Level2wo

Marketing – What Recession?

During this volatile time in the economy, with home prices slashed, foreclosure rates edging higher, and stocks hitting all-time lows, there are inevitably two views or ways of looking at the situation. Depending on your own situation, as well as your view on the state of the economy, stock prices heading lower is an indicator to sell. For others, certain stocks now seem like a bargain, and so they are on a buying spree, as they believe stocks can only head higher. The same goes with marketing.

To understand why you should sometimes go against the tide, think about the benefits of doing the opposite of what your competition is doing–or planning on doing. Say you’re selling widgets (yes, I’m going to use widgets here), and because of recession fears and all of the good things a recession brings (yes, sarcasm), all of a sudden everyone that sells widgets cuts their budgets because of recession fears and projections based on those fears. Should you do the same? The answer to that question depends on a lot of factors. But what if you don’t cut your budget, and what if you don’t follow your competitors into tight-wad-ness?

The thing about a recession is yes, while companies are adjusting their marketing to what they’re seeing and how they’re being affected, certain things are also dropping in terms of cost–such as ad costs and other costs associated with marketing. It’s sort of like the buy low-sell high concept in the stock market (although, obviously, there are some basic differences–all of which I won’t go into here).

Being the kid on the block that’s showing up everywhere during a bad time is not such a bad thing to be. Building your brand and building market share on the cheap is often an effective way to not only boost awareness in those channels but to stimulate activity in other areas, such as online. Marketing is about awareness, and if you’re everywhere (especially if your product or service is viewed more as a commodity than not), then you’ll likely get the prospects either on the fence or indifferent to your product/service.

The great thing about the internet is that it allows smaller companies to compete with larger companies, and during a recession, as larger companies cut back on spending (especially if they’re public companies with shareholders to think about), smaller companies are able to exploit their advantage in terms of flexibility. Start viewing economic cycles not as your time for me-too thinking but as a time for (yes, here comes cliche-ville to brighten up the day) thinking outside of the box. Make some noise when everyone is quiet.

Cause a stir when everything is tranquil. You wait all year to time your marketing so that you get the best ROI–so why not view bad economic times as good marketing times? If you do, you just may make your marketing that much more effective.

10 Marketing Faux Pas (Sometimes, You Just Need a Laugh)

Having lived abroad, and speaking more than one language, I’ve seen my fair share of marketing mistakes that were just plain hilarious.

Today, I’d like to share some of the ones I’ve come across (and some you have probably already chuckled about). Hope you enjoy them. (And yes, the links are meant to be odd and funny too)

1. The classic: Chevrolet Nova (Yes, the car). In Spanish, Nova, pronounced “No Va,” translates to “Doesn’t go.” Not a great name for a car, obviously.

2. Life Fitness’ LF logo (4F in the Army means that someone is physically unfit for duty). Unfortunately for Life Fitness, the logo looks like 4F because the design superimposed the L over the F.

3. Coca-Cola, when it made it’s journey into China, was given a similar sounding name in chinese. Problem is the characters that were used actually meant “Bite the wax tadpole.” Now that’s unfortunate.

4. In Arabic, the Jolly Green Giant that gives us all that gives us all of his veggies translates to “Intimidating Green Ogre.”

5. Waterpik, that lovely laser shot of water machine you use to clean your teeth, has to go by another name in Denmark. Why? Because the word ‘Pik’ is the Danish word for the male genitalia.

6. This goes out to my friends at Bacardi (Yes, I do have one or two), besides the bottles in my cabinet. Bacardi once put out a fruit drink called “Pavian.” Pavian, in German, means baboon. Not sure that’s what Bacardi was going for.

7. Gerber, in French, means to stack/pile, or ‘vomiting.’ Needless to say, Gerber is not very popular in France for baby food.

8. Not to pick on Gerber, but when the company moved its products into Africa, they didn’t make any changes for culture–they used the same packaging as in the U.S. Problem: In Africa it’s common to put pictures of what’s inside the package. What was on the package, you ask? Pictures of cute babies.

9. Perdue chicken once had a slogan that went something like “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” In Spanish, the translation became “It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.” Ouch.

