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It Turns Out That Local Advertising Is Hard To Do

Hey product manager, so you’d like to find a way to make your product appeal to more customers? Hmm, well let’s think about this for a moment – is there anything in your product manager job description that we can use to solve this problem? Maybe there is. Although many of us work for companies that are national or even international in scope, the hard, cold reality of marketing your product is that all customers are local to somewhere. If you want to capture their attention, then perhaps you need to find a way to successfully do local advertising…

What Doesn’t Work In Local Advertising

I love watching the U.S. football SuperBowl game every year. It’s not so much the sports as it is the very creative (and expensive) commercials that really catch my attention. Sadly, this is nothing that I can put on my product manager resume. However, it has given me a deep appreciation for what advertising can do for a product.

When it comes to focusing on a particular geographic area for finding new customers for your product, you need to start to talk about doing some local advertising. I was startled to discover just how much money firms are spending on doing local advertising for their products. The firm BIA/Kelsey estimates that in 2010 local businesses spent a whopping $134 billion on advertising; however, only $20 billion of that was spent on online advertising.

Hmm, look we live in the 21st Century and as a product manager you’ve got to be thinking about doing online adverting for your product. As long as you are doing that, I’m sure that the account manager and business development manager that you work with would love for you to help them out by drumming up some more business in various local areas. You just need to find out how best to do this.

Be very careful. It turns out that trying to capture the attention of local customers is much harder than it looks. In the world of online advertising, lots of things have been tried that just didn’t work out. Way back in the late 1990′s (is that really all that long ago?) the first attempt to generate more local business for products involved using those banner ads that we all hate to see on web sites.

There were a lot of reasons why that approach didn’t work out. However, the next thing that was attempted was a bunch of bets on city-specific guides that the big boys made. Microsoft called theirs Sidewalk and AOL had CitySearch. Neither of those was much of a success either.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on Google’s AdWords. This has probably been the most successful advertising tool, but it has not done a good job of helping firms appeal to their local customers. It’s just too complicated to use!

The Magic Of Groupon (and Others)

As I am very fond of saying, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the firm Groupon. They, along with a host of other similar firms, seem to have found the magic answer to effective online local advertising.

Just in case you don’t know how the Groupon model works, perhaps we should take just a moment and cover it. What Groupon does is come to your company and make you an offer. If you’d be willing to offer your customers a 75% discount on your product, they can bring the customers to you. What they will do is make a one-day offer of a 50% off coupon to their very large base of customers who are local to you. The people who want to buy your product will pay Groupon who will then turn around and send you 50% of what they collect.

The math goes like this: if your product costs $100, then Groupon offers it to your potential local customers for $50 and they send you $25 for every person who accepts. Ouch! That’s a heck of a discount, but it might be worth it.

If your company is looking to pick up more local customers, then a Groupon approach might work for you if your product meets a key requirement. This may call for just a bit of strategic management. Think about your product for just a moment: does it have high fixed costs and low variable costs? If it does, then making one more costs very little. These are the perfect products for the Groupon type of local selling approach.

What All Of This Means For You

If you want to sell more of your product to a local geographic region, you’re going to need to use your product manager skills to find ways to effectively advertise locally. Many ways of doing this online have been tried in the past to no avail.

The arrival of firms like Groupon have identified an effective way of reaching local potential customers. If you are willing to offer your product at a 75% discount, then they can reach many potential local customers with an attractive 50% off discount offer.

The key is to remember that although Groupon created this local advertising space, they don’t own it. Other firms such as LivingSocial and kgbdeals along with the big boys of Google and Microsoft have rolled out their own local advertising 50% off deal programs. As a product manager you are going to have to take the time to first decide if this type of advertising program is right for your product and then you’re going to have to pick the right advertising firm to go with. Good luck and much success in getting lots more local customers for your product!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to turn one time discount customers into long-term repeat custmers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Is it possible that Apple might be able to teach you a thing or two about how to find more customers for your product? I can almost hear you saying “Hey Dr. Jim, I’m a product manager who manages a line of ball bearings – they are nothing like the kinds of products that Apple sells.” Hold on for a minute there, sure Apple has a handful of very hot products, but how they go about getting them into their customer’s hands has lessons for all product managers. Let’s see if we can find out how they do it so that you will have something new to add to your product manager resume…

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Why Not Create A Good Looking Catalog For Your Product?

