It engenders a sense of pride. Yet, it is war at its worst…and, given the courage of those men, at its best, if there is such a thing.

This is how a powerfully produced commercial that I saw last night, starts. Film rolling, the voiceover says,

We didn’t wait for someone else to storm the beaches at Normandy.

Cut to footage of a civil rights march in the Deep South in the sixties and then to the Washington Mall and the “I had a dream” speech by Martin Luther King.

The music is dramatic, compelling. The voice over continues,

We didn’t wait for someone else to guarantee civil rights,

Or, footage of the first moon landing

put a man on the moon.

And, shots of a toxic sky,

we can’t wait for someone else to solve the global climate crisis

We need to act and we need to act now.

Join us. Together we can solve the climate crisis.

The ad is part of $300 million advertising campaign promoted by Al Gore and sponsored by The Alliance for Climate Protection.

This is positioning at its most brilliant: position global warming with the three most revered occurrences of the twentieth century – the invasion of Normandy, Martin Luther King’s I had a dream speech and the first man on the moon.

Truly inspired.

There is just one little problem: the advertisement, in all its positioning glory, promotes a falsehood.

Global warming is a myth; temperatures have been cooling for over a decade. And carbon dioxide is what helps plants grow. Don’t get me wrong, environmental problems abound on this planet. But carbon dioxide is not the source of them, and this is becoming increasingly evident to the public as a growing hit parade of studies that made that claim are now being exposed as fraudulent.

But my point here is this: if there’s one cardinal rule in advertising, it’s don’t lie to your public. Look what happens when you do. The following graph was taken from a poll by Gallup.

From 2008, when the above advertising campaign started, to March of 2010, the percentage of people that think the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated has increased from 35% to 48%. The uptrend starts before that, but the major upswing is in the last two years.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature (even if you’re Al Gore.)

The rule holds even more stringently in public relations. A current example is playing in the headlines as I write this: Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, who is running for Chris Dodd’s U.S. Senate seat, has often spoken about his service in Vietnam and how he and other troops were mistreated when they returned home.

Enter the New York Times, which turned up an inconvenient truth, Dickie Boy never served in Vietnam – in fact he managed to acquire 5, count ‘em 5, deferments.

His poll numbers have crashed.

I am not a fan of Bill Clinton. But let’s be honest, he presided over the longest period of economic expansion in American history. Still, Arkansas’ favorite son will always be remembered first and foremost for his sexual escapades in the White House and then lying about them.

Clinton was known to be a philanderer and was still elected. He was impeached for perjury, not for violating his marriage vows and embarrassing Hillary to the rest of the planet.

Several of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies have been sued by state and federal regulators and have had to pay billions in fines and penalties because they lied about their drugs’ uses or effectiveness.

Notice, by the way, the use of the politically incorrect verb, “lie.” When Blumenthal, caught on video tape saying he had served in Vietnam when he was never within thousands of miles of the place, he held a press conference and apologized for having “misspoken.”

No, Dude, you lied.

“Misspoke” is the euphemism du jour when someone is caught on a live mic (thought to be off) or on “film” lying or saying what they really think.

The real message is this, it doesn’t matter how good your positioning is if it is false.

But as long as you are promoting something that you can deliver, when surveys are done that enable you to craft a unique position for your product, the clouds part, the angels sing and the cash register chimes like the bells of Saint Mary’s.

And that, of course, is exactly what we have been doing for nearly a quarter of a century. We conduct surveys that drive sales.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your marketing, call us directly or visit us on the worldwide web at the address below.

Best,

Bruce
Bruce@ontargetresearch.com
www.ontargetreseach.com
818-397-1401

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That’s right.

Some years ago, when our offices were on the Sunset Strip, right across the Boulevard from a soaring billboard of the Marlboro Man – that advertising icon who has since been charged with crimes against humanity – our next door neighbor was Jay Ward Productions.

The Sunset Strip avoids the frenetic flash of the Ginza and the hordes of Time Square. It is the Haute Couture of hip; it is the front window on the world of entertainment. Awash with high-end hotels, ultra-chic restaurants, billboards of the lush and sensuous and rock’s most legendary clubs, it pulses with the very heartbeat of creative culture.

And in the middle of this sandbox of sensation sat Jay Ward Productions – creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle, Dudley Do Right and Crusader Rabbit. Ward’s studio was a small cement building at the East end of the Strip. Perched on a pedestal a few feet in front of the entrance as if he were addressing the United Nations on the subject of animal rights, was a six foot high statue of Bullwinkle.

