Posted by Suzanne Abate on November 10th, 2010
Twelve o’ clock came. A twenty foot table dressed in white hosted steaming beef wellington aside a pile of cured meats and Quebecois cheeses. Puff pastries, powdered donuts and Belgian chocolates caused cavities from a distance. Hundreds of men and women in suits flooded out of the elevators, hungrily stacking their plates and, in another instant, disappeared. All that remained were the lettuce leaves that lined the buffet plates and a sign board that read, Free Seminar Today: How to Save Thousands by Outsourcing your Office Administration.
Web surfers won’t even eat your free lunch
We know the truth about free lunches – take the prosciutto and go. Leave your business card at best. Online we know even better. We approach the allure of “try nows,” “sign up for free,” and “learn this one secret” with caution. The dilemma is that we want to know more but we don’t want to get caught up giving more than we get, or getting what we didn’t ask for. A disappointing teaser can result in web death, read: high bounce rate.
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Tags: bounce rate, conversion, messaging
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Posted by Suzanne Abate on September 21st, 2010
If you’ve seen the latest advertisements for Halls “Refresh” you’ve been told, “it’s not a cough drop.” This is a great re-positioning tactic for the goal of “introducing a different kind of Halls.” The problem is that Halls is already a leader, it doesn’t need a new position. Let’s look at the stats:
-Halls has been the longtime leader in cough drops for sore throats
-Halls registered its “mentho-lyptus” ingredient (a way of differentiating its brand through an attribute benefit)
-Halls owns the category. When you’re looking for a cough drop you don’t say, “do you have a throat lozenge?” you ask, “do you have a Halls?”
I want it all
The real problem is always about wanting to dominate the market. The CEO says, “Look at all these great candies out there. There’s Vitamin C candies, fruit berry blast candies, chocolate fruit candies. We’re losing market share by just selling cough drops.” So the team at Halls goes off and develops Halls Vitamin C, and Halls Breezers, and, now, Halls Refresh. And the website says: Get the Halls that’s right for you.
So now I find myself wondering, which Halls is right for me? And I’m no longer comfortable asking, “do you have a Halls?” because I’m not sure whether somebody is going to hand me a pomegranate blaster instead of the cool healing power of mentho-lyptus® I grew up on.
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Tags: difference, differentiation, positioning, Procter & Gamble, re-positioning
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Posted by Suzanne Abate on July 19th, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for those “in the know,” didn’t just become a fancy buzzword. It became an industry almost overnight. Now most web savvy CEOs and entrepreneurs know getting a high Google ranking is paramount, especially for service-based businesses whose leads typically come from directory searches: “best marketing Toronto;” “cheap duct cleaners in Brampton;” “24 hour plumbers.”
Caffeine in your “Organic Coffee Suppliers.”
Here are the facts about Google’s “Caffeine” Index, released last month.
- Nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database = Largest Index Ever
- Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel
- 50% fresher results compared with the old indexing system
So what does that mean to the searcher?
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Tags: Google, SEO, social media
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Posted by Suzanne Abate on May 13th, 2010
Likening himself to everybody else, Christopher Walken (playing “famed producer Bruce Dickinson” in a now legendary SNL skit) tells Blue Oyster Cult he puts his pants on one leg at a time. The “only difference” is when his pants are on he makes gold records.
Be a Mac
In a series of earlier ads, Mac pitted itself universally against PC – positioning itself as the virus-free alternative computer. Two things were incredibly clever about this campaign. Firstly, Mac’s positioning strategy was actually one of re-positioning the competition (PC) – as a headache product that always breaks down. As a result Mac’s position became the computer that never breaks down. The second smart thing the campaign did Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: difference, differentiator, Mac, PC, positioning, repositioning, SNL
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Posted by Suzanne Abate on April 26th, 2010
My mother used to tease me whenever I hurt myself. She said I was overly dramatic in my carrying on of “owws” and “ohhhs.” Maybe it was a tactic to make me laugh – to ease the pain. Most times it worked. Except when it really hurt. When it really hurt I didn’t think she was very funny at all. And I sure didn’t think it was up to her to measure how much pain I was really in anyway. I mean, how could she know?
Getting to the root of objection
When it comes to making a sale you have to sift through a lot of problems before you can get to the root: the pain. Perhaps you’re sifting through price oppositions or busy schedules? Indecision-makers or budgetary constraints? Whatever you’re selling, it’s a solution. The fact is you can’t provide solutions without really understanding the problem. And every problem is rooted in pain.
Why pain is important
It would be careless of a doctor to diagnose before giving a full exam. In sales it’s equally careless to focus on you/your product/your company when you should be focused on your prospect. In general it demonstrates a lack of concern, and without knowing the pain you can’t prescribe the remedy. Unlocking the pain creates a simple connection between your prospect’s problem and your benefit.
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Tags: benefit, missed opportunity, pain, problem, prospect, Sales, solution
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