Poor targeting and a missed opportunity (bad). But perfect pitch (good).

Three things caught my eye this week. But first, a digression…

Years ago, I was in a restaurant with my boss and a group of colleagues. My boss was pretty fearsome, and took no prisoners when it came to service.

Her opening line to the waitress was chillingly direct.

“I usually tip 20%,” she said. “In fact, the tip is already 20%. But here’s the catch – from now on, I’m going to deduct points for bad service. OK? Now I’d like to order.”

The poor girl stared with rapt attention, and the service never wavered for the whole of the time we were there. It was impeccable.

My boss’s secret was simple. She knew what she wanted. She asked for it. She got it.

On another occasion, at another restaurant, she requested a sauce that wasn’t on the menu. The waitress, who this time hadn’t had the 20% routine (my boss varied her tactics) said she was sorry, but that it wouldn’t be possible.

“Why not?” barked my boss.

“Because we’d have to make the sauce up,” said the girl, faltering slightly in the glare of the blue-eyed headlights.

“Oh right,” said my boss with exaggerated emphasis. “I see. I mean, it’s not as if this is a restaurant or anything, with ingredients all over the place. You’d have to make up the sauce.”

The dripping irony had its effect. And before long, that special sauce was dripping too.

1. Close (but no cigar)

I was reminded of the second restaurant episode recently. If anywhere knows about sauces, it’s a restaurant.

And if anybody knows about technology, and how to use it, it’s a technology company. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

Just last week, I got a letter from Google with a little surprise in it (well more than one, but we’ll get to that bit).

Here’s what it contained:

The word ‘discover’ should have set alarm bells ringing. But it didn’t.

Inside was a credit-card-sized voucher with a unique code. I logged into my AdWords account and entered the code, relishing the thought of 75 smackers off my next bill.

Not so fast.

Because here’s what it said when I entered the code:

Too old? Well, yes, it’s years and years old. I’ve been using Google AdWords for longer than I can remember. I’m very, very happy with it.

Or at least I was.

Until they dangled £75 in front of me and took it away again. Is it really that difficult to de-duplicate a mailing campaign when you’re targeting prospects, so you exclude existing clients?

Sauce. Technology. Different consistency, same taste (bitter-sweet).

2. Don’t bank on it (the feature, that is)

Just as I’ve been using AdWords since the dawn of time, so too have I been a customer of the Royal Bank of Scotland since the good old days when banks were privately owned and collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were a twinkle in the eye of a Wall St banker.

In fact, I was one of their online-banking beta customers, way back in the mid-90s. And recently, they sent me a leaflet extolling the virtues of their online service:

Can you spot the problem?

Yes, they got the headline the wrong way round. Make the most of digital banking isn’t the best thing about digital banking. It’s the time you save.

So that should be in a big, bold, brash font that shouts Benefit! followed by the more sober feature. And somebody close that gap, please.

It’s Marketing 101. Feature (banking) and benefit (time).

Which would you pick? (Thought so.)

3. U and non-U

And lastly, a company that gets it exactly right.

HTC, who make those super-sexy smartphones, realise that a phone is just a phone. What makes it special is you, as this advert shows.

Their closing line sums it up exactly: You don’t need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you. It’s simple, direct and hits the mark.

And I want one.

[If you're reading this in an email, click here to see the advert on Youtube]

We can all do with a makeover now and then

Every January, I play a little game. I check how long it is before I see the evergreen headline New Year, New You! somewhere.

In past years, winners have been my gym, The Times, and my ex-ex-mobile phone operator (brand loyalty isn’t my strong suit).

This year, the winner was Tesco. For there, above the magazine rack in my local store, were those four fateful words. And it was only 29 December. That took the biscuit (low-fat, Light Choices, of course).

Why does it work year after year?

Because change is good. Any change.

And what goes for our faces, figures and jobs also goes for our businesses, brands and corporate image.

The constant constant

No brand can afford to stand still. But not all brands change for the same reason. Some want to, some need to, and some do it just because they can.

So why would you want to change your brand?