Our offices were next door above an English pub that served a stilton cheese salad that made me want to play soccer.

So, yeah, Bullwinkle was my neighbor.

But Rocky, Bullwinkle and friends were not Ward’s most famous creations. Few people outside of the advertising world know that it was Jay Ward who took Quaker Oats from the stodgy second tier cereal company to front ranks the lucrative children’s breakfast market by helping them develop a world class brand: Captain Crunch.

In 1962, Quaker was looking to expand their cereal line. Not a walk in the park competing against a triumvirate of 900 pound breakfast gorillas – Wheaties, Cherrios, and Kellogg’s Corn flakes – the ad guys at Quaker turned to their customers and conducted extensive market research and surveys (can I get an Amen?).

A key finding was that kids wanted cereal that would stay crunchy in milk.

Who’d have guessed.

Armed with this key bit of market intelligence they turned to the creative brilliance of Jay Ward and the rest, as they say….

I tell the story not to reminisce about our digs on the Strip, but to make an important point about branding: Your brand should say what your product is … or does.

Yes, there are exceptions, but if your brand is explanatory, it will meet with your customer’s understanding and acceptance much faster than if you try to be cute. And you won’t have to spend the extra advertising dollars trying to drive your brand into the mind of your public.

Here are a few industry leading brands that are illustrative. Some, having matured, have been “minimized” to their initials by customer use or corporate strategy, but the original names tell the story.

The Wall Street Journal

Toys R Us

Kentucky Fried Chicken

YouTube

Bank of America

Petco

Etrade

Cable News Network

Pizza Hut

Playboy

In each case, the brand tells the public what it is or what it does.

Companies that carry the founder’s name have been exceptions: Ferrari, Forbes, Marriott and Dell come to mind. And the information age has spawned some beauties: think Yahoo! Google and Blackberry.

But America On Line, Internet Explorer and Netflix are all descriptive and remain category leaders.

A trip through the latest issue of Business Week makes the point. I am pouring through the magazine in search of ads that grab my attention and get a message across. Some people would call this activity a mental disorder, but it is how I spend many a dinner on the patio of the Daily Grill in Studio City.

I stop at a full page, four color ad. There is a picture of a large pill in the middle of a field. My first thought is that it’s one of the ubiquitous pharma ads: a treatment for fear of open spaces, perhaps. Wait, it’s not a pill, it’s a close up of a pitcher’s mound.

What are they selling?

I look at the bottom of the page to see whose ad it is. What’s the brand?

Unum.

Ah… sure, Unum. And they are selling….

Now I have to read the very fine print. I discover that the pill cum pitcher’s mound is neither; it’s a base pad, like second base. And Unum, well they sell employee disability insurance. And the base pad…that was something that a professional baseball player might trip over and hobble the “Entire organization for the rest of the season.”

Eh….

Show of hands: how many of you CEOs out there would spend $104,300 for this ad in the international edition?

How about the California edition, just $24,000?

Thought so.

So for any of you agency VPs that are looking for an account that needs advertising help….But be gentle.
___________

Not far from our friends at Unum is a two page story about the challenges of a Silicon Valley startup. It is a interesting story and my money would be on the company being a huge success. They have a unique product, which lets users of different IM services – AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, talk to each other – way cool. Add to that a dose of serious PR savvy: not only is the coverage in the Business Week article highly positive, someone had the public relations chops to get the article placed in the first place, a serious coup.

So I’m thinking, these guys will are going to make it; they’ll do well. But it won’t be their brand that drives their success, because the name of their company is – stay with me here – Meebo, which, even according to the founders, means… exactly nothing.

That’s right. The Gen Y founders were at a restaurant discussing what their name should be. They wanted a brand with two syllables. One of them favored names starting with the letter “M.” It was a short trip from there to doodles on a paper napkin and then to Meebo.

The Meebo story highlights a critical point: the foundation of a company’s success is rooted in a solid product that is needed and wanted by some market segment, the larger the better. A good product and great service puts you on the fast track to the options candy store. But what keeps you there, what fuels the sales and income, is marketing that drives that brand into the mind of your public. And a brand that tells your public what your product is or does, greases that track in an almost mystic way. The right brand flies into the mind of your prospects like a metaphysical frisbee.

