My recent post “Poll: Promo Items as Sales Tools” spawned a comment from a marketing guy which truly made me cringe.
But before I get to the substance of that comment, I want to go over the self-promoting advertisement that the writer included in the comment. Here it is:
S***** R***** is a dynamic marketing knowledge mentor, who teaches marketing and executive people how to use a variety of marketing tools, models and techniques to think more strategically and to get focused about growing their business to the next level. Warning: Before you have another planning session download his free eBook, “17 Ways Marketing Can Increase Your Company Bottom Line Profits” at [website]. Invest in the seeds of knowledge to explode your business growth.
Truly, that is one of the worst elevator pitches I’ve ever read. What the heck is a “dynamic marketing knowledge mentor”? That’s just a string of cool sounding words. And who are the “executive people”? The cousins of the “village people”? And what’s with the “Warning”!?! Are we supposed be scared or something if we read this guy’s unpublished (and probably unpublishable) book?
And then we come to “seeds of knowledge to explode your business growth.” Say what? Exploding seeds? Gee, that sounds like something from a Star Trek episode.
Honestly, do people really get paid to write stuff like that? I’d pay good money to get this guy to NOT attend my planning meeting.
Anyway, you can pretty much guess from the marketing patter how this guy is going to view the subject of logo trinkets and, sure enough, his comment epitomizes the worst of marketing theory. Here we go, kids:
Promotional items are an effective tool when used as part of an integrated marketing communications plan. Promo items are not intended to get you to buy anything. They are intended to help support top-of-mind awareness. Awareness is just the start of the purchase cycle. Many studies have shown that when faced with purchasing or recommending a product or service that we have a list of usually 3 items we remember. The promo item helps to make sure we think of the item as one of the three for consideration. Marketing continues to under marketing the effectiveness and thus we have the trinkets for the boy’s concept. As you write on you Dell computer with that little Intel sticker remember integrated communication is the key to using marketing dollars effectively.
So SPAMming your logo builds your brand. Two words come to mind: “Burma Shave.”
Look, here’s the truth: what builds brand is great products and (in B2B) great sales reps. Everything else is just noise and overhead.
Product (and quality sales) generates brand. Not marketing. To prove that point, I’ll use the very examples that the commenter used: Intel and Dell.
INTEL: The “Intel Inside” campaign has done nothing to create consumer preference for Intel products. Consumers couldn’t care less. The reason most computers still have Intel CPUs is that Intel keeps releasing superior products, and uses its deep pockets to underprice the competition. Whenever Intel has stumbled, AMD has quickly taken up the slack. The CPU battle is all about product, not about marketing, and the “Intel Inside” campaign is just a sing-song noise in the background.
DELL: Dell built itself on providing a great product at a low price through a great sales channel. However, despite umpteen millions spent on marketing campaigns (including the dismal “Dude: It’s a Dell” campaign), Dell is getting its tuchus kicked in the market because Dell’s customer support — an important element of any computer product — has been getting successively worse. Dell’s brand goes up and down depending on whether its doing a good job making great products and supporting them — not based upon the logo SPAM on the devices it sells.
Let me make this perfectly clear: If your product stinks, your brand stinks. If your product drops in quality, there is a lag before the brand tanks along with it. But the brand eventually reflects the product, NO MATTER HOW MUCH MARKETING YOU DO.
This is especially true in B2B sales, where the primary brand is the sales rep (see this morning’s post “In B2B Sales, You are the Brand“). No matter how trustworthy and knowledgeable a rep seems, if the rep can’t deliver a quality product, the customer will eventually think the “brand” is lousy.
Brand reflects product.
All the “integrated marketing communications plans” (ugh!) on the planet can’t change that.
