CharlieMoger.com

Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses

100,000,000 and counting

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We should all have this kind of success. Apple sold it’s 100-millionth iPod. How many did they sell because of discount sales? Did detailed ads explaining the many features and functions put them over the top?

Five-and-a-half years of iPodding demonstrates the effectiveness of attraction marketing. Teathered in our ears, iPods deliver choice in our hands; extreme intimate connection–personalized.

Choice is proof you’ve become transparent to consumers;  turning over the reins of control. It’s actually more a case of admitting control has been taken. iPods don’t come pre-loaded. They’re individual expressions of their owner. (The only condition is digital rights management (DRM), a condition imposed by the music industry likely to pass into history soon.)

iPods are all about salience: choice of song without obligation to an album, choice of genres, sequence, etc. They’re examples to all of us what’s possible by truly understanding customer desire and helping satisfy it. Do that and they’ll say thank you 100-million times.

 

[Originally published 10 April 2007]

 

 

Words matter

Bulletrifle221aA bullet doesn’t discriminate; it goes where it’s sent and does what it was made to do. Choosing words are like loading the right bullets; choose the right ones and they’ll deliver regardless of where you aim them.

Good web copy is good radio copy is good tv copy. Words are agnostic beasts, carrying their meanings without regard to placement. When you string the right ones together, the result is killer creative that punches through no matter how or where you aim it.

Testing creative to determine optimal click-through, VideoInsider reports an advertiser discovered that repurposed broadcast spots out performed web-only video by 25%. Similarly, they reported standard JPEG and GIF ads outperformed rich media placement.

It’s not the media, it’s the message. Messaging is everything. Delivering salient, relatable meaning  attracts attention; attention leads to action.

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Supermarket Hostages

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Being handcuffed to a shopping cart isn’t the best way to build trust. But, that’s how customers feel about so-called supermarket loyal shopper cards. That’s because the premise of the cards violates a basic principal of attraction marketing.

Two-thirds of a typical supermarket’s business is done by 20% of its customers, according to the Food Marketing Institute. In the years since loyalty cards first premiered in 1979, that ratio has stayed about the same. Retailers’ intention of building more volume from more customers has resulted in just getting roughly the same volume from the same customers at a discount–to the retailer.Continue Reading

Stronger than dirt

3485364Cresting the peak of Mt. Madison, part of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, I discovered a timeless truth: climbing one mountain reveals  the next one. This truth applies equally to web development: mastering one technology reveals the next to be learned.

Ajax is the next mountain in web development. Remember the internet before Flash? Quicktime? Ajax promises another leap forward, delivering a more dynamic web experience. When that promise is fulfilled, what we see today will seem as clunky as your first 300 baud modem.Continue Reading

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