10. And one of my favorites–because I live in Seattle and drink Lattes pretty much every day–mostly in the morning. Latte in Italy means milk, and in English it’s that great coffee drink we love so much. In Germany, however, Latte means erection.
Bottom line? Make sure that when expanding to different countries, take into consideration the translations you make, as well as any cultural implications that may exist in your new market. A few minutes researching the literal translations (as well as colloquial ones) could save you a lot of time, money, and face, later on.

 Check out some other articles on Level2wo topics.

Successful websites can work in many capacities: as a marketing tool, for lead generation, a presentation, or to share media, to name a few. Whatever the case may be, they all share one thing in common: great design. The following list is a basic checklist of the minimums you should at least be aware of when designing your corporate website, or any other website you’d like to see the light of day.

Color
When devising or approving a color scheme for your website, you must take into account several considerations:

• How will your logo fit into the color scheme?
• Does the color scheme reflect the image of your company?
• Does the color scheme connect emotionally with your customers?
• Do you have a proper balance of contrast?
• Is the color usage consistent throughout the website?
• And on and on…

Color is tied to emotion, so careful choice of color is important. Use color sparingly. Color should not even be apparent; instead, color should be used subconsciously to complement your message. Use color to bond emotionally with your customers. Here is an excellent article on color theory.

Navigation
People usually come to your website looking for something. They could be looking for information, your product, a manual, etc., but whatever it is that they are searching for by going to your website, your website must present a clear path to what someone may be looking for. Your website must accommodate for every scenario, and in turn, there may likely be more than one path to the same solution. Your users, however, should never find themselves lost when navigating your website; prominent, easy navigation should always be available. A search function on your website is a great tool for lost users, and Search can act as a life-vest in the sea of information on your website.

Whatever the case may be, you do not want a frustrated user to get lost and hit that ‘X’ button in the upper right hand corner. Always provide a way out for your users, or a way back to the beginning, or Home page of your site. Usability testing usually exposes areas that may be confusing to end users, so it is vital that you test your website with someone other than yourself.

Legibility
How many times have you found an informative website, only to realize your eyes are hurting after the 4th paragraph? I’ve actually copied and pasted articles into Word just to be able to read it. White font on a dark background is the worst offender. It is so offensive that one must wonder if the designer planned on blinding his or her users. Another faux pas to look out for is font being placed directly over an image. If your site is the latest trendy webzine, ok, but if you’re trying to communicate with your user base, they simply won’t read it, or find some other website with similar information to bookmark.

Information Hierarchy
Information Hierarchy is part of an Information Architect’s job. Good IAs analyze all the information at hand, and they organize it into a properly formatted schema. Laying out all the information into a hierarchy is the basis for your navigation and site layout. Due to the organic nature of a website, an open architecture must support future information in order for your website to maintain its usability, i.e., extensibility is key. This important aspect of website development is often overlooked by large and small companies, and it’s one that needs to be addressed before the site is even built, if possible. Information Architecture provides the blueprint for your website. It ensures nothing is missed or lost when transferred to the live site. It is a means of taking a large amount of data and mapping that data out to support your users’ needs. By systematically organizing your site’s information hierarchy (also known as Information architecture), gaps in usability will be exposed and easily corrected before the first code of your website is even written.

Sitemaps
One reason for creating a website in the first place is for exposure, and the best way to get exposure is to have search engines index your pages. One way for a search engine to index your website completely is through the use of hyper links; however, this does not guarantee your entire site being indexed. You may, in the process of creating your great site, miss a link. An easy way to control how search engines will index your site is through a sitemap.xml file. This is a search engine specific file, used by the search engines to index your site. You control what is indexed and what extra information is passed to the search engine. This file sits in the home directory of your website and is automatically referenced by search engines once a spider hits your site. It is not a guarantee your site will be indexed, but once it is indexed, you can rest assure that all your pages listed in the sitemap.xml file will be considered.

Quick loading pages
This is a more important characteristic of your website than you may think. Heavy multimedia downloads, insufficient server resources, poor, inefficiently coded pages, all contribute to slow loading pages. If you are going to throw at your customers everything but the kitchen sink, be sure your ISP has plenty of bandwidth and processing power to back up the loads you will put on it. For end users, there is nothing more annoying than waiting for a flash presentation to load just to access your website. With quick loading pages, website users can get to the information and carry out their tasks with minimal effort. You do not want to scare away customers and have them running to your competitor because it takes too long to load the first page your users lands on.