Why Create A Catalog?

So here’s a novel thought for you to consider Product Manager: why not create a catalog for your product? Based on a recommendation from a friend, I’ve been reading the book “Catalog Design: Creating Desire” and it has given me a whole new appreciation for catalogs. I used to just get them in the mail, scan them quickly, and then toss them aside. Now I better understand just what a valuable product tool they are…

Look, no matter if you are a product manager for a single product or for a whole line of products, you are actually selling a number of different things. Whether it’s different configurations of your product(s), training, different bundles, different support programs, etc. we are all selling more than just one thing. This opens the door to creating a catalog to describe to our customers everything that we sell.

As product managers we are always thinking about our competition. We’d all love to have a way to make our products stand out in their markets. Since none of us have an unlimited budget, it’s time to get creative. Does any of your competition currently create a catalog for their products? If not, then you’ve got a real opportunity here.

Brochures don’t count. A catalog is a “book” that allows you to lay out everything that you offer to your customers in one place. A brochure just provides information on one product. A catalog will allow you to build an image for both your product and your company.

What does it take to make a catalog?

In order to create a catalog, you need to first start by selecting a theme that you want to use for your catalog. This is going to depend greatly on the type of product that you manage and the people who are your customers. Remember, businesses don’t buy products, people do. The theme needs to be something that your customers will respond to – something that they want to be part of.

Once you have a theme selected, you next need images – photos. You are going to need a lot of these because the whole purpose of a catalog is to allow your customer to experience your product. Don’t even think about filling a catalog with screenshots of some software product. Instead, spend some time and think about what your customers do with your product and include images of the end results that your customers want to achieve.

Finally, you’re going to need words. But not just any words. The words that you drape in and around your photos need to explain what your customer is seeing in the photos and how they can get the same results. The tone and the specific words that you use need to reinforce the theme that you’ve chosen.

How do you go about using a catalog?

Once you’ve gone to the effort of creating your catalog, the next step is the most important. You’re going to have to sit down with your sales team and go through the catalog page by page in order to make sure that they understand it.

One they understand the theme, the content, and the intent of the catalog, then they can take it to their customers. As a part of their selling process they can go through the catalog with their customers in order to show them what’s in it and to motivate them to take a closer look after the salesperson is gone.

Finally, you will also need to update that part of your company’s web site that deals with your product. Its look and feel needs to be the same as the theme that you used in the catalog. As customers read the catalog and decide to visit your web site to learn more, the theme should carry over to the web site.

What does all of this mean to you?

No matter how fancy we get in this all-electronics age, it turns out that catalogs still serve a purpose. They do a fantastic job of laying out in one place a company’s entire line of products and telling a story to your customers. Catalogs are not going away anytime soon.

As an example of this I’ll refer you to my favorite catalog, Cruchfield. They do a great job of transforming commodity electronics into a product that you really want to buy from them.

Catalogs can provide a product manager with a unique way to make your product stand out in a crowded market. Please note that creating a catalog is the start of a long-term commitment. Once you’ve created one, your customers are going to be eager to see the next edition…

Do you think that you sell enough products that you could fill a catalog?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the best interviews that I’ve ever read was with Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) in which he scoffed at doing things like focus groups and such in order to get input for the fantastic products that Apple makes. He said that since what Apple is doing is so revolutionary, getting input from potential customers wouldn’t help much because they couldn’t even imagine what a product could do. I do respect Steve, but could he be wrong?