Weekly magazines have done well at this: Sports Illustrated;

Newsweek; The National Enquirer; Reader’s Digest; Cigar Aficianado; Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ); Woman’s Wear Daily and Ebony, to name a few.

So have non-profits that work to better social conditions, environmental problems, and civil rights: The Sierra Club; The Earth Organization; The American Civil Liberties Union; Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

How much easier is it to remember Hotels.com than it is to remember -or even spell – Orbitz?

Which brand better communicates a product that handles spam, Cloud Mark or Spam Arrest?

If you were looking for a software program to help you design your new home, which brand would best communicate to you; Broderbund or Chief Architect?

How about software to help you with your income, which would most attract your interest to purchase; TurboTax or Tax Gaga?

Which is a better name for a GPS system; Nuvi or Street Pilot?

Some of these names sound like an off-planet law firm: Nuvi, Meebo Orbitz, & Gaga, LLC.

Marketing is about communicating with your prospects. Communication involves understanding. If you have to create that understanding from whole cloth (e.g., Nuvi means GPS), it is a harder sell and a more costly branding program. It can be done, but why make it difficult?

Modesty aside, I can’t tell you the number of people that have commented on how “spot on,” the name of our company is: On Target Research.

I can’t take all the credit. We simply did for ourselves what we do for our clients: we conducted a branding survey. We created a number of potential names that communicated what we did. Then we surveyed corporate Sales & Marketing Directors as well as account executives in advertising agencies – both key publics that need and use market research and surveys. On Target Research won hands down.

We encourage anyone starting a new company, rolling out a new product or considering rebranding an existing one, to select a name that reminds people what you do every time it is spoken, written, printed, or communicated in any way.

And if you really want to create a brand that makes the angels sing and the cash register ring, give us a call, or send us an email, to discuss a branding survey, because at On Target Research we conduct surveys that drives sales.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Bruce@brucewiseman.net

C 818-397-1401
F 800-680-1452

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The Hustler was Paul Newman’s greatest film.

Yes, yes, I know some of you will plead the case of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting. Others will call for Hud, The Color of Money or Cool Hand Luke.

But Fast Eddie Felson is one of the greatest characters in the history of American cinema. Newman’s performance was spellbinding.

I first met Paul Newman at a popular restaurant in Anaheim.

Perhaps “met,” is not the exact right word. I was a busboy at Carnation on Main Street in Disneyland and he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, came into the restaurant with several kids. I bused the table when they were done – cleared the dirty plates and cleaned the ashtrays. This was the first of two intimate connections with the man.

The second has its roots in the community of Toluca Lake, a small enclave next to Burbank surrounded by some of the largest movie studios in the world – Warner Bros, Universal and Disney.

Toluca Lake is also home to a high-end burger and salad hangout called, Mo’s. I moved to Toluca Lake in the nineties and was stunned to discover that Mo’s used to be called Hamptons. And Hamptons was owned by… that’s right, Paul Newman.

See? You gotta’ love that serendipity.

Which leads me to a point about marketing, a point that will bring us back to Mo’s and some of the most exotic hamburgers on planet Earth in just a moment.

But the point I want to make here has to do with whether or not you should use price as factor in your marketing strategy.

A client came to us wanting to market a telecommunication system to government entities. There were several big players in this market and the common wisdom was that pricing factors were the primary motivating factor in getting the purchasing agents by buy the system.

But the client wanted us to survey this public and see if this was true. We conducted the survey. The client was stunned. So were we, frankly. Money was not the issue. The overwhelming desire of this public was for durable, well-built telecomm systems.

The client created a PR and marketing campaign around this attribute and was extraordinarily successful.

In point of fact, in the vast majority of surveys we conduct, price is almost never the top “button.” People will often pay extra for something they want if they know it is of a finer quality.

We find this in survey after survey. The exact wording isn’t always “quality”- it depends on the product or service – but most buyers know that excellence has a price, and many are willing to pay it.

I will shop at Nordstrom knowing that I am probably paying more than I might pay elsewhere, because they have an excellent selection of high quality clothing, good service, and a liberal return policy, if I wind up not liking the apparel I bought.

And Mo’s, of Paul Newman fame, is another excellent case in point. They have, as I said, the world’s most exotic selection of hamburgers. Here’s just a few so you get a sense of the burger menu.

