Why We Buy
One of the Top Shopping Anthropology/ Business Marketing Books on Earth Consumer Anthropology at its best. Not one of your typical business marketing books, but an amazing trip into the psyche of retail and consumer buying behavior. Great writer, great book.

Tested Advertising Methods
56 years of Results and Tests – Essential Business Marketing Books Pay attention to this treasure-trove of research. It may not be a business thriller, but the nuggets in this book are worth their weight in gold. Discover how subtle changes can make a 300% difference in pay-back on your marketing. A must-have handbook.

22 Immutable Laws of Branding
The Bible of Branding Which Anyone Can Understand- One of Your Must Have Business Marketing Books Only 22 laws: a simple way to understand the hows and whys of branding. Another one of the essential business marketing books. Great for those launching a new product or reinventing themselves.

Buzzmarketing
Financial Times of London dubs as one of the “Best Business Reads of the Year” along with Freakonomics.

All five are well worth the read if you’re at all interested in business marketing books.

Maybe.

The brands with real marketing power are the ones pushing the Six Buttons of Buzz—and letting word of mouth proliferate exponentially. When consumers start talking, they begin marketing your brand for you.

Word-of-mouth marketing works well because of attention. When people talk to each other, they’ve got undivided, face-to-face attention—something conventional advertising rarely achieves. Word-of-mouth marketing also succeeds because of credibility. When an advertisement tells us to buy a product, we know it to be biased; we know it to be advocacy. When our friends and family members tell us about a great product, we believe them.

Big brands and small start-ups using word-of-mouth marketing achieve three-to ten-times higher sales versus using traditional marketing. George Lois, who put Tommy Hilfiger on the map, puts it at the top end of that range, claiming a ten-times impact when you create buzz.

But remember, word-of-mouth marketing ain’t easy. You’ve got to create a story…ready-made for water-cooler conversation. It’s got to be entertaining, fascinating, and newsworthy. You’ve got to give ‘em something to talk about. Connections count, impressions don’t.

When people begin talking about your brand, you’ll break away from the pack in no-time.

Push people’s buttons—the Six Buttons of Buzz.

Recap
Can you reach far more people with one TV ad than with word-of-mouth marketing?

If you call impressions meaningful, yes. If you’re talking about consumer connection—-people who actually pay attention to you—not in a million years.

First, remember our secret about attention. Then remember the clutter issue. You could create a Mr. Whipple ad—but how long will it take you? And remember the odds against management actually recognizing a great, buzzworthy campaign.

Word-of-mouth marketing isn’t about you and your brand. It’s about them—the people who will start the conversation for you. You have to be a buzz giver—creating a ready-made story to make them the center of interest.

Push the six buttons of buzz. They’re tried and true:

• The taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor)
• The unusual
• The outrageous
• The hilarious
• The remarkable
• Secrets (both kept and revealed)

Are people really that easy to figure out? Aren’t we much more involved and more intricate as human beings?

Of course we are. We read books. We talk about philosophy. We all seek a deeper level.

But at the same time, we want to be entertained, and we want to entertain others. There’s nothing new about this. The playwrights of the ancient Greek comedies understood about entertaining to hold people’s attention; Shakespeare understood it. Buzz and word of mouth are just as predictable.

Give people currency, give them entertainment, and discover an explosion about to happen with your brand.

Even Procter & Gamble stumbled upon taboo many years ago with Mr. Whipple and his admonishment, “Don’t squeeze the charmin!” Whipple told America it wasn’t allowed in the store…we couldn’t squeeze the Charmin. And the Mr. Whipple campaign was the most successful campaign in the brand’s history. Time after time, a P&G ad agency would try to kill off Whipple and replace him with a new campaign—only to return to Whipple, because sales were higher with Whipple. Whipple succeeded because he tapped into our taboo. When we arrived at the supermarket aisle for bathroom tissue—what did we do? Squeeze the darn Charmin, of course! Why? Because we knew we weren’t supposed to do it—it was taboo.

Why did our urinal screens work for Half.com?

First, because it suggested a contextual message that was creative (Don’t piss away half your money…head to Half.com). But second, because it was bathroom humor.

