Michael Shipe Blog

Maybe a good product, but could use help marketing

The other night I was watching Ultimate Fighter Champion Rich Franklin vs Evan Tanner 2 when I saw a commercial that was completely out of place. I see absolutely no connection between a Cross necklace that you can see the Lord’s Prayer when you look through the center crystal and Ultimate Fighter Champion.

The money spent on that advertisement was almost totally wasted. There will never be a shortage of people who are ready to throw money away thinking it’s a marketing opportunity. Please do not put any money towards marketing without at least knowing your target, the demographics and reach of the marketing opportunity. This information is available in any media kit and could have easily saved IdeaVillage the time and money. Or better yet, trade the money spent on un-targeted tv shows for highly targeted social marketing opportunities. You will halve the reach, but quadruple the sales – funny the effect of proper targeting.

To recap: The Prayer Cross & Ultimate Fighter Champion DON’T MIX!

The title reminded me of chatter when e-commerce was ramping up. However, there is a growing tide, a silent tsunami that will be a greater game changer than online retail. The greatest opportunity for differentiation has been price, it has been quality, it has been convenience but it will soon be responsibility.

The responsibility requirement is not coming because consumers are starting to care. It is coming because consumers will soon be able to easily find out which companies are showing leadership in responsibility and which ones are profiteering. The phenomenal growth to 75 million fair trade shoppers shows that the caring consumer will soon be the primary consumer.

I am excited for the day when retail clerks will need preparation to answer questions like,

• “Were the people who made these shoes paid a living wage?”
• “Does the factory where this was made meet international standards?”
• “What has your company done to improve the world?”

My guess is that within 3-5 years, genuinely responsible companies will start taking market share from companies content with status quo. If responsibility is little more than a polite velleity, your company will miss the responsibility boat – a sizably larger boat than e-commerce.

Upping your position on the left side of search engine result pages is the cheapest form of internet marketing right. Aside from the cost of achieving a higher ranking of course. But having a high position does not cost a thing. So we found out that inbound links up our relevance and all of the sudden building links became the thing.

It is no wonder it became the thing. Building links is relatively easy, inexpensive and kind of fun for the swivel chair marketer. This spawned a whole slew of irrelevant opportunities to build links. Thankfully, search engines weight the importance of each link by the quality and relevance of the site providing the link.

Thus the Golden Rule of Link Building:

Establish links as if there were no search engines.

Milk’s Favorite Cookie wins gets A+ for their new packaging. Though it really isn’t that new any more. However, it is an excellent example of doing things right. I always thought it was ridiculous to have to throw an Oreo bag into a zip lock bag. With the plastic tray, you couldn’t even seal it off with a clip.

Now however, they are easier to open, easier to seal bag and thus easier to consume. The easier to consume part is the key point for Nabisco. Way to go Nabisco.

One of the things I enjoy most about marketing is how pervasive it is. Marketing gives input at all stages – product creation, packaging, pricing, distribution, promotion, sales. Marketing also contributes at the strategic level with research, targeting, and product offering. All aspects are crucial.

Here is a personal example of when Crest Mouthwash completely lost any hope of ever winning my business again because of failing at the packaging design stage.

I have no idea how Crest Mouthwash compares with other mouthwashes when it comes to effectiveness in mouthwashy things. I will not buy Crest’s Mouthwash any more and I have instructed my wife not to buy it because it is impossible to use without dripping blue mouthwash all over your bathroom space. This transcript of a typical rant after using Crest’s Mouthwash has been expurgated for all audiences (expurgations):

“What the heck! Son of a gun. Who was the dumb dumb that designed this inadequate lid to drip this blue stuff all over my sink? This junk is all over the place. It looks like a trucking smurf couldn’t hold it and went all over the dirty place.”

Crest, please let me fix this for you. And please help the guy in charge of packaging for the mouthwash find a position that better fits his skills.

The other day, some friends of mine were researching the rumor that someone had found a cure for HIV/AIDS. After reading the Wikipedia entry on it, he went on to some news site that had written a story about it.

They are not marketing nerds, so I was a little disappointed when my exclamation and finger pointing at the advertisement fell on deaf ears.

Someone was not doing their job and let the advertising they spent good money on denigrate Johnson & Johnson’s K-Y Jelly. Who thought K-Y would be good to associate with HIV/AIDS?

This just goes to show how thorough you have to be in building your brand. Marketers who think they can just throw money out will find themselves hurting themselves unexpectedly. Maybe they thought, “Since some prince in Africa has cured AIDS, people will be buying more K-Y!”

I feel like I am becoming an expert in SEM. I have learned that the average person with 12 months of website analytics gets over $78,000. Wowza! Internet marketing is still growing because you can get the ROI on your marketing efforts – ROMI if you will.

Why do I feel like an expert? Reading blogs. Adage, Search Engine Watch, Web Analytics Association, etc. I also came across http://www.semmys.org/ which I need to check out further.

I have also started offering some advice to some small web projects on how to improve their web presents. It is largess I know, but how else was I going to get a Dictionary.com word of the day into this blog?

All the articles I read about getting descovered on search engines said Google would be the last one to rank me, but that’s turning out not to be the case. MassEffect.MichaelShipe.com is now 43rd on Google (when searching “mass effect”). I think that’s pretty good.