Baja Burger
Salsa, sour cream, and Swiss or cheddar cheese

Bleu Cheeseburger
Covered with fresh bleu cheese

Foggybottom Burger
With peanut butter and sour plum jam

Frank’s Fantasy Burger
Sour cream and black caviar

Menage a Trois
Avocado, bacon, and Swiss or cheddar cheese

Mo’s Veggie Burger
Homemade blend of mixed vegetables, nuts and grains, no dairy

Nelly Burger
Creamed horseradish and bacon

O-Solo-Mio
Mushrooms, marinara sauce, mozzarella, and Parmesan cheese

Rose street burger
Blue cheese and caramelized onions

Slam Dunkburger
Spread with sour plum jam and Dijon mustard

White Delight Bacon covered with bleu cheese dressing

There are more.

But it gets better: you can get anyone of these burgers made with Kobe beef. Kobe (the actual name is Wagyu) is an exceptionally fine breed of organically fed, Japanese cattle. It is the most succulent beef in the world. I realize this is dinning pornography to the vegetarians in the audience, but I say unto them, you can often cut a Kobe steak with your fork, and the taste is…well, it’s sinful.

Kobe burgers at Mo’s go for a few bucks more than the regulars, but I also spend the extra because they taste so damn good.

You don’t have to have a Kobe burger at Mo’s to know that customers are willing to pay extra for something they want. Whole Foods markets started in Austin, Texas with one store in 1980. Today, they are the largest organic and natural grocery store in the world with 292 stores, 53,000 employees and revenues of $8 billion a year.

Awesome growth.

All this while, Whole Foods has been the highest priced major grocery chain in the country. But that is not to say price doesn’t matter – of course it does. The point is that it isn’t always the hottest button in the marketing oven.

There are certainly those that take a “low price” position and thrive. Motel Six, which was actually $6 a night when it started in 1960, is the largest hotel chain in the United States and Wal Mart is still the largest food retailer in the country. Price is a position for these two companies. And it has worked for them, just like Nordstrom and Whole Food have their niche.

But my point is this: I find a lot of clients that think they must push the “price” button in their marketing… they think this until they see the results of the surveys we do for them.

When they have a chance to look at what their customers tell them is important, marketing strategies change.

This is not always the case, but it happens enough, that I wanted to make sure you weren’t just throwing “price” into your marketing programs without at least checking with your customers.

And that is what we have been doing for nearly a quarter of a century, finding out what our client’s customers and prospects think is valuable about their product or service and what will motivate them to buy it.

If these are questions you feel you need to have answered, or if your marketing programs simply aren’t biting the way you feel they should, contact us via phone, email, or Internet and we’ll let you know what we can do, what we charge and how long it will take.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce@brucewiseman.net
www.ontargetresearch.com
C 818-397-1401
F 800-680-1452

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Yeah, the one in China. Sometimes life is serendipitous: CCTV, the government owned television system, is doing a 5 part documentary on the financial crisis – why it occurred and what to do about it. They had heard about my new book, Crisis by Design, the Untold Story of The Global Financial Crisis  HYPERLINK “http://www.behindthewizardscurtain.com” www.behindthewizardscurtain.com and flew me over there to discuss global financial matters.

No joke. It was quite a trip. There is legitimate concern there about the financial coup d’ etat orchestrated off by the Bank for International Settlements last year.  More on this later, but you can catch a glimpse of me here as CCTV promotes past and upcoming interviews (and if you think Fox News has a large viewership, these guys own the airwaves in the most populated nation on earth).

http://you.video.sina.com.cn/m/1112850533

But the point of this little missive is a marketing one, not financial.

I checked into the Beijing Hilton and this bright Chinese kid helped me with my luggage up to my room: nice space, great work area, big HD TV screen on the wall. And he says, in good English, “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles,” I say.

He goes from cheerful to ecstatic, “LA. Wow. I love Kobe. He’s my favorite.”

It is sincere enthusiasm, not a ploy for a bigger tip, because you don’t tip in this country – which is why this is a little odd to me. You see, Yao Ming, the 7’6” giant center with the Houston Rockets, who is from Shanghai, is a virtual God in China.

A couple of nights later, I am walking down Wangfujing and find what may be the reason for my bellboy’s enthusiasm. Wangfujing, by the way, is Rodeo Drive on mega-steroids.

Every major brand in the world seems to be represented on this street which is as wide as a freeway (no cars allowed in most parts) and runs into the distance as far as the eye can see.

And it is packed with Chinese shoppers – I mean packed. The above is not a picture from my trip, but Wangfujing was only slightly less crowded the night I was there. It was a Sunday night and it was freezing – literally the temperature was freezing or below – and you could hardly move on this street due to the crowds, which go on and on and on.