Bathroom humor is taboo—and we talk about the taboo. If you’re ever at a dinner party with parents of babies or toddlers—give yourself thirty minutes before somebody starts talking about “doo-doo” and diapers. Of course you’re not supposed to talk about those things at a dinner party— they’re taboo. Or Viagra—can you imagine your parents or grandparents talking about bedroom performance except when alone in the bedroom?

Got a boring product like shampoo? Introduce taboo. Herbal Essences did. Each commercial pictures a woman in the shower, orgasming in sheer delight as she washes her hair with Herbal Essences shampoo.

Clairol turned a hum-drum “Herbal Essences Organic” into an industry star with their vibrant commercials playing on the close wording of organic and orgasmic. Every time you see their commercial, you see playful (but taboo) images of women enjoying their shampoo…as much as an orgasm.

Just think if GM’s Hummer could get Hugh Grant in one of their commercials (slyly reminding us how he was caught by the police for, er, getting a hummer from a lady of the evening). Talk about taboo! That would get the whole world talking!

Maxim #2: Push The Unusual Button To Start Conversations

David Letterman’s got the “unusual” buzz button nailed with his stupid human tricks and his Top Ten lists. For marketers, look as far as Pepsi’s decision to put a competing product, Coke, in the Pepsi Challenge commercials (revolutionary in its day, and still not much done). Unusual marketing makes its way into pop-culture and gives people currency.

In a very different kind of business, a man named Ian Klein five years ago decided to go into the online dating business. But when you’re competing against Match.com, things get pretty competitive. His sister was one of the 64 percent of overweight Americans, and also one of the eighty million single people in America. In time he made the connection, pushed an unusual button, and created a niche site called OverweightDate.com.

Among overweight singles, the whispers started. At Weight Watchers meetings, at bars, everywhere.

Best of all, the idea worked. People who had been shelling out $40 a month on Match.com and getting zero dates because of their weight were now getting dates left and right. These days when founder Ian Klein walks through the mall in the Boston area where the site is based, people stop him to ask about it. Put on a tee-shirt with the OverweightDate.com name, and he gets stopped even more.

Will he resort to having flyers slipped to people eating at In-N-Out Burger locations in California? You bet. They’re handed to everyone— overweight people, athletic people, skinny people. People laugh, they actually read the flyer, and most important of all—they talk. It becomes an unusual conversation piece.

With marketing held to word of mouth, flyers at In-N-Out Burgers, some keyword buys online, and a few tee-shirts, OverweightDate.com’s registered user count tallies in the millions. Push the unusual button.

Maxim #3: Push The Outrageous Button To Start Conversations

You can’t get more outrageous than asking a town to rename itself. Still, the town went for it.

But a word to the wise when you push this button. Outrageousness for the pure sake of outrageousness doesn’t resonate too well. If you try to get attention by shooting gerbils out of a cannon, that’s certainly outrageous. But if you push this button just for the sake of being outrageous, it will probably work—giving people something to talk about. But what’s the connection to your brand or product?

There needs to be some connection. In renaming our town, the “half” connection was obvious to everyone—and plenty of people found it outrageous. What you’ll find with gerbils being blown out of a cannon is that people might not remember your brand or make a connection to your brand…unless there is a connection.

Here’s the difference. A hypothetical situation: a porn star in the GM Hummer commercial. Outrageous? Yes. Any connection? NO. So—a bad decision.

Now let’s put Hugh Grant in a GM Hummer commercial. Outrageous? Yes (and taboo). Is there a connection, YES. A good decision? Debatable.

The point is: the outrageous button will always work. It just works ten times better if there’s a connection between your product and the outrageousness.

Maxim #4: Push The Hilarious Button To Start Conversations

The hilarious button works, but it may be one of the harder buttons to push—being truly funny is never easy. It can work to your advantage if done right, and to your disadvantage if you’re on the wrong end of it.

A client of ours, the foods and household products company Reckitt Benckiser (they sell nine million household and personal care products every day) came to us with one of its tougher challenges. The brand was French’s Potato Sticks, and it was a classic case of milking the profits with not much marketing spend. As a test, they asked what we could do. The budget wasn’t huge, and we weren’t sure if we would even accept the project, but off I went to the grocery store for three hours one night to make my decision.

