Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

June 21, 2019 · 10:41 am

No Strings

It’s Foodie Friday and it’s also the first day of Summer. Actually, it’s felt like July down here in the Carolinas since May, but I digress. In honor of the day, Dairy Queen is giving out coupons for a free soft serve ice cream cone. Yum! What better way to celebrate the new season?

Well, not to be the one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but of course, there are strings attached. You see, in order to get said free cone you need to purchase something else at DQ. Not that I’d generally mind doing so but that little bit of fine print sort of chills my enthusiasm (see what I did there?). Oh yeah, one other thing – in order to get the coupon you need to have installed the DQ app on your phone. I mean, who doesn’t want yet another app tracking you, sending data to who knows where, taking up room on your phone and hitting you up with “big announcements” every hour or so?

My point is a broader one that just beating up on Dairy Queen. I’ve always had an issue with seemingly benevolent marketing or charitable offers that are really self-serving. You know what I mean. How many offers have you seen for “buy this and we’ll make a donation to this worthy cause”? If the cause is so great, why don’t you just make the donation? Then there are those “free” offers that cost you in other ways. Opera, the browser company, offered “free” VPN a couple of years ago. Of course, you had to agree to let them track your usage and share the data with third parties.  Sure, it’s supposedly completely anonymized but if it includes a device identifier of any sort or location data, it’s not hard to merge it with other data.

Gift horses may, in fact, be Trojan Horses too. There are way too many “free” offers that are really scams. We’ve all seen the “free” product that involved paying shipping and handling charges that are detailed in tiny print and quite costly. Then there are the “free” products that require you to hand over a credit card, ostensibly so that if you make any “optional” purchases it’s a seamless transaction or maybe they’ve enrolled you in something that will charge you monthly once your “free” period is up. Illegal? Actually no, if it’s disclosed (you read all the mouse-type every time, don’t you). Shady as hell? You bet.

If you’re going to make free offers or do something nice for your customer, do so without strings. A gift involves altruism. If there is an ulterior motive lying within, it’s not a gift, right?

 

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May 22, 2019 · 2:58 pm

You’re Missing The Target

Many of my friends are over 65. Most of them don’t act like it. Sometimes they – and I  – contemplate being younger but I’m always of the mindset that the only way I’d take back 30 or 40 years would be if I could keep the bank accounts and credit cards I have now. While it’s true it used to be a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning, it’s also a lot easier now once I’m out of it to pretty much engage in consumer behavior with a lot less care than I did all those years ago.

It’s baffling to me, then, why most marketing budgets ignore those of us over 55. In fact, according to U.S. News & World Report, we baby boomers control 70% of the country’s disposable income and spend $3.2 trillion a year. We provide over 50% of consumption and yet we are targeted by 10% of the dollars. My kids are millennials and while they’re both gainfully employed they don’t spend nearly what I do. Most millennials don’t spend like boomers yet they’re the target audience for a lot of marketers.

I don’t get it.  Not only is my generation spending more, but I think we’re also more available to be marketed to. We’re heavy digital users (got to keep up with those reunions!) and use Facebook and Instagram quite a bit. We also are still watching “traditional” tv and news. We read our email too. It’s like we’re begging to be sold.

Millennials tend to rent. That means traveling light – who wants to move a ton of stuff when the lease is up? And unfortunately, they’re also the first generation that entered adulthood in worse financial shape than their parents. They spend every dollar carefully.

Marketing has always been “square peg, square hole” to me. Unless your product can’t be used by older folks (pregnancy tests is about the only thing I can think of), the reality is that you should be targeting older folks. Yes, we’ve built up many years of brand preferences but hey, I just switched to a new toothpaste so you never know!

So why aren’t you marketing to boomers? Seems like an opportunity, no?

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May 1, 2019 · 12:59 pm

Masking The Message

Chase Bank did something really dumb the other day while they were actually doing something smart and necessary. It’s a good lesson for any business that how you communicate is every bit as important as what that communication entails.

Chase tweets out something on Mondays hashtagged #MondayMotivation. This week they attempted to inject a little humor into something that really isn’t humorous for the folks who face it: a depleted bank account. Chase tweeted out a fantasy dialogue between a consumer and their bank account. The customer wonders why their bank account is so low and the bank account replies, and I’m paraphrasing, because you spend money on things like buying expensive coffee and dining out and taking taxis when you could walk. The customer replies “I guess we’ll never know”. It came across as snarky and patronizing, especially coming from a bank that makes millions in profits on the fees charged to their customers for ATM use and overdrafts (not to mention a multi-billion dollar bailout from taxpayers).

Politicians jumped in, as did a lot of pundits. Frankly, when I heard about it and the responses to it, I thought it was too bad that a good, important message got lost in a bad presentation. Many younger consumers (and quite a few older ones) don’t realize that making coffee at home can save them hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, as can walking and bringing lunch to the office or learning to cook at night. Those $4 lattes add up and many younger people never learned the financial management skills as they matured that one needs to cope with the money demands that adult life makes. While I don’t discount the effect that stagnating wages and creeping inflation have, having the skills to think through the bigger picture can help.

Any business needs to ask itself “what baggage do I carry” before they message their customer base. Are they angry about anything? Smart businesses constantly have their ears to the ground to listen for any disruption in the force. They monitor social media, their own customer service reps, and the news media generally. Money, or the lack thereof, is one of the most sensitive topics the bank could have addressed. Snark, condescension, and arrogance are rarely the right approach, even when the message is spot on.

Chase was smart enough to delete the tweet and replace it with something humble – “Our #MondayMotivation is to get better at #MondayMotivation tweets. Thanks for the feedback Twitter world”. That’s something every business should constantly try to do – get better – don’t you think?

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