And then I saw it…up to my left was perhaps the largest billboard like display I had ever seen: Kobe Bryant charging down the court like a wolf chasing a fleeting prey, but he has the ball and the basket looms. Behind Kobe, up in the left hand corner of the piece, is what has become one of the most successful brands in the world – the Nike swish.

Cold as it was, I paused and admired the positioning. Nike has become the biggest name in sports equipment (worldwide sales = $18.6 billion) by positioning itself with many of the world’s greatest athletes.

This is positioning at its simplest and yet most powerful. Positioning is achieved by tying your product, your service, your brand to something that is already in the mind of your prospects. In sports, tying the brand to the top athletes in a sport is a no brainer.

But Nike has done it with power and panache like no one else in the history of sports advertising (there was a smaller billboard further down Wangfujing with a picture of Yao Ming. He was standing stoically holding a basketball wearing his Reeboks. Yawn.)

We didn’t create Nike’s position, but our clients do include some of the largest brands in the world: from Saatchi & Saatchi, to Hilton, Courtyard by Marriott and Hitachi Consulting. We have also serviced hundreds of smaller and medium sized companies. If your marketing isn’t biting the way you think it should, positioning might make all the difference.

At On Target Research, we have been creating unique positions for our clients for more than 20 years.

“The positioning that grew out of your research was nothing short of stellar. We now have a strategically researched, laser-like position that will dramatically assist us in rolling out our new brand.” Jeff Donner, President.

If you want to discuss positioning for your brand, or any survey needs, feel free to call me at 818-397-1401 or visit us on the web at www.ontargetresearch.com.

Have a spectacular 2010!

Bruce

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I can’t tell you how surreal it felt standing under a large and oh-so-imposing image of Lenin while giving a talk to senior officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs just after the fall of Communism.

The Ministry, Russia’s Federal law enforcement body, is based on a military structure, so the room was full of uniforms hosting dazzling displays of medals and combat ribbons and hats adorned with more gold braid than a university marching band.

They were all Russian officers, most of whom, until a few months previously, had been Communists, or at least had paid it lip service. I later found out that I was the first American to ever address this group, which is probably why my initial reception was…oh, let’s call it “chilly.”

But they warmed up, actually. And by the time I was done with the talk, the room was abuzz with interest.

See, for 70 years, the primary communication line between the Russian police and the country’s citizens was a night stick. When Communism fell, the citizenry started to turn on the police.

It happened that I had gone to Moscow at this time to help open up a business college. The grand opening of the college included a conference and I’d given a talk on the use of surveys in marketing and public relations to a couple a hundred Russian entrepreneurs (a very new breed of Russian at the time). A lieutenant colonel from Ministry happened to in the audience.

After my talk, he approached me and asked if I might discuss the survey technology I had spoken about with his superiors at the Ministry.

I have always made it a habit not to turn down a request from a colonel of the Russian Internal Ministry when hanging out in Moscow. So the next morning my wife (who had accompanied me on the trip) and I found ourselves in a meeting with Colonel Stanislov Pylov, the Director of Personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. All police in Russia are federal, so this man oversaw the lives and fortunes of a million Russian Police.

We discussed many things that morning, one of which was the invitation to speak to the senior officers of the Ministry. Thus the talk beneath the visage of the Founder of the Russian Communist Party.

The other subject we discussed was the fact that the Ministry was having recruiting problems. Could the survey technology I had spoken of at the conference help the department improve its recruiting results, he wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. It could. Pylov stood up with such fanfare I thought Yeltsin had entered the office behind me. He walked over to a closet in his office and carefully removed a beautifully crafted wooden clock. He handed it to my wife as if it were a new born child and said, “This is a new day in the relations between the United States and Russia.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I briefly considered a career as a diplomat. But Reagan and Gorbachev had left things well under control, so I let the moment pass.
But a great deal came out of the relationship with Colonel Pylov, who became a good friend and ally, as well as an important partner in bringing important management skills to the Russian government.

But I digress.

I agreed to help Pylov with his recruiting problem. I won’t bore you with all the logistics of getting these surveys done, but trust me when I tell you it was a world-class challenge without a Russian speaking crew there; without any crew there.

But here is the punch line: you never know what your prospects need or want until you survey; until you ask them.