The baseline situation was awful. French’s Potato Sticks used to be sold in a can but the company had recently started putting it in a stand-up pouch. It reduced the visibility of the product, but the cost savings of switching to a pouch were too attractive to pass up.

The positioning in the grocery aisle was awful. Right next to Pringles, but low down on the shelf. Hard to see, hard to find, more competitors from the Dorito family arriving. A recipe for disaster, but it was a small cash cow. I lurked in the aisle and asked every one who walked by if they knew about potato sticks (making clear I was a marketing and PR person, not a wacko). Nearly every person paused, squinted, and seemed to reach in the recess of their brain and said, “Yeah, I used to have them as a kid.” Bingo.

It wasn’t so bad after all. All it took was a prompt…a conversation…and people remembered.

The next day we called to take on the project. I didn’t know what we were going to do, but I knew if we could spark some word of mouth conversation, it would be easy to recall a brand people knew when they were kids. We later presented a two week, intensive campaign that focused on nostalgia and comedy.

We would literally bring Potato Sticks to life—with comedians. We recruited amateur comedians and gave them the exposure and the prayer (long shot) of getting on The Ellen Degeneres Show or The Tonight Show. Each day, we would have three comedians show up in Potato Stick costumes that looked like your eight-year-old made them.

Talk about rough around the edges, these were made from UHaul cardboard boxes and spray paint. When people saw these people in costumes, they couldn’t help but stop, approach, laugh, and ask, “What the heck…?”

Purposefully, we designed the costumes to look home-made versus corporate. The costume begged inquiry. They were our conversation openers. But once you start a conversation, you’ve got to continue it, make people laugh (in this case) and give them a ready-made story to take away with them and talk to other people about.

The comedians had no problem making people laugh—office workers, cabbies, teenagers, tourists, gays, straights, hot chicks, metrosexuals, old ladies, cops, and suits…they all stopped, listened, and laughed. Along with a product sample to eat, the punch line was, “Potato sticks…they’re back!”

Combined with two weeks of appearances all over Boston, and a Web site with riddles to guess the next Boston location, these comedians gave out twelve thousand packages of Potato Sticks.

Since this was a test, Reckitt Benckiser wanted to measure awareness results as well as sales. They spent $15,000 on the awareness study, and to be honest, we were nervous, even though we knew it would work. We were pushing the hilarious button, it was planned extremely carefully and deliberately, with locations chosen to cross-pollinate wide across all the Boston metro area.

Before our campaign, unaided awareness of French’s Potato Sticks tallied a mere 10 percent. With three comedians and twelve thousand packs of Potato Sticks—unaided awareness in the Boston Metro more than doubled from 10 percent to 21 percent.

If you know anything about awareness statistics, they are like glaciers. It takes mountains to move them. What we had done was to start conversations and make connections. We pushed the hilarious button to do it. Humor isn’t easy, but when it works, it works well. We weren’t just getting exposure and impressions. We made people laugh. They took pictures of our comedians, and our comedians took pictures of them. The entire purpose was not to sell, but to give. Give people something to laugh about…and a ready-made story to talk about.

Maxim #5: Push The Remarkable Button to Start Conversations

How do you make auto parts worth talking about, among people who ordinarily wouldn’t? When I ran marketing and advertising for Pep Boys, we looked at all the categories that moved the needle in our business and picked a few ‘leader’ categories to promote. One of these categories was brakes. Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or prefer to have a mechanic fix your brakes for you, you need reliable brakes. Everybody does.

So how do you create advertising about brakes that starts conversations and gets people remarking on brakes? First, we had a creative team at DDB that produced a great commercial. It opened up with two guys driving back from a weekend in the mountains clad in plaid shirts. They’re driving their Ford Explorer along a winding mountain road as country music plays on the radio. They pass a “moose crossing” sign…then another sign labeled “really big ones.” Looking at each other bemused, they continue driving. They pass another moose crossing sign labeled “no kidding.” They now look at each other confused, then immediately jam on the brakes—stopping just short of a huge moose, standing twelve inches in front of their vehicle. The moose calmly looks at the drivers…and begins to speak.

