Disclaim check

We consumers must need protecting: I see more advertisements that include disclaimers. Pharmaceutical ads warn that a medication that treats hot flashes may cause hot flashes. Distillers encourage us to drink in moderation, with sober-looking actors surrounded by a bevvy of beverages. Sportsbooks encourage people with gambling problems to seek help from any one of a myriad of state agencies.

Recently, we created an ad for a lender and the disclaimer took up 40% of the ad space. The ad copy was 140 words; the disclaimer was 883 words, rendered in six point type.

Do disclaimers sway consumers? Unlikely. They provide air cover for advertisers that are under the thumb of regulatory agencies or the targets of class action lawsuits. Marketing and educational value is zilch.

There is a new twist in disclosure: I notice podcast advertisers playing disclaimers at high speed and low volume. One advertiser, Chumba Casino, condenses what might be 30 seconds of a disclaimer into two seconds of jumbled audio. Who is being served by this nonsense?

I realize that, in this litigious world, disclaimers help keep class-action lawsuits at bay. But man, there has to be a better way to educate consumers. 

Your milage may vary.

The burning bush

Back in the day, I would share an esoteric fact about new technology with my business partner. He would momentarily fix me with a blank stare and then ask, "How does that affect UCLA's chances of going to the Rose Bowl?"

 

Point taken.  How does this affect me?

 

Similarly, we sometimes react to news of breakthrough technology by asking ourselves, "How will this change our business?" But is this the proper prism through which one should view technological change?

 

I liken navigating through our changing technological world as hiking from Death Valley to the top of Mount Whitney. The journey begins in an arid desert, stark and primitive. As you progress, elevation changes bring new terrain. Plant and animal life become more abundant. The climate changes, as does your apparel. Perhaps you encounter the burning bush, which signifies that you are the chosen leader. Forget that last part.

 

So, too, we navigate through our lives encountering new technology, some of which is life changing. Artificial Intelligence navigates us and guides us through traffic. Fintech enables us to move money around instantly and effortlessly. A wristwatch records our temperature and heart rate and notifies emergency responders if it detects that we are in distress.

 

Each of these things will likely change our perspective on how other things should perform. If Waze can calculate my arrival time to the minute, why do I have to wait for 45 minutes in my doctor's office? If I can instantly transfer $1,000 to my brother Fred, why does the bank put a three-day hold on my deposit? New technology raises our expectations for how things should work.

 

We often hear or read about new technology and wonder how it may affect our business. Will it lower the barrier to entry? Will it enable a new competitive advantage? Do we have to reinvent ourselves? This is provincial thinking that can often mask the effects of technological evolution on our industry.

 

Rather than drawing a straight line from the advent of new technology to your business, my advice to you is to view technological change in a broader sense: how will it shape consumer expectations for what I offer? Then, consider how you might deliver similar benefits using a different business model or technology.

 

Second, don't adopt new technology because it's vogue or sexy. Choose technology that is the right tool for the task, regardless of whether it sizzles.  Applying new technology that sizzles may be akin to killing flies with sledgehammers.

 

Next, peek over the fence now and then at other industries wholly unrelated to yours to see how they are adopting new technology or new business models to protect themselves from disruption. While their business may be different, their strategy can be relevant.

 

Finally, be preemptive. Look for the nexus where a new technology confronts an old problem.

 

 

Take a stand and build a brand

Want to build your personal brand? Adopt content-based marketing. Simply put, it's about publishing articles, posts and blogs to advance a point of view or share your specialized perspective on technology, emerging business models or social trends. When done properly and consistently, it shapes you as a subject matter expert and thought leader.

Let's talk about the mechanics of writing a modern message.

Develop an outline

Step one is to create a blueprint of your message. This forces you to plumb the depths of your thinking and outline a fully fleshed message.

I use a product called Mind Manager when I outline a piece. It's a tree-branch-leaf approach to organize your thinking.  Here's an example.

 

My "mindmap" guides me through the writing process. It keeps me out of the swamp and ensures that I focus on themes that underpin the big idea. It may require 2-3 days of development, but it saves time and reduces frustration when I face the bull that is the sheet of paper with no writing on it.