We needed to survey high school seniors, college students and returning military (the Ministry’s primary recruit pools). But we needed to train surveyors to do that, which was going to take some time. Pylov needed answers now and so I figured out a way to survey existing ministry staff to find out what had motivated them to choose a career in law enforcement in the first place.

This could give us enough initial information with which to start promoting, while we worked out the logistics of surveying others.

Why did people join the Ministry?

The answer will floor you. At least it did me. Even though I knew the only real answer would come from the surveys, in the back of my mind I thought it would be something like, “Catch bad guys,” or “Serve Mother Russia,” or even, “Protect our citizens.”

But remember this is just months after the fall of Communism. Almost no one owned anything. The state owned all. The general population certainly didn’t own cars, for instance.

The number one reason people joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs was because… they could ride the Metro for free – cops didn’t pay. That was it.

I don’t have the time to tell you the whole story, which rolled out through the early 1990s. But I usually end these short vignettes with a success story.

While this one is a bit unusual, and sounds rather self-aggrandizing, I tell it to make the point. And it was kind of fun.

One my second trip to Moscow, a few months after our initial work with him, Pylov picked me up in a Ministry car and drove me to the studio of one of Russia’s preeminent sculptors, Sergei Bychkov. I was ushered to a chair in a studio surrounded by huge statues of famous figures from Russian history. And Bychkov proceeded to sculpt a bust of me, which was cast in bronze and later placed in the Hall of Heroes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

This is not the kind of thing you wake up in the morning and think, “I ought to get my bust done in bronze and have it placed in the Internal Ministry’s Hall of Heroes today.” It’s just a little out there. But it shows you what a happy client can do (especially one that is highly placed in Russian law enforcement).

Busts aside, the moral of the story is a simple but important one: don’t guess at what your prospects think is valuable about what you sell; survey first. I promise it will pay big dividends.

I should know, our survey company has been getting these kinds of results for almost a quarter of a century.

If you need to know what is going to motivate your prospects to buy from you, call us at 818-397-1401 or visit us at www.ontargetresearch.com

Dasvidanya.

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO

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White sandy beaches. Water so pristine it laps at the shores like liquid topaz. Lush, verdant foliage that blankets a nearby mountain where parrots in brilliant, multi-colored plumage await a Kodak moment.

And then the invasion starts.

Charging out of the rain forest at the bottom of the mountain are dozens of gorgeous young women in bikinis.

Cut to a semi-nerdy guy in a bathing suit standing on the beach spritzing himself with a bottle of we don’t know what.

Back to the babes, whose numbers are growing as they charge senor nerd like it’s the first day of the  semi-annual Nordstrom’s Sale. The camera pans to the other side of our hero where another contingent of bikini-clad marauders are stampeding across the sands from the other direction.

Okay. They have my attention. It’s an ad for some kind of men’s cologne I figure, but the girls, now numbering a hundred or so, are making a fashion statement that those of us concerned with matters of…eh…style cannot possibly ignore.

They have reached him now. Our guy is surrounded by swarms of beautiful women. The camera switches to the viewpoint of the guy, whose vision is blurry. He puts on a pair of glasses. His vision sharpens only to see the girls frowning at him now. Some are disgusted.

They all turn and walk away as the screen displays the message that he “Should have gone to Specsavers.”

Specsavers is a discount vision chain and the glasses the guy put on were dorky, not, we assume, from Specsavers. Of note, this ad is a takeoff of a similar commercial for a deodorant (Lynx) of a few years earlier.

But here’s the deal: The Lynx commercial ends with the guy getting the girls. The deodorant attracts the women and they stay. The guy is in seventh heaven.

The Specsaver commercial ends on a loss. The women are  disgusted and have turned away from him; our hero is bummed out. Yet, the creators of this advertisement think that this toxic ending will motivate viewers to want to buy the brand of glasses that the guy isn’t wearing.

Are they brain dead?

Why in the world would you associate your brand with a loss? The commercial must have cost some serious coin: it was shot in Columbia and there were 100 bikini-qualified gals in this spot. (My heart goes out to the poor casting director.)

But, you get my point. They transport more than 100 cast and crew members to South America and shoot a commercial that associates the sponsor’s brand with…paradise lost.

The company’s marketing director should be water-boarded with the spray the nerd was using on the beach.

Let’s take a quick look at something that is much simpler, costs next to nothing and communicates a message instantly.

It’s a print ad.  A picture of a french fry, one end of which is charred to a crisp and smoking. In the corner of the ad is the familiar Heinz label which says “Hot Ketchup”.