• It’s stale. What seemed like a great logo, tagline or look simply doesn’t cut it any more. You’re tired of seeing it, tired of hearing it, tired of putting it out there. And guess what? Your customers probably feel the same way.
• It’s invisible. ‘Brand blindness’ inevitably sets in among your target audience. Been there, done that. Nothing to see, move on. Change your look and they’ll sit up and take notice again.
• It’s falling behind. Makeovers are a me-too thing. If everybody else is doing them, and you’re not, it doesn’t matter how strong your brand is. It’s a game, so learn to do it well and often.

Sometimes, there’s simply no option. A takeover, for example, means that somebody loses out. When HSBC took over Midland Bank, a brand that had been on UK high streets for over a century disappeared without a trace.

The same happened recently when the Spanish giant Santander swallowed up Abbey, Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. But when it comes to brands, bigger isn’t always better, as Barclays’ ill-fated ‘big bank’ advertising campaign proved.

Consumers like choice, and smaller banks, with a cosy, corner-shop feel, are preferable to huge multinationals. In an interesting development, the charmingly named Williams and Glyn’s bank looks set to re-emerge from the rubble if the Royal Bank of Scotland is broken up.

Froth with wings

Times change, and brands do too. Could there be a more iconic brand of the boom era than Starbucks? From humble beginnings in 1970s Seattle, it spread around the world and became synonymous with coffee.

Dot.com entrepreneurs hung out with grungy college students, lounging in battered leather seats with chill-out music wafting among the tables.

But that was then. This is now.

Big is now Bad: big banks, big investment houses, big bonuses.

Small is the new big. So Starbucks is going small again, launching unbranded coffee shops in an effort to lure people back.

So if you wander into 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in Seattle, and think what a welcome alternative to Starbucks, you’re in for a surprise.

Because it’s Starbucks.

The stuff of legend

Sometimes, you really have no choice, and a makeover is not just an option – it’s the only option.

2010 sees the relaunch of a venerable old magazine, with a 90-year track record. The new title is to be Canada’s History.

It’s not going to set the world on fire, but at least it has the virtue of being immediately recognisable and obvious. Unlike its old title, which caused chaos with spam filters in the digital age.

For up until now, it’s revelled in a delightfully unfortunate name.

The Beaver.

Find out more:

• Spam filters stuff Canadian Beaver at The Register.
• Unbranded Starbucks stores attempt to come up with a new brew at Marketing magazine.
• Williams & Glyn’s bank could make comeback at The Times.
• Is it? Isn’t it? 15th Street Coffee and Tea, inspired by Starbucks. (It is.)

Make it obvious (I mean really obvious).

“I don’t want to insult their intelligence,” said a client to me recently. “Do you really think we need to tell them what to do again?”

Yes you do, I thought.

“Yes you do,” I said.

Why?

Because buying is stressful (cast your mind back to Christmas). You want reassurance. You want to be told that you’ve made the right choice. You need reasons to go ahead and not just turn on your heel and flee the store. Or close that web page.

You want to know what to do next. So why are your customers, readers or prospects any different?

They’re not.

So make it easy, make it clear and say it again. And again.

Just this week, I realised once more the power of signs when I was working out at my gym.

First, I saw this one:

And then this one:

Button number 1 is a polite, well-behaved button. Sensible, low-key and probably not very effective. Button number 2 screams Emergency!

Which is exactly what it should do.

More is less

Good signs are clear, obvious and easily noticed. It could be a button on your site, a big bright heading in a letter, a bold underline instruction on what to do next in a brochure.

But be careful.

Where it comes to signs, there’s a fine line – and if you cross it, you get diminishing returns. If you have too many signs, they overwhelm people, so they blank them all out.

Let’s go back to the gym. Not the one above, but another I used to go to. It did signs – lots of them.

Please put your towel in the bin provided. Please replace weights carefully. Please dry off before entering the changing area. Please shower before entering the pool. No running or jumping in pool. Male and female changing rooms swapped today only. Goggles must be worn. Training tops are obligatory. Sign up a friend and get 20% off.

See how easy it is to miss an important sign?