“Hey, d’you get them brakes at Pep Boys?” says the moose.

The camera cuts to the two guys—shocked by the talking moose. The driver responds in bewilderment, “Yeah…I did.”

The unscathed moose then responds, “I appreciate it,” followed by a closing promotion on brakes at an attractive price-point.

The commercial itself was very good, and bordered on the type of marketing that people would talk about. But we needed a boost. So to enhance the word of mouth and got people remarking on it, we created an in-store campaign with the moose. Tapes of the moose commercial were sent to all the stores, and the employees loved it.

We then had employees in every store wear a round button with a picture of the moose saying, “Ask me about Raybestos brakes.” And guess what? When a customer sees a moose button on your shirt with an “Ask me about” …they remark “What’s up with the moose?” It started conversations between customers and the sales associates.

It also started a conversation among our employees. They talked about the commercial, and they also talked about the new line of Raybestos brakes promoted on the button. So when customers asked about the brakes, employees knew the features and benefits and were prepared to make the sale.

Based on the expected trend of sales from the prior year, brakes showed a double-digit net increase. The commercial itself was very good. But what pushed it over the edge was the in-store campaign causing employees and customers to talk about this crazy moose. We created a campaign that would push people’s buttons and start conversations.

Maxim #6: Push The Secret Button To Start Conversations

How many times has someone said to you, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…”

Secrets are currency. Revealing a secret is a definite conversation starter. People love to talk about secrets, and when they do, they become ‘in the know.’ They become part of an exclusive circle, and exclusivity is the cousin of secrecy.

Sometimes withholding can work better than flooding. Limit supply and everybody’s interested. Limit those in the know of a secret, those not ‘in the know’ want the currency of knowing—they want to be part of the exclusive circle. Withholding a secret can push people’s buzz buttons, and get people talking.

While not intentional, Google’s Gmail created secrecy and exclusivity in its Gmail account. At one point, people were paying $200 on eBay for an account (I admit I paid for one on eBay myself). But the crazy thing is…it’s a lousy email account (yes, it does have one gig of storage…perhaps enough for twenty years of one person’s e-mail archives). But you can get e-mail accounts anywhere.

Although it’s standard practice in the world of technology to create a very small list of beta test users, Gmail was kept a secret. It became exclusive to have an address like Joe@gmail.com. Limit supply, create exclusivity, know the secret, and more people want to know also. They get interested in what they can’t readily have, and people talk. Shhh…push the secret button.

Time and time again, these six things push people’s buttons and start conversations:

The Six Buttons of Buzz

• The taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor)
• The unusual
• The outrageous
• The hilarious
• The remarkable
• Secrets (both kept and revealed)

Push any one of these buzz buttons, and you’ll give people the currency to start a conversation.

Why? Because most of us love to be the center of attention; we love to have something interesting, amusing, or novel to talk about, something others will find entertaining, fun to hear…and will remember us for having brightened their day a little.

Remember our definition of buzz:
Capturing attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand
becomes entertaining, fascinating, and newsworthy.
A conversation starter.

You’ve got to give ‘em something to talk about because most of our products and services are simply boring. Law firm—boring. Exterminator— boring. Green beans—boring. Office supplies—boring. Computers—boring. Boring, boring, boring.

If you want people to talk about your product, you’ve got to give them a reason to talk about your product.

Give them a story, and not just any story.

Take yourself back in time to 1984.

On the day after the Super Bowl, can you imagine people talking about a computer? Water-cooler conversation centered around MIPS or DRAM? Absolutely not. Boooorrring! Apple Computer got everyone talking about its computer in America because it gave people a story to talk about.

Not the product, not its attributes. People talked about that amazing commercial, about the audacity of poking IBM in the chest, about George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, about the new era of big brother and how there might be a mini-microphone recording their every word at the water cooler right then and there. The story is not Apple’s technology, all its MIPS and DRAM crap, but Apple is at the center of the story, and Apple is the giver of buzz, allowing people to tell a story to their co-workers and neighbors.