A piece of simple marketing brilliance, says I.

A good ad does not tell the message, (He should have gone to Specsavers) it shows it, (burnt French fry); the visual delivers the message in an instant.

That said, the good, the bad and the ugly are not always this obvious.

Sometimes a professional eye can help polish the message and increase the response. On Target assists companies to fine tune their marketing so that it sings to their customers like Tony Bennett on a summer night in Central Park

We bring 25 years of marketing and PR expertise to a review of your marketing materials, websites, and proposed press releases for their ability to communicate to your public and drive sales and income.

This service is fast, dreadfully inexpensive and will help ensure that your marketing materials are doing their job – creating interest and reach for your product or service.

Call or email if we can be of service.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
818-397-1401

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It is a magnificent spring morning. You ease your car into your parking space at the office, turn the key to off and step into the brisk morning sunshine. Walking across the parking lot, you wonder how it is that an evening’s rain can clean things so purely that it smells like the air just took a bath. As you bound through the front door of the office you see the receptionist just settling down to her desk, a cup of Starbucks finest occupies her immediate attention. “Good morning Melinda, how’s it going?”

”Fine, Mr. Crystal, just fine.”

But guess what, Melinda is not fine. She had a fight with her boyfriend last night, she is hung over, and she is not “fine.”

“Fine” is a social answer to the question. It is not an honest answer. It may well be that you really didn’t want an honest answer to that question and it’s not that Melinda “lied” in any harmful sense at all- more of a PR handling of the boss. But this little vignette illustrates one of the most critical aspects of effective market research–getting an honest answer to a question, a survey question.
Without really being aware of it, many people feel compelled to say that they “agree” with something whether they actually feel that way or not.

”Isn’t that a magnificent painting?” your friend remarks.

”Why yes it is” you say not wanting to be rude or hurt their feelings by replying that you really think it looks like it was drawn by a six year old on a Cap’n Crunch high.

But art is not my point here; effective market research that helps advertising or PR campaigns increase sales and income is the point. And to achieve that one must start with honest answers to survey questions.

By actual study, these are best achieved by one on one–individual–surveys, not in a group where people think that their answer is going to be heard and or perhaps considered by their peers. The phenomenon that we often refer to as “peer pressure”–really kind of a compulsion to be in agreement with others–does in fact exert itself in focus group situations and can easily distort the results of the research. Understandably, this can misdirect an advertising, marketing or public relations campaign resulting in red, not black ink , on the bottom line.

”That is how the industry operates,” some say, “everybody uses focus groups.”

Well, not everybody, and use them or not, the results from focus group research can be highly questionable at best. And I for one am not enthralled by the fact that such results can, and in some cases do, give the market research industry a bad name.

It has amazed me over the years that 80% to 90% of the advertising and marketing executives that I have spoken with “admit” to me, as if they were telling their wife they had been having an affair, that they have had bad or questionable results from focus group research. In discussing our services with agencies or directly with clients one of the first things that I say is “we do not use focus groups, we have found that results from them can be unreliable, we do personal one on one surveys” and I almost always get a sigh of relief. In several cases, ad executives have lowered their voices to whispers and said “I know, those things don’t work, I hate them.”

In a few cases my remarks have prompted ad men to launch into horror stories of campaigns gone awry because of misplaced reliance on focus groups. The simple truth is that one-on-one interviews of individuals will yield remarkably more accurate and usable information than a group of people sitting in a room with a “facilitator”.

Does mean that market research or public opinion research is worthless or, worse yet, damaging? Nothing could further from the truth–unless it is done incorrectly. Market research and surveys are a truly vital element to any campaign. Done correctly, the heavens part and sales and income soar. But the information that you get must be accurate and represent what the customer or potential customer actually thinks or would do regarding the product or service or issue. Why are focus groups less likely to get that result?

One reason is the point mentioned above, people tend to be less forthcoming when sitting in a room with a group of other people than if engaged in a personal one on one conversation by someone who is truly interested in their opinion. If all of the other ladies in a room say that they think that the new dish soap packaging is attractive then…. Well yes, I guess you could call it that. But put this woman in a grocery store with her shopping cart and the new product gets bypassed.

Why? Because she is influenced, regardless of how many times the group “facilitator” tells her not to be, by what others in the room say regarding the product or service being “researched.”