Before you know it, you’re a man, in the men’s changing room, but it’s full of naked women (read it again – slowly this time).

When it comes to signs, less really is more. And a few simple rules will make your signs stand out:

• Be focused: work out your key messages and stick to them. Don’t give people too many choices or they won’t make any choice.
• Repeat yourself. You should include your call to action regularly in your copy – at the bottom of every web page, in your headers and footers, in call-out boxes and headlines. Make it crystal-clear what you want people to do, and say it as often as possible.
• Make it easy. How often have you been on a site and got caught in a loop or trapped in a dead end? It happened to me just the other day. I was ordering a USB drive, but wanted to double-check the spec before I completed the order. But I couldn’t go back to check, like I do when I’m ordering a book on Amazon. All I could do was click Pay now. So I didn’t. I simply found a more user-friendly site and bought there instead.
• Give them more. People are often looking for reasons to use you. Why wouldn’t they be? If you’re the company, the brain-frying, mind-boggling, toe-curling, buttock-clenching search is over. Give them lots of reasons why they should look no further – and make them as prominent as possible.
• Pretend you’re them. Or put another way, take the ‘tourist test’ (walk around your own town/city, slavishly follow the signs, ask for directions and follow them to the letter). When you’re inside the mind of the reader, customer or prospect, things look very different indeed. So go with the flow, and anticipate their questions, problems and needs.

Waving, not drowning

I did press one of the emergency buttons – the smaller one. I didn’t mean to, but my hand caught it as I prised myself out of the leg-extension machine.

I froze, and waited for the flashing lights, alarm bells and solicitous staff running to my assistance, first-aid box in hand.

It didn’t happen. In fact, nothing happened. Which goes to prove another truth when it comes to signs.

They’re only as good as the people behind them.

Happy New Year.

Three things you won’t find in your stocking

I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve  spoken to recently who don’t have a marketing plan.

It’s all up here, they tell me on the phone, and I picture them tapping their head.

I know what I want to do, they say. Why would I take the time to write it down?

Because writing it down makes it real. It forces you to focus. Writing it down exposes the flaws, shows the holes, and makes you look reality in the face.

But here’s the great thing: it also reveals opportunities you never thought existed, and things you hadn’t even thought of. It takes you in unexpected directions and gets you thinking about alternative strategies.

But where do you start? How do you get over BPS (blank-page syndrome, that is)?

With a template, of course. It’ll give the process structure, order and a purpose.

Microsoft has some great ready-made templates for Word (here) and PowerPoint (here).  The PPT is in Office 2007 format, so if you have an earlier version, you’ll need the Microsoft Office compatibility pack (here).

Personally, I’d choose PowerPoint. It forces you to keep it brief, concise and bullet-pointed.

Which is what the best marketing plans are.

Words (don’t come easy)

All bulleted out? Plump up the cushions, grab a glass of port and a mince pie, and take 15 minutes out to watch lexicographer Erin McKean on TED.com.

Erin McKean redefines  the dictionary is a witty look at words from somebody who spends her every day swimming in a sea of them.

One of the biggest drawbacks of using online dictionaries is, she says, that it eliminates serendipity.

“Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you were looking for is so damn difficult,” she says.

If, like me, you love words and can spend hours on end discovering new ones, this talk is for you. And even if you don’t, this talk is for you.

If nothing else, you’ll find out the meaning of double dactyls, as well as polysemy and synecdochically.

Enjoy.

(If you’re reading in email and can’t see the embedded video, click here instead.)

Free lunch? Walk this way…

If all that talk of words leaves you hungry for more, here’s a great way to access some of the leading reference works for free.

Yes, I said free. Not free* or free++ or even free^. Just free.

There is one catch, though.

You have to be in the UK and have a library card. If you are, and you have, you’re in luck, as your library website will provide a gateway.

Researching a company? Try Marketline. Need to find out more about the Big Cheese? Try Who’s Who. Plus the OED, Oxford Reference Online, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopaedia Britannica – and a whole lot more.

Even if you don’t read (you dont?) it’s worth joining your local library just for the freebies.