A buzz marketer’s dream is to start conversations that begin with phrases like “You’re never gonna believe…” and “Hey, did you hear…” Yet within the context of these conversations, their brand rests at the center. The giver of buzz.

The membrane of word-of-mouth marketing is that people love to tell stories—ever since the Odyssey and before, all the way back to the first tribal storytellers, the human race has been a culture around the spoken word, revering the elder who could grasp the attention of a circle of listeners and hold them spellbound.

Remember Bonnie Raitt’s song, “Let’s give ‘em something to talk about”? You’ve got to do the same thing. Give ‘em a reason to talk about your brand. What you’ve got to do is create a ready-made story for water­cooler conversation.

We did this with Half.com. It wasn’t an especially exciting product. Talking about a Web site that sold used and overstock books, CDs, and DVDs, isn’t exactly titillating—there were competitors in the marketplace doing the same thing, and no one was talking about them.

We had to give people a reason to talk about our brand. We had to give them a ready-made story. Renaming a town from Halfway to Half.com gave the world a great story to tell, and it propelled us from a no-name Web site to a top ten retail site in less than six months. The better the story, the faster the spread of word-of mouth.
We talk about things that make us gasp, things that make us laugh, things that make us wonder, things that make us marvel. We talk about things that shock us, and things that thrill us.

But why do we talk about these things?

On the surface, we talk about them because they’re emotive and they’re interesting.

But dig a bit further into the human psyche and you’ll discover we talk about these things because we want to be the center of interest. Imagine you’re at a cocktail party. Introducing interesting news gives you a certain currency. For example, being the first one to discover an unknown gem of a restaurant gives you currency. Introducing entertaining and fascinating news makes you entertaining and fascinating.

And after all, who doesn’t want to be entertaining and fascinating?

You’ve got to give ‘em something to talk about—because it makes them interesting, and it gives them currency. Hey, Mr. Motorola and Miss Minolta, it’s not about you…it’s about them! If you don’t create a story that gives them currency…word of mouth will not spread.

So you’re well on your way in basic training. There are a lot of buttons in the F-16 of buzz, but there are six magic buttons to push which produce currency and start conversations.

They’re tried and true. I call them the “Six Buttons Of Buzz.”

One of the secrets to word of mouth is that you’re speaking face–to-face, which gives you what tons of marketers are trying to get every day: attention. Face-to-face attention competes with no other media, grabbing unadulterated mindshare.

Another secret to word of mouth is credibility. When you’re a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, or a family member tells you about a great movie, product, or service—you believe them. They’re not being paid to pitch the item and so you give them full credibility. That’s why having a great product matters so much: If you can wow ‘em, people will tell their friends and neighbors.

In addition to face-to-face attention, audio stimulus stays with you longer, providing superior memory retrieval. In a study of two groups presented with advertising information with the brand removed, only 49 percent of people recalled advertising based on a visual cue, while 70 percent recalled advertising from a thirty-second musical cue1. Given the right context of attention, audio stimuli can be far superior to visual.

Why It Matters More Than Ever
Why should you care?

Not only is word of mouth ten times more effective than print or TV, word of mouth is more important today than at any time in the past, for four reasons:

• The ad clutter is rising to intolerable levels in America (a 283 index on the Clutter Curve; see Chapter 11).
• Traditional forms of media are rising in cost, compounding the issue of clutter.
• We’ve been lied to so many times with advertising, it seems like the only message we trust these days comes from regular people like you and me.
• Technology is accelerating word of mouth.

Because of technology, word of mouth is moving faster than ever before. Text messaging, e-mail distribution lists, chat rooms, message boards, Web sites, and blogs. If you see a great movie—bam, you’re sending an e-mail to sixty-three of your friends in an instant and you have the buzz currency of being ‘in the know.’ If the movie stinks—bam, an e-mail goes out to those sixty-three friends warning them to save their money. You become the hero for saving all your good buddies $20 for a pair of tickets and popcorn. With Blackberrys, Treos, Pocket PCs, and WiFi, we don’t need to be tied to a desktop computer. We’ve got mobile communication with us for instantaneous messaging.