Added to this is the fact that she is being “paid” for her opinion. Almost all market research of this kind operates by compensating those being surveyed in some way. And regardless of the pleas for impartiality from the company the gift or money paid inclines some of the respondents to try to answer the questions “favorably”.

Some years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to an infomercial producer who (wisely) wanted to determine the attitudes, likes and dislikes of women regarding a cosmetic product for which she was being hired to produce an infomercial. The budget for the infomercial was to be in the $600,000 range and the producer thought it wise to see what women thought about this product before having her client cough up more than a half million dollars.

She wanted focus groups. I told her that we didn’t do them and why. But the producer was adamant. That, combined with my friend’s pleadings, led us to conduct some focus groups for this product.

I will not say that the information gained was worthless. It was not. But some ancillary results also showed us that some of the responses to the questions about the product were definitely affected by the lovely earrings these women received to participate in the focus group.

This does not mean that “majority opinion” is not important? To the contrary, it is critical. You need to know, very specifically what your public agrees on–what they consider valuable about what is being offered. But the way to obtain that information is to conduct one on one personal interviews and then tabulate the answers of each one into the overall results.

An example. The Senior Vice President of Marketing for the First National Bank of Des Moines (all resemblance to institutions living or dead is purely coincidental) wants to increase the bank’s deposit base among small to medium sized businesses and is considering an advertising campaign to this public.

You have this public contacted on the phone or at a business convention of some kind, they are asked qualifying questions to ensure that they are the right prospective public, and then asked questions such as:

”What is the most important factor in selecting a bank for your business?’

Sixty two percent (62%) say “a personal relationship with the branch manager.”

You now run a campaign on all of the media channels that reach this public with a headline that says at First National you can always have “a personal relationship with the branch manager” (assuming that you can deliver on that promise) –graphics to match.

You do not run “We are a relationship bank” or “at First National personal relationships are important to us” or anything else. You take exactly what your prospects say and give it back to them and then stand back and watch the business from this market segment grow. Why? Because you just personally asked them what the most important factor was in selecting a bank and they told you. Don’t change their words to something that you think they mean. They said what they said, use it, give it to them. This kind of accuracy rarely comes from a focus group.

Sometimes it is unbelievably simple. A small company that operated a chain of carpet cleaning franchises came to us several years ago to help increase the response to their direct marketing materials.

We surveyed the decision-makers for such services (mostly housewives) and found that overwhelmingly the main reason that professional carpet cleaning companies were used was to “remove spots.”

Not surprising in retrospect.

The company subsequently engaged in a major direct marketing campaign with a flyer that had a “spot” on it and said on the cover page that their service “removed spots.”

As the campaign rolled out, the company’s income increased steadily from $120,000 per month to $327,000 over a period of ten months.

This isn’t rocket science. Of course, you have to do your demographic research to identify your market, your public. And you need to know how to get through to people exactly what questions to ask and how to tabulate and analyze the results. But that done, get the straightforward information to your creative people without having someone superimpose id and egos all over the data, that’s is a sure-fire formula for wasted advertising dollars.

This kind of income generating research does not come from focus groups, it comes from looking into the minds of your public with personal, one on one surveys and with questions written and asked in a way that gets honest answers and reactions. Yes, it takes professional skill but, done correctly, can make the difference between a so-so campaign and one that can drive sales and income through the roof.

Which brings up another point, please don’t listen to all of this psychobabble that floats around the periphery of the market research community. Good market research is very straightforward. One of the major agencies in New York called us in to evaluate some research after a campaign had bombed.

This was research that had been done for a fortune 1000 financial services company. The research director was a psychologist who had “interpreted” the survey results and suggested a campaign in which the client was the father figure and their customers were to be viewed as children and….Yuck.

What staggered me was that senior management had bought into this stuff. Good research must come from the minds of the company’s customers or potential customers.

Whether for advertising, marketing or public relations campaigns, surveys can provide the magic key to the door of increased sales and income. But that key must be forged from by honest and straight forward responses from individuals in your public (and then tabulated), not by a group of people who have been paid to kick the concept around in a room and not what someone else “thinks” it should be.

To quote Al Ries and Jack Trout the authors of the ground-breaking book, Positioning the Battle for your Mind

”In determining the state of the prospect’s mind, it is important not to let corporate egos get in the way. You get the answers to (positioning questions) from the market-place, not from the marketing manager.”

Done in this way, you may well come to recognize market research as the foundation upon which consistently successful media campaigns are built.

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