Be succinct

Legend has it that someone once asked Abraham Lincoln how long a man's legs should be. "Long enough to reach the ground," was his reply. Similarly, your writing should be long enough to convey your big idea—without fluff or filler.

Writing that meanders or is stretched to meet a prescribed word count dilutes your message and fatigues the reader. I realize I'm up against prevailing wisdom on how long LinkedIn or blog posts should be based on measurements that purport to show opening and sharing metrics. But speaking as a consumer, I find writing that is brief and to the point to be more interesting and engaging.

Keep articles to 1,200-2,000 words unless the publisher requires otherwise. Blog posts should be 400-750 words. And LinkedIn posts should top out at 400 words. While there are exceptions to the rule, if you blow through the word count, ask yourself if you're trying to cover too much ground. It may be better to spin additional material into a new piece.

Make it personal

Write in the first person using "I," "me" and "we." These are your thoughts, and you should own them. The first-person narrative gives your writing credibility, and it conveys that these are your ideas and points of view.

In the same vein, try to write using the active voice. At the risk of sounding like your high school English teacher, the subject of the sentence should perform the action. Instead of "attention must be paid," say "we must pay attention." Rather than "my first assignment will always be remembered," say "I will always remember my first assignment."

You will produce succinct and direct communication when you adopt this approach.

Find a good editor

Good editing produces good writing. While it's possible to edit your own work, you probably won't do so with a dispassionate eye. An editor will catch grammatical and spelling errors, spot hackneyed phrases and remove redundancies, the kind of stuff you might overlook.

A good editor will also help you maintain a consistent voice and develop your personality across your catalog. Your voice should become familiar to your audience as it projects your personality.

A final thought: don't agonize over every word or phrase when you write. Let the words tumble off your frontal lobe and on to the paper. Clean-up is a part of the editing process and you will probably go through several--even many--drafts before your work is ready for prime time.

And remember that writing is a muscle. The more you write, the easier and better your writing becomes.

So, go ahead and join the chorus.

When it comes to e-mail, thin is in

I can be accused of being too obsessed with detail, but usually it’s the small stuff that separates us from the great unwashed.  Like the length of your necktie (it should just touch your belt buckle) and how you tip the chef at a teppanyaki restaurant (fold and palm the currency and pass it to him as you shake hands).

This time I’m obsessed with e-mails; in particular, the length of e-mails, the lapse in formality and the use of elaborate signature lines.

For most of us, the most frequent “touches” occur via e-mail messages, as we interact with sales, accounting, customer and technical support and operations.  These touches create brand impressions, as the contents represent the acumen of your workforce, your understanding of the customer’s question or problem and your ability to engender a positive customer experience.

E-mail should be viewed the same way as Time Magazine’s letters to the editor from the nineteen eighties.  Back then, letters to the editor were two, maybe three sentences long and delivered the message succinctly and with a dash of élan. In the same way, e-mails should communicate the message quickly while making it clear what action is required on the part of the recipient. 

Too often, instructions and important content are buried in long e-mails and ignored or overlooked by the reader. Why? Because we all suffer from the same poverty of time. People do not read lengthy e-mails. And they shun e-mails from senders who tend to write lengthy prose.

Keep your message brief and lead with the action you’d like the recipient to take (e.g. “This message recaps our discussion from earlier today and contains three action items for you, highlighted below”).

With respect to message formality: I have some clients who use salutation lines (e.g. Dear Dave), and I respond in kind.  Generally, though, for the sake of brevity and readability (most of my e-mails are probably read on Blackberry and iPhone devices), I disdain the salutation and get to the heart of the matter.

I do not use texting short-hand in e-mails, because I believe e-mails are the equivalent of business casual dress.  You’re not wearing a three-piece suit, but at the same time you’re not wearing flip-flops and cargo shorts.  “UR” is expressed as “you are”, and you’ll never see “LMFAO” in an e-mail from me.  This is still business communication.

Finally, we have the e-mail signature line; what has become an altar of sorts for the sender.  E-mail signature lines can include a name (occasionally formatted in a script font), title, company name, five or six phone numbers, a URL, and an e-mail address (this one kills me because the sender’s e-mail address is in the header).  They can also be festooned with logos, like the company mark (usually oversixed) logo and Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn icons.  To top it off there may also be a six-line disclaimer that basically says, “If you get this e-mail by mistake, delete it and forget you ever saw it, lest we beat you with the knotty end of a piece of long pine.”

