When was the last time you read a novel? A big, chunky, doorstep of a novel? Hundreds and hundreds of pages of densely packed text, which kept you enthralled for hours at a time?

OK, maybe that was a bit ambitious.

How about a really long article – I’m thinking New Yorker-length, or perhaps Standpoint? One where the journalist takes several thousand words to give a vast, panoramic overview of the topic, scrupulously presents both sides of the argument, and reaches a balanced, thoughtful conclusion?

OK. Ambitious again.

How about a full-page article in a Sunday newspaper? A broadsheet, I mean, not one of the tabs, with their half-page photos and big, brassy headlines that squeeze the column inches.

OK. Let’s stop there, and I’ll just take a shortcut.

To the point.

Short and tweet

Getting your message across in as few words as possible has always been the guiding principle of marketing copy. But in the internet era, the approach is even more relevant.

You don’t have the luxury of rambling. Not that you ever did, mind you. It’s just that now, people are only ever a click (or a swipe) away from another screen, message, tweet, page, app, clip or game.

The way we consume information is changing. Even the way we talk about it is changing – who ‘consumed’ information in the 70s, 80s or even the early 90s?

We’re voracious info-animals, and we can’t get enough of it. Trouble is, we don’t do detail anymore. Or length.

Just last week, I caught up with a friend of mine whom I haven’t spoken to for long while. He was always a big reader, and had at least two books on the go at any one time.

So what was he reading?

“Er, nothing – I mean nothing big. Not at the moment,” he said falteringly. “In fact, I haven’t actually read a book – I mean a book book, not an e-book – for over two years.”

The long and the short of it

It’s something that Nicholas Carr knows only too well. He’s a technology writer and author of the boat-rocking article in The Atlantic magazine in summer 2008, Is Google making us stupid?

His thesis is that the sheer volume of information available to us is changing the way we read, as is the number of devices we have it served up to us on. He’s noticed that he’s no longer able to do ‘deep reading’ in the same way he used to, as his brain is remapped to skim, skip and hyperlink.

I know exactly how he feels.

And that’s partly why I printed out his article (seven A4 pages, by the way – breaking out in a sweat yet?) to read offline. I just knew that I’d flit about if I read it online, and its subject matter made me want to really concentrate on what I was reading.

Cut it down, spice it up

And my point is? The point I’ve spent all these paragraphs building up to?

Brevity is king.

(If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, by the way. )

It’s not that people don’t want detail – they do. It’s just that you need to serve it up in bite-sized chunks, so they can digest it.

We don’t do long anymore. Short is the new long – and here’s what to do to fit in with the fashion:

• Get organised. Don’t just throw your facts in a pile, like some Swedish self-assembly bed. Instead, put them together so they make sense, they’re ordered logically and are easy to understand.
• Reach for the red pen. No, you don’t need 500 words. Yes, you can cut it down. No, you don’t need to say everything. Yes, you do need to select. No, you probably don’t need that last point. Yes, it was a mistake having 12 bullets.
• Chunk it, like good old Dan Brown did in his blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (short chapters, cliffhanger at the end of each). Small sections work better, as people don’t feel so intimidated by them. Keep them turning those pages.
• Summarise your key points in a box: the quick, two-second elevator pitch that makes people want to find out more.
• Write for both types of reader – the skimmer and the deep-reader. OK, the latter are in short supply these days, but they’re still around. So give a quick summary, list the highlights, and let them choose whether they want to plunge into the deep waters of detail. Don’t just chuck ‘em in (they probably can’t swim).
• Minimise temptation. Don’t