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Sexy Products Get All The Dates With Your Customers

Just how many ads for products do you get hit with each day? 10? 100? 500? No matter what the number is, the end result is the same – you shut down. Something in your brain switches off and you stop “seeing” ads because you are in overload.

This is bad news for a product manager who wants to get his / her product noticed. Is there anything that can be done to get your customers to notice your product’s advertising?

What Doesn’t Work?

You are the CEO for your product and so you’re going to have to find a solution to this problem.  Dr. Sridhar Balasubramanian and Dr. Pradeep Bhardwaj are marketing professors at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and they’ve been studying this problem of how to reach customers that have tuned traditional product advertising out.

The professors point out that most product managers take the aggressive approach and attempt to get their products noticed by simply TALKING LOUDER (remember those TV ads with “Crazy Larry”?) This simply doesn’t work.

Questions That You Need To Be Asking

There are 5 things that as a product manager you can do in order to ensure that the advertising for your product is actually working for you. Here’s what you need to be doing today in order to get your product noticed tomorrow:

• Pick The Right Time: You know your (potential) customers better than anyone else. When will they NOT be getting hit with too many ads – when they get their postal mail at work? Via Twitter? Via FedEx box? Find your customer’s quiet time and seize it to get your message across. Examples: the in-flight magazine that everyone reads is a great opportunity to reach the right type of customer when they are “locked in” and have nothing else to read, also those adding your product to those videos that they are starting to show in elevators would be a great way to reach your target customers in their building.

• Arouse Curiosity: Ads that just talk about how great a product is are boring. Ads that trigger your customer’s curiosity are something special. Is there a puzzle that you can create that they have to solve? Once they solve it can they go to your product’s web site and claim a reward? Talk about a great way to get your message across! Example: Google did this when they were hiring – they created billboards with math problems and a URL where you could go to type in the answer.

• Piggyback On Another Brand: If your product is new, you are going to be fighting for your potential customer’s attention because they don’t know anything about your product. However, if you can join forces with an existing brand, then both brands can benefit from combined advertising. Example: you see this all the time – summer movies do cross promotions with McDonald’s and Burger King,

• Physically Move Into Your Customer’s World: Where does your customer spend most of their day? In days of old, companies sent out calendars to their potential customers (Pirelli’s is world famous) because they knew that they would be on the wall for a year. Example: Today providing your customers with a browser widget might be the best way to promote your product.

• Trigger All 5 Human Senses: Ok, so maybe you can’t hit all five senses but can you at least do one better than sight? A clever tune or a pleasant scent that becomes associated with your product could help it stand out from all of the other ads that your customer encounters. Example: The Coke “jingle” and the Southwest “ding” sound are both audible sounds that we all now associate with the brands. If we hear the sounds, then we automatically think of the brand!

Final Thoughts

As though being a product manager was not hard enough, now we have to be advertising experts? Well, no. However, you are the one person who is ultimately responsible for the success of your product. You need to be asking these 5 questions so that you can steer the advertising for your product so that in the end, it works to make your product fantastically successful.

Product managers who find ways to use advertising to make their products even more sexy to their customers will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The part of being a Product Manger that I hate the most is pricing. How am I expected to come up with just the right price for my product? Who am I – Goldilocks: my product’s price is supposed to be not too high, not too low, just right? That’s a tall order. Now I’ve found out that this impossible task has just become harder: an entirely new way of pricing has shown up and it’s called freemium…

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Tough Times Call For Product Managers To Work To Make Their Products Visible

The economy dips even farther down each and every day if you are to believe what you read on the front page of just about every paper lately. Product Mangers are finding themselves in tighter and tighter situations – what can we do in these tough times to make our products successful. Would you believe that you already have the answer?

Martin Roth and Richard Ettenson over at the Wall Street Journal have been doing some digging in order to find out how product managers can make the best of tumultuous times. They’ve interviewed lots of folks including product managers who live in emerging markets and who have to deal with inflation, hyperinflation, or even recessions.

