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Two ways sponsorships engage an audience

As I observe the evolution of marketing and advertising, I am convinced that 'sponsorships' will become one of the most important ways for companies to gain and keep awareness among a target audience. Sponsorships take the pressue off a company to talk too much about itself (or theirselves, I guess). Your audience is interested in what you can do for them, but not in much else going on in the company. Unless your have employees who are particularly entertaining...if not, you can hire some entertainment by sponsoring a professional entertainer.

For instance, Hewlett-Packard is sponsoring the online airing of The Beautiful Life, a cancelled TV series produced by Ashton Kutcher. The really entertaining part is that HP is not promoting computers but a charity drive, and now the show's stars have to participate. Looks to me like a clever variety of product placement.

Hewlett-Packard is presuming that Kutcher and his supermodel stars will attract traffice, but Toyota's Scion brand is taking a different tact. They are helping their audience discover emerging artists in music and the visual arts, in keeping with their brand promise to help people express themselves. After sponsoring hundreds of performances and exhibitions, they have launched www.ScionAV.com to make sure their audience realizes they support many artists across many genres.

So Hewlett-Packard is 'borrowing fame' and Scion has its 'heart on its sleeve'--two ways you can use sponsorships to keep your market engaged.

Sales Leads: Talk to 'em or Lose 'em

'Working a lead' is an unfortunate concept because the person at the other end often ends up feeling 'worked on.' Always remember that your leads are people who can tell you what's going on. Take an interest in their life—it won't take long until you relationship has a trajectory and a rhythm.

Marketing Strategy and Innovation Blog: Give Your Leads a Regular Check-Up, 2009-Sep-10, by Maria Pergolino:

How often do you ‘talk’ to your leads? The frequency in which you engage with your leads is correlated with the chance of a sale. For example, calling a lead too much may frustrate the prospect and not calling them may cause them to forget about your brand.

Let my people sample

Good commentary offers a way for people to sample your mind, to figure out if you are on the same wavelink. To find people who share my values, I want to sample their thinking. The article below is about physical samples, but mental samples count, too!

AdWeek: Sampling Inspires Repeat Purchases, 2009-Aug-4, by Ken Hein:

...sampling programs drove a 475 percent sales lift the day of the event compared to non-sampled households, per the "Report on In-store Sampling Effectiveness" conducted by Knowledge Networks-PDI. Those who sampled an item were 11 percent more likely to purchase it again during the 20-week period that followed.

Reintegrating the brand after many campaign jumps

Burger King, like many major brands, has jumped from one advertising campaign to another, maximizing confusion. Now they recognize that their customers want to them to be something more integrated. It's like looking in a fractured mirror, of course.

Wall Street Journal Digits Blog: Subservient Chicken, Whopper Freakout Come to BK.com, 2009-Jul-20, by Andrew LaVallee

Burger King has redesigned its primary U.S. site, BK.com, to feature well-known but long-gone ads such as “Subservient Chicken” and “Whopper Freakout.” The site, which emerges from beta today, will still provide corporate information that it’s hosted in the past, such as nutritional information, menus and restaurant locators, but it adds the ability to dial that back and increase the video content, or vice versa.

How to Make Marketing More Humane

Speaking as someone who's spent hours in the emergency room waiting for them to sew my fingertip back on, I'd like to salute the simple, marvelous attention to detail that makes our lives better.

You probably can't tell by a casual glance, but one of my goals in life is to make marketing more humane. When an object or a service improves the quality of life, then it's worth communicating, and the quality of that communication had better live up to the quality of the thing being marketed. Clarity, convenience, nutritional information, and entertainment are all message ingredients that serve the human being at the other end of the conversation.

So what brought on these philosophical musings about life and marketing? One of my favorite journalists, iMomus (Nick Currie), recently wrote a tribute to a deceased friend who shared his devotion to "making humane things with technology. Teaching code to help us live." Technology and marketing are both often accused of destroying the quality of life. We have to work hard to make sure that isn't so. 

References:
iMomus/Nick Currie's Click Opera journal: http://imomus.livejournal.com
Tribute to Jip de Kort: http://imomus.livejournal.com/2008/10/18/
Jip de Kort's photographs: http://www.kwark.org/x/lsgfx

How to Squeeze your Marketing

When times are tough, it's more valuable to shrink your target market rather than letting your margins shrink. Staying in touch with existing customers is usually much less expensive than acquiring customers. If your customers are suffering, then commiserate with them! The most important problem is avoiding fear. Channel your energy into strengthening your relationships.

Chiefmarketer.com: Loyalty Marketing in Times of Economic Distress, 2008-May-20, by Rick Ferguson

Don't spend your finite resources further training your customers to wait you out for the next sale. Instead, focus your efforts on marketing to the two core groups of customers who can most directly influence revenue:

High-value customers you want to retain. Give them offers to keep them spending at their current level. For these loyal customers, tilt the hard-soft benefit equation toward the soft side with special benefits and access unavailable to the general population.

High-potential customers you want to grow. Give them offers to shop more often and spend more during each visit. Use targeted discounts and bonuses through your loyalty program or store card and monitor their transactions.