With all that reference material, there’s more than enough room for a little serendipity. Not to mention synedoche and polysemy.

Merry Christmas (and don’t leave crumbs on the cushion).

Easy is the new hard. No, really.

So there you have it.

The all-singing, all-dancing, everything’s-connected National Health Service IT system is to be ‘dramatically scaled back’ (i.e. quietly scrapped).

Mind you, I could have told you that. For two reasons.

First, I got a bad feeling about three years ago, when I did some copywriting on the subject. The background reading (all 500 pages of PDFs) was grimly compelling.

A bit like watching a road accident that’s about to happen but not being able to do anything about it.

Front-line staff weren’t behind it. It was ambitious, fiendishly complicated and promised the earth.

Mind you, it also cost the earth. Back then, my bedtime reading suggested anything between £6bn (€6.6bn/$9.8bn) and £30bn (€33bn/$48.9bn).

To date, it’s come in at £12bn (€13.2bn/$19.6bn).

My second inkling came when my doctor tried to use the system. She didn’t want to do anything complicated – just to book an appointment.

But it was complicated, as I’ve written about previously (High tech or hype tech?). And in the end, I bypassed the system and used the telephone to make the hospital appointment myself.

Not good.

Easy peasy lemon ketchup

The trouble with big projects is that they’re big. No one person can get their head around all the individual pieces, so they project is compartmentalised. And that means it very quickly becomes fragmented, complicated and disconnected.

A couple of years ago, I boarded a train at London’s King’s Cross station in the rush hour. I took an outside seat in a group of four. In the two seats opposite were a hassled-looking middle manager and her shiny-suited sidekick.

As the train pulled out, she flipped open her folder and peered at a spreadsheet printout.

“You know that consultant, the one with the gold-rimmed glasses, in Peter’s section – you know, whatshisname?” she said hopefully.

“Oh Graham, you mean,” he said. “What about him?”

“Well,” she said, “he’s paid £900 a day and he’s been with us six months. Do we know exactly what he does?”

I did a quick mental calculation, and came up with a figure of close on £100,000 (€110,000/$163,000).

“Hmm, ” said the shiny suit. “Not really. I mean, not exactly. Erm, no.”

“We should find out,” she said, lazily snapping the folder shut, “one of these days.”

Or tomorrow, I thought. Or right now. Because that’s my tax money (yes, they were civil servants – couldn’t you tell?).

Easy does it

Difficult is easy: you do one thing, then another thing, and yet another. Each without reference to what came before. You add a bit here, and there. You spread responsibility among different groups, and patch holes as they appear.

Issues are dealt with as they come in, not according to how important they are. And before you know it, you don’t know where you are. And neither does anybody else. And the result is organised, project-managed chaos. At £900 a day.

So what’s the answer? If difficult is easy, what’s easy – difficult?

Actually no. It’s easy – when you know how.

Here are my top tips for keeping it simple, staying on top of things, and never losing sight of what’s important.

And for leaving the office early (that’s the clincher, isn’t it?):

• Keep a log of your day: and see how you really use your time. Important things should take priority, with urgent ones trumping them only if they’re also important.
• Review your tasks, and update and re-prioritise each one every day. Or better still, at the beginning and end of every day.
• Take stock: check where you are with a project regularly, and make course adjustments if you’re off-track.
• Be realistic & honest: if you know you can’t achieve it, don’t say you can. If it’s too big to tackle, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks.
• Peel off. Adding another layer to an already-complicated process just makes it more complicated. Instead, strip away the unnecessary layers and get back to basics.
• Communicate. Tell people what you’re doing. Ask them what they’re doing. And if you’re the only one doing anything (like me) sit down and have a serious talk with yourself now and then.
• De-junk. Recently, I threw out old clothes, LPs, clever-but-useless kitchen gizmos and anything I hadn’t used in a year. It felt so good (better than skinny, to paraphrase Kate Moss). Take the same ruthless approach to your work and you’ll feel supermodel-light in less than no time. Need it? No? Junk it. Move on.

Now wasn’t that easy?