt quality claim - it hopes that the warranty will demonstrate it stands behind its cars and that they are high quality.  This is an interesting gambit and one that GM needed to take years ago, but this ad positions GM well to recover some car buyers who may have only thought of imports for high quality transportation.

Dell - Can you have it both ways?

Watching television I am struck by Dell advertisements.  On one hand, Dell tells me, the individual consumer, that all my requirements can be met by Dell.  The message is one of personalization.  OK, I can buy that from Dell - that's their bread and butter.  Then, later in the same day I see an ad for Dell targeting the IT director - Dell's telling him that Dell can meet the needs for his corporation completely.  Well, which is it?  IBM and H-P, two much larger organizations than Dell, struggled to do a good job marketing and delivering PCs to a home audience and a business audience.  Dell has struggled recently financially, and I think this marketing is indicative of their problem.  What is Dell? 

Is Dell an online retailer of consumer electronics (flat screen TVs, MP3 players)?  Is Dell a build to order shop for savvy home consumers?  Is Dell the one stop shop for the IT department?  Can Dell do all these things well?

Who is the buyer?  Dell wants the home consumer electronics buyer, the home PC buyer and the corporate IT buyer.  These are different people with different needs and very different purchasing, support and "whole product" requirements.  The first buyer wants high quality items with some branding, sleek product design and some support after the sale.  Dell is not especially known for branding, design or support.  I'll posit that Dell can provide well-priced PCs to the home buyer, and does a reasonably good job with building and shipping PCs to corporate accounts, but Dell does not understand how to design and support a data center and has not demonstrated great customer support for corporate clients.

What's Dell trying to do? It seems to me that Dell is trying to be everything to everyone.  It is trying to expand its market share into the home market with consumer electronics, and trying to gain more wallet share from corporate customers.  None of these moves is necessarily wrong, but running very similar ads targeting very different buyers with different needs on the same television channel sends very conflicting messages.  I watched those two ads and thought - OK, which is it Dell?  Which one of these do you want me to believe?

My Take:  Dell may be able to have it both ways, but I think it will be a struggle.  However, Dell should find a way to differentiate its products and services to the home buyer and its capabilities to the IT corporate buyer, who has different needs and expectations.  The ads I've seen don't address these differences in a compelling fashion, and when they are run close together in the same media they create confusion. 

Sprint's Fast Draw - what were they thinking?

Watching TV recently I saw an advertisement for Sprint's wireless data service.  If you've watched television over the last few days you've seen it too.  The ad features two cowboys facing off in a bar, drawing pistols.  One cowboy is much faster than the other, and is able to slap the other cowboy and draw on him before the other cowboy can respond.  What this has to do with high speed data transfer is beyond me.

Let's look at a few key elements of marketing to see how the ad fares:

Who's the customer for high speed wireless data cards? Most likely, buyers are going to be owners of small businesses or corporate buyers who purchase the cards for their sales force or mobile executives. 

Who is targeted by this ad? Clearly not serious business users who won't see much business value in an ad about spaghetti westerns.  Clearly not women, who I doubt will be drawn to this ad either.  The ad seems to target men 18-34, who probably aren't the primary buyers of this product.

What does Sprint want you to know? On their website, Sprint tells you in plain english that their claim is that their wireless data network is larger than Cingular's and up to five times faster.  These are both good, defensible claims that get overshadowed in the ad.

Where's the sizzle?  If I'm right about the buyers primarily being corporate buyers for sales teams and mobile executives, all the claims are right, but these are FEATURES.  The benefit is left to the imagination of the listener.  Seems like these benefits should translate to significantly lower bills from wireless usage, and more productive sales teams and mobile executives who can work from any location.  Yet these benefits are not communicated in the ad.

What does Sprint say?  "The ad using actual spaghetti western footage comparing Sprint’s mobile broadband network to Cingular’s EDGE network very clearly depicts how Sprint is empowering customers to do more, at five times the speed of Cingular’s EDGE network."

My take:  Sprint and its marketing partner completely missed the mark and will need to do a much better job next time.  A spaghetti western theme for a product meant to improve business productivity that does not call out or help the buyer understand the benefits when they seem fairly obvious is inexcusable.  If Sprint's claims are true, it has a huge advantage over Cingular and should not camoflage that message with some silly western quick draw.  A slightly more boring but more communicative ad could show two busy sales execs working on their laptops in an airport lounge while over their heads bubbles track the cost of their work.  This would communicate value to the buyer, bring the message home more quickly and tie directly to the strongest benefit Sprint has.