Now more than ever, we can spread word of mouth faster and wider. Most importantly, though, word of mouth used to travel in unique settings where a conversation could never be heard again. Now, with the Internet, a permanent history of word of mouth stays recorded forever. Bad or good, the Internet has transformed word of mouth from a single-engine dog-fighter to an F-sixteen. It’s now become fast, powerful, long-range, and dangerous if you can’t harness it. It can be your biggest asset in today’s marketing world, or it can be your biggest nightmare if you can’t control it.

But it’s so simple to say “Just start a word-of-mouth marketing campaign.” Obviously it’s not that simple do to. Flying this powerful machine requires knowledge, patience, and deliberation.

Hang on.

Aaahh, yes—identifying the holy grail.

This is the question many CEO’s and small business owners ask over and over: “How can we bring great marketing to our company and break out our brand?” A marketer’s typical response is, “Let’s look at some of the best marketers of all time and duplicate what they did.”

Follow this line and what happens next? You read articles. You interview professors. You find yourself looking for respected brands and may very well come up with Procter & Gamble as the model to examine.

You discover that Procter & Gamble tests their TV commercials rigorously in focus groups. And before producing their final commercials, they test first-draft versions (called animatics) for persuasion scores. They test intensity levels of media for these commercials.

And maybe, like many others before, you decided that you’ve discovered the secret to great marketing. They wrote the book on marketing, right? Just duplicate what Procter & Gamble does, right?

Sorry. It won’t work.

Why? Chances are you don’t have Procter & Gamble’s billions of dollars of advertising and resources at your disposal. Furthermore, Procter & Gamble hasn’t created buzz in a long while. They’ve been focused more on refining than reinventing.

If you’ve read Part One of this book, I think you’ve discovered the power of word of mouth. It’s the most powerful form of marketing on earth. Period. Great marketing is marketing that gets people telling other people about your company, your product, or your service. Word-of-mouth marketing connects with consumers, costs a whale of a lot less, and travels further— exponentially. Just recall the two comparative figures we began with, Figs. 13-1 and—2.

2. DVR Penetration in markets like Dallas = 27%. In three years, it will be 50%. The Carmel Group

3. Allstate slashed its upfront spending to $10 million from $70 million two years ago. Wall Street Journal

4. “On the heels of the Vioxx/Celebrex controversy, the task to penetrate consumer consciousness—which is likely more predisposed than ever to ignore marketing messages from pharmaceutical firms—will be even more challenging.” Brian Steinberg, Wall Street Journal

5. Coca-Cola announced that it plans not to make any purchases during the TV upfront ad buying period. Yesterday Johnson & Johnson also announced plans to skip this year’s TV upfront. Coke and J&J’s move to sit out the TV upfront also reflects major advertising shifting their ad budgets away from network TV because of the changing media habits of consumers. AdAge

6. 78% of the top 133 marketers feel the potency of their television advertising has declined in the last two years. ANA/Forrester Research Study

7. There are a host of nimble, new media-christened production and distribution companies whose programming lends a degree of ownership to the advertiser. This advertainment goes beyond typical product placement and writes brands in as actual characters. So rather than not so subtly hitting the viewer with occasional product drops, the same brand(s) will consistently enter the storyline. The thinking is more background music than exclamation point, with the desired effect being achieved over 10 or 12 shows. MediaPost

Do understand the most powerful advertising technique on the Internet is showing up in organic search results (ideally first page, in the first three results).

Do understand that Wordtracker.com is currently your best tool along with Pay Per Click suggestion tools (from Google, etc) to discover which search terms get the most search volume.

Getting in organic search engine results is hard, but the best quick checklist to help you get there is the Vaughn’s list: http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Do understand that Pay Per Click search ads provide your next best set of Internet advertising techniques after organic search engine placement.

Do understand that text links almost always outperform banner ads as advertising techniques because they look more like content and people are used to clicking on content (text links) far more than ads.

Do understand that Internet display ads perform best with flash animation, motion, or video.

Do understand the eye reads top left to bottom right and that impacts your click-through rate depending on where your text links or display ads are on the page.

Do understand that the page upon which the consumer clicks is just as important than the ad or link that got them there.