What they found is that these folks have remembered the golden rule of product management: it’s always easier to keep customers that you already have instead of trying to get new customers. This means that when bad times arrive, these product mangers use their limited marketing dollars to draw their existing customers closer.

If you were planning on doing any broadcast marketing for your product on TV, on the radio, or even in magazines, then you might want to reconsider. This type of product advertising is generally geared towards informing potential customers. What you want to be doing is making your product(s) more visible and more available to customers who already know about them.

One key area that could have a great ROI (return-on-investment) for your product is customer service. You should always have good customer service, but when times get bad you should have great customer service. During tough times stop trying to up sell customers when they call customer service and instead start trying to help them make your product last longer. When things turn around, they’ll remember you and you’ll be glad that you helped them out.

What changes in your marketing plans have you made because of the current recession? What steps are you taking to retain your existing customers? Are you doing anything to improve your level of customer service? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Subliminal Advertising Is A Powerful Tool That Product Managers Need To Learn To Use

Gosh – doesn’t the whole concept of subliminal advertising just sound naughty to you? I mean, I’ve always sorts lumped this type of advertising together with hypnotism and sorta figured that they were slightly immoral. You know, it can’t be right to get people to do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise, right?

Let’s assume that you are not trying to get your customers to take off their clothes (you are growing sleeeeepy…) or stop smoking or anything like that. Instead, you’d really like them to think positively about your product or, gasp, even go ahead and buy it.

Advertising and its kissing cousin subliminal advertising are generally thought of most often in terms of business-to-consumer marketing efforts. However, there is absolutely no reason that this concept can’t also be applied to business-to-business advertising, product brochures, etc. After all, businesses don’t buy products, people do.

Lots of really smart people have spent much time studying the field of subliminal advertising. Among them is Martin Lindstrom who is an international marketing expert and the author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Bruce has a few thoughts for how we can incorporate subliminal advertising concepts into our next product brochure / slide deck / website / etc.

1. Product Feel Matters – A Lot!: Here in the 21st century, we can do amazing things when we manufacture a “real” product that people can hold in their hands. However, sometimes we are too clever even for ourselves. Bruce has done studies with consumers using two different TV remote controls. Both had identical functionality; however, one weighed more than the other. The heavier one was always reported to be of a higher quality. Even if your product is nothing more than an application that comes on a CD, including a “heavy” user guide in the box can improve your customer’s perception of the quality of your product. If your product can be downloaded off the web, you’ve got a real “perceived quality” issue that you are going to need to overcome.
2. Rituals Rule!: Stress, time limits, and the state of the global economy are all weighing on our customers minds. As our personal stress levels grow, we unconsciously start to seek out those rituals that are the most familiar and comforting to us. By including images and words in your product material that associate your product with those rituals, your product will become more appealing to your customers.
3. Music Soothes The Savage Customer: The power of music to influence customer’s buying habits is well know in retail circles. That’s why you’ll hear music with a slower beat in grocery stores – slower music makes you move slower and thus gives you more time to shop and buy. In many business-to-business situations, you don’t have a chance to include much music. However, when customers come to your site for a product presentation or to negotiate a contract, putting on the right tunes can make all the difference in the world.
4. Customers Want Cachet In What They Buy: Sometimes it’s called “putting on airs”, but no matter what anyone says we all like to think that by buying a product we will become special in someway. If the product is expensive, rare, hard to get, or uses some special magic, then we want that product all the more.

Just because we may be responsible for products that are sold to businesses does not mean that the subliminal advertising techniques that have been developed for the retail market can’t be used by us. Now the trick will be to make sure that we use this new found advertising power responsibly…!

Have you ever used subliminal advertising techniques in your product material? Were you able to measure a positive impact of this type of advertising? Have you ever detected subliminal advertising being used in advertising that has been sent to you? What did you think about the product that used this advertising? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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