I love getting an e-mail message with the response “OK”, and six inches (or 600 pixels) of signature. 

Come on, people. Do we need all of that content embedded multiple times in an e-mail chain? It can be irritating as hell to scroll down using an iPhone to get the gist of an e-mail exchange.

Here’s my signature line.  Suits me just fine.  

Dave Ross | Principal | Bazooka Communications | Direct 714.997.0385 | Mobile 714.715.9976 

Privacy is a marketing issue

In an earlier life I was responsible for raising awareness for consumers’ privacy rights for a division of TRW that maintained real property files.  The focus was on identifying high-risk areas where information we sold or distributed might be used in a way that a consumer would be disadvantaged or threatened, thereby jeopardizing our access to data and creating brand risk for the company.

It was said that the division’s general counsel was informed by the company president that, if the company's name appeared in a headline relating to a privacy incident, he’d be out of a job. That necessarily made all executives in the company disciples on the privacy issue.

A component of our current practice involves working with clients to help them understand and risk-protect their businesses on the subject of privacy.  We advise them to treat privacy as a marketing issue, not as a compliance issue.  That is, in today’s marketplace, trust is the cornerstone of any healthy business relationship.  Mis-use of information that a customer relays to you (for example, via a Web form or by virtue of how they access your services) diminishes that trust and jeopardizes the relationship.

 

Treating privacy as a marketing issue is a powerful construct.  The perspective changes, from “what does it take to comply with our privacy policy?” to “how would our customers react if they new what we were doing with their information?”  Your customer becomes a de facto participant (albeit imaginary) in any product or marketing strategy discussion.

It will also alter the look and feel of privacy disclosures you're obligated to provide consumers. What is generally unreadable today will become more succinct, explicit and consumer-friendly.

I learned long ago from a former mentor in privacy, Marty Abrams, that what consumers find most annoying about mis-use of information centers on the element of surprise: information provided by a consumer for one purpose suddenly turned up in a different application.

Judging by how willing we are these days to spill our guts using social media, I suspect privacy is becoming less of a concern for the mainstream.  My gut tells me that we’re headed for a backlash; at some point, great hordes of today’s consumers are going to feel pangs of regret at having unleashed volumes of intimate detail about themselves over the Internet.  Will that result in greater regulation of information under the guise of consumer protection?  I’m not so sure.

Regardless… stay close to the privacy issue, look at information use from the perspective of your customer, and don’t blindside your audience with information you may hold about them.

Breaking new ground in business

In my last post, I spoke about using trade shows as a centerpiece event for securing new business and deepening relations with current clients.  In this post, I will talk about how you can use a trade show event as an opportunity to get client feedback on new product or business initiatives. This piece focuses on three elements:

·         How to distill a vision or concept into a clear visual that can be validated by customers

·         Engaging company executives as active participants in concept-testing with customers

·         Facilitating an ideation session where executives pool their observations to form a go-forward plan

The year was 1996.  I was working for TRW in the real estate information business, and we were eyeing the mortgage industry segment as a growth segment. Our thinking was that we managed databases that cataloged consumer credit, property valuation and title, so we were in an ideal position to automate the underwriting component of mortgage origination. Our question was not, “Can we do this,” but “Will the market embrace TRW as a company repositioning itself as more than a data vendor?” In 1996 the mortgage industry was made up of numerous companies jockeying for the role as “automation enabler” in mortgage origination. We were one of many.

TRW was a big ship and to steer 90 degrees right-rudder, we needed buy-in from all hands.  Our division president was on board, but we had a dozen or so executives who needed to understand and embrace the vision.  We chose the 1996 Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Conference as our research venue and retained Grant Thornton to help us set up interviews with industry thought-leaders.

We reserved a suite in a nearby hotel and began setting interviews with ratings agency, GSE, mortgage banking and bank executives, and primary dealers issuing mortgage-related securities.  We paired our managers into interviewing teams, gave them crash courses in the mortgage finance industry, and matched them to interviewees. 

We whittled our vision down to a single page; a pictograph that represented the mortgage finance segment as a hierarchy.  At the bottom were the primary sources of information needed to underwrite a loan: credit, collateral and title.  Above that was a line separating content from “the deciders”: the underwriters who used the information to give a thumbs-up or –down on a loan deal.  At the top of the pictograph were the banks who provided the funds and the buy and sell sides of the secondary market.  The operative questions were twofold: can the role of underwriting be automated, and would the market embrace TRW as an “above the line” provider of more than content… could it become “the decider”?

This visual allowed us to cover a lot of ground in the interview.  Which segments would drive change in mortgage underwriting? What was each segment’s proper role in the change process? What were the limitations in automated underwriting? What were the risks and who would assume them?

We conducted thirty or so executive interviews in the course of two-and-a-half days.  We interviewed in pairs so one person could lead the discussion while the other took notes. Using company executives to conduct the interviews helped everyone internalize the opportunity and uncover new information from a multi-disciplinary perspective, while advancing the company’s understanding of the mortgage finance industry.

The conference ended Wednesday morning, but we stayed for an additional day to debrief as a team.  We hired a moderator to keep us on track and ensure that we had a detailed list of action items.  The meeting ended with a consensus and a mandate: we had identified a valid strategic opportunity and we must concentrate our efforts to make it a reality.

There are many ways to conduct research that identifies or validates business opportunities.  I am particularly fond of this method.  As a team we rolled up our sleeves, got our hands dirty and, by doing so, made the information real.  It gave us a sense of ownership in the discovery process.  And it generated momentum for the change process.

The show must go on

I distinctly remember the 1998 Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Convention held in Chicago.  I was a Vice President of Sales and Marketing for First American Real Estate Solutions and with an odd-hour to kill, I was working the booth.  In strode a diminutive, but unmistakably familiar man: Franklin Delano Raines, the Chairman of Fannie Mae.  No badge, just quietly cruising the floor, getting a feel for things.

Frank was fresh off of a gig with the Clinton administration where he served as Director of OMB.  He was the first OMB director in recent history to preside over a balanced federal budget. I had met Frank in 1995, when I accompanied Van Skilling, head of TRW Information Systems, on a courtesy call to Washington.

“Frank,” I said, grabbing his hand like we were golfing buddies, “on behalf of the American people, I want to say ‘thank you for the balanced budget'.”  We spent a few minutes chatting and I was able to introduce him to my boss, Dennis Gilmore.

For a brief moment, I was somebody, as Marlon Brando said in the movie “On the Waterfront.”

That’s the thing about trade shows:  moments of success are, in part, a matter of luck.  But, as the saying goes, luck is what happens when fortune meets preparation.

The Big Dance

The MBA National Convention was our prom.  It was where we unveiled new products, made major announcements and signed big deals we had been working all year.  The accountants may orient around a fiscal year, but our sales year began and ended with the MBA conference.

We would spend more than six figures on registrations, travel and entertainment expenses, promotions and a hospitality suite where we conferred with major clients.  We invested far too much coin to set up shop and fish off the end of the pier.  In the weeks leading up to the conference, we worked the phones to fill our meeting agendas, what we called our "dance cards.”  We timed contract negotiations so we could hold signing parties at the convention, where our president would ink deals and establish executive alliances. 

The cardinal sin was taking a co-worker out for dinner.  Those were special times reserved for special clients.

When is your prom?

You must have one major trade show event that dominates your industry.  Where anybody who is anybody is in attendance.  There is probably no more convenient and efficient way to touch your customers and prospects than by working that show. Make it the centerpiece of your marketing plan.

What’s your plan?

There are a million details to attend to in a major trade show if you’re planning for success.  You must define roles and responsibilities, drive to clearly-stated objectives and plan for contingencies (what happens if the booth doesn’t arrive?). It’s the kind of event that begs for a plan.

Everyone who attends has a role to play and must have their own set of objectives – or they don’t attend.  If you’re displaying or demonstrating products, everyone from the president on down must be checked out and capable of speaking to features and benefits. 

Your trade show budget (an all-up budget, including travel and people-cost) should be offset by revenue targets for new sales or renewals. If the return isn’t clear or realistic, cut the budget.

These events are not slapped together in the last week; they are scripted months in advance. Plan for success and create a sense of urgency. It’s exhausting, but worth the effort.