Do understand that improving or optimizing your own pages and your own site has more impact than optimizing your advertising techniques in text links or display ads.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this sentence above.

Don’t assume that just because you built a website people will visit it.

Don’t underestimate the power of words: You, your, asking a question, amazing, discover, now are all proven “power” words that produce far higher response. See more on this down below.

2. Direct Mail Advertising Techniques

Do use a stamp vs. a bulk mail endicia – Open rate on envelopes with physical stamps is 13% higher.

Do make your letter look like newsworthy content – Content gets read, not advertising.

Do attach news articles blown up to fit on 8 ?” x 11” paper as an attachment to your direct mail piece.

If you are using a card vs. letter, use 6” x 9’ stock or larger.

Do not use any “special offer inside” language on your envelope or “hey look at me” advertising techniques when using a letter envelope.

Do not use an adhesive address label unless it’s a label from Stamps.com or endicia.com.

Do not use an 8 ?” x 11” letter in B2B direct mail, but do use A4 or executive sized stationary – higher read rate and higher response rate vs. full sheet letter.

3. Writing as Advertising Techniques

Note: this applies to anything to do with Direct marketing, Internet marketing, even memos to your boss.

Do understand that the use of certain words are power words which produce results.

Do use present tense – better response than past tense.

Do use the word “you” or “your” far more than “I” “me” or “we.”

Do use words like these in your writing or advertising techniques which produce demonstrated higher response rates:

• You
• Your
• Now
• Discover
• This
• These
• Amazing

Do understand that asking a question with the word you in it is one of the best ever advertising techniques.

Don’t, however, ask a question where the answer can easily be “no, and I don’t care.”

4. TV Advertising Techniques

Do use TV as a way to legitimize your brand, launch your brand, or reposition your brand. When used prudently and selectively, it can be one of the best advertising techniques depending on your situation.

Do investigate buying “remnant” TV media and making opportunistic buys for a fraction of retail prices.

Do make sure your TV spot looks like nothing else on TV (in order to stand out).

Do make sure you have a compelling offer, and a compelling newsworthy announcement.

Do pay special attention to audio in your TV spot…recall of ads with music in the ad (not background music) produces higher recall and captures more attention.

If you have people in your TV spots, do make sure to have them with their eyes looking right in the camera…the stopping power and attention rates are higher with ads that have people looking at you directly in the eye.

Do have a response medium (website, telephone number, SMS number, etc). If you don’t, it could be one of your worst advertising techniques.

Do understand that for response, early AM and late evening produce higher response rates (if someone is up at those hours, they often have nothing else going on and are paying more attention than normal).

Do understand that the creative that you put into the costly media of TV makes all the difference in the world. A bad TV spot in good TV media can be one of the worst advertising techniques.

So: do test your TV creative on the Internet before putting it on TV…or test at small levels before putting on untested TV creative in large media buys.

Do understand one of the cardinal rules of TV creative: see and say. See the product when the words are said. P.S. don’t forget to show the actual product. See and say in TV is one of the most basic, but often forgotten TV advertising techniques.

Do understand that likeability of ads (plus the offer) produces the highest correlation to sales.

Do understand the basics of targeting, but index the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) with the index of propensity to buy your type of product/service (e.g. a TV show with an index of 180 for buying laptops @ $20 CPM is actually more expensive than a TV show with an 130 index @ $10 CPM).

Don’t always do what you like…let the numbers dictate.

Don’t accept mediocrity in your TV creative. Mediocre TV spots in costly TV media, is the most common blunder in all advertising techniques.

5. Public Relations as one of the “Earned” Advertising Techniques

Do understand that Public Relations is fundamentally different than advertising. PR is not necessarily in the genre of advertising techniques, but on average PR is 6X more powerful because people pay attention to content 6X more than advertising (that’s starting at 500% higher ROI).