Images
Images break up long text and allow you to reinforce your marketing message. One of the first forms of communications was through the use of images. Think cave drawings and hieroglyphics. Use that innate ability of familiarity with images to trigger a connection with your audience. We are, after all, visual beings. By using well thought out, compelling images alongside content, your customers will be more receptive towards your message. You can also use images as a way to illustrate complex concepts. The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” absolutely holds true in web design.

Using Templates
There are a plethora of templates out there for building websites. And many are good; however, you will always find limitations with templates. Templates also require a pretty knowledgeable coder to go in and hack the template to meet your requirements. Templates may cost you less initially, but in the long run maintenance, customization, and updates will offset your savings. Another issue you risk running into is that same template being used by many other websites. Here at Level2wo, marketing is about standing out with your audience, building up and maintaining the perception (and hopefully reality) that you are a leader in your market. Using a cookie cutter template that Acme Inc. used for their website, dilutes your brand, and may even be detrimental to what you are trying to achieve.

The Scripts
Scripts, as we will refer to them, are installed Content Management Systems (CMS) and Blogging software like Wordpress and Drupal. These systems are great for maintenance and great as a platform to build your website upon. We definitely recommend a custom theme for your website in order to stay away from the Template look described above. These platforms are easy to get up and running and also allow a non-coder to contribute content as well. Furthermore, by separating the style from the content, these systems can easily be transformed to coincide with your branding strategies without reinventing a complete CMS from the ground up. The best scripts are usually open source, have a huge community behind them, and consistently release security updates and fixes. You will want to stay away from proprietary scripts released by small companies due to their lack of support and inability to keep up with spammers and security issues.

As you can see, great website design consists of a variety of expertise. As an extension of your business, and often being the first impression of your company, a website with great design can win over customers who may be on the fence in terms of choosing you or your competitors. Don’t risk losing your prospects due to a poorly designed website. Wow them immediately with your professionalism, not only in person but online.

Don’t Dilute Your Brand

Building your brand is a lot of work and not something you really want to damage–so when you’re thinking of extending or stretching your brand, think hard.

Brand extension, simply put, means taking a product’s image and using the brand to extend or move into a different product category–with the hope obviously being that the product will be accepted by the consumer or target market because of the strong name and brand behind it.

A brand’s ability to successfully extend their brand depends heavily on whether or not the consumer appropriately associates the brand with the values and goals being exemplified in the new product. A very basic way of hypothesizing if a brand will be able to extend is by stepping back and analyzing what currently makes the brand a success–that is, what are the brand’s key attributes? If a brand speaks of quality, exemplifies a certain lifestyle, and whose products are, say, gourmet foods from France, it may not be such a stretch for the company to extend to higher-end wines from France. But if a brand is currently associated with cleaning products from Germany, it would be a bit of a stretch for the brand to extend to high-performance automobiles.

The problem with brand extension is that consumer’s are a fickle group in general, and extending a brand is a costly, and often ineffective and unsuccessful, way of generating addition revenue. What happens in this case is known as brand dilution–which basically means diluting the good brand you already have by extending it. Extending a brand is often a bad idea, and one which should be thought upon heavily–because it will affect the brand in general, not just the new product being associated with it.

What often can happen with extending a brand is cannibalization of the brand’s own products. If you’re a soft drink maker, and you put out 2 or 3 different soft drinks that compete with your original product, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. While sales for the new product may go up, it comes at a cost, and often that cost is lower sales for your original product.

Some bad brand extensions:

1. Sylvestor Stallone’s high protein pudding
2. Budweiser Energy beer
3. Diesel Jeans Wine
4. Smackers Starburst Bath and Body Collection
5. Chicken Soup for the Soul Pet Food

Some good brand extensions:

1. Arm and Hammer toothpaste
2. Petsmart Petshotel
3. Curves Cereal
4. Better Homes and Garden Real Estate Network
5. Guinness Whole Grain Bread