The four keys to PR are the following:

• A great story: see the chapter in my book for the five most frequently written news stories in America.
• A great headline: consumers read headlines 19X more than body copy and the same is true for reporters you are pitching. Also know that the first 8 characters in your headline are more important than ever because a reporter only sees the first 8 characters in their Blackberry. Headlines are 19X more powerful than body copy—you should spend 19X more time working on the headline. Headlines should be less than 11 words.
• A great database: contrary to popular belief, it’s not who you know, but if you have a great story. Even if you know the editor of The Wall Street Journal, it means nothing if your story isn’t newsworthy. You need a large database blended between custom and a standard news reporter database. Reporters are everywhere today and so is the Internet. All reporters want great stories…you need a database not necessarily a chummy rolodex.
• Luck: yes. Reporters have 4-7 stories in various stages of development. If you happen to land on their desk when they just finished a story, it’s luck and the law of large numbers when sending/phoning a pitch. Luck is a factor.

Test your pitch much like you would test a direct mail piece using the advertising techniques learned here. Test small, see what responds, and what doesn’t. Find out before you blast a big push which may not work.

And my shameless self-promotion: everyone should know the five most frequently written news media stories in America. These five most frequently written news stories are in my book, Buzzmarketing.

6. Print Advertising Techniques (Newspaper, Magazine, etc)

Do understand that a print ad which looks like an “ad” will fail unless you have an amazing offer (great discount, sale, limited time only). Without an offer, an ad that looks like an “ad” won’t get read.

Do make your ad look like content (use the same font style and layout as the publication) or make your ad look like no other ad in the pub (reference Infiniti print ads from 2005 and Pfizer’s Celebrex print ads from 2007).

Do understand that white space can stop people in their tracks, and produce a higher response rate. One of the greatest advertising techniques is white space.

Do understand that a photograph of a person with their eyes looking directly at you produces a higher response than a photograph of a person with eyes looking elsewhere. Perhaps the most powerful of all advertising techniques in print, or even on the Internet.

Do understand that a print ad with a “Drop Cap” gets read more than without one.

Do understand that ads with lists and bullet points get read more than ads with paragraphs.

Do understand that a photograph’s caption is extremely important…a good photograph can be the first thing a reader sees, and the caption the second thing they read. If the caption fails, they skip the rest of your ad…if the caption works, your ad gets read. Smart captioning can be of the most effective print advertising techniques.

Do understand that copy in quotations gets read 13% more than without quotations.

Do understand that ads delivering news value get read more than anything else.

Don’t ever use a reverse print ad (black background with white font) it’s hard to read and has proven repeated lower response rates…one of the worst advertising techniques.

7. Radio Advertising Techniques

Do understand that radio advertising works best with high frequency and proper timing.

Do understand that the first five seconds of your radio ad may be the most important…a cell phone and the radio preset button is a moment away from avoiding your ad.

Do understand that you need to say your brand name a lot more often than you would ever imagine in a radio ad (people daydream in their car), and you need to drill your brand name often.

Do understand that reads from DJ’s get more attention because they seem like content from a familiar voice versus a stranger’s voice.

Do understand that one of your most powerful advertising techniques is to produce fresh radio creative every week versus running the same radio spot for more than a week.

Do understand that if it sounds like content, people will listen…if it sounds like an ad…people won’t.

8. Word-Of-Mouth and Buzz as Advertising Techniques

Note that word-of-mouth or buzz is created with pull, not “bought” like print advertising.

Also note that this lost art which was practiced before the advent of Television is more powerful than any other set of advertising techniques (Euro RSCG Study found it 10X more effective than TV or Print advertising).

Do understand that the root of all buzz is a seven-letter word: stories.

The crux of buzzmarketing and word-of-mouth is to give people a great story to tell, which they, in turn, can tell others…and by them telling the story it makes them interesting, fascinating, and newsworthy.

Do not confuse buzz marketing with some other services which pay people to talk about products (still a push technique). Buzz marketing is about creating a pull. Creating a story which gives people social currency. Buzz marketing is about creating a story which pulls a brand along with the story (like my own renaming of Halfway, Oregon to Half.com, Oregon).

What creates a good story can be found in my book or in the free chapter download on this site’s book page.

Buzz marketing happens when people start conversations that begin with “Hey did you hear…” or “Hey, you’re never going to believe…” and then they tell a story which pulls your brand along with that story.

Hope these advertising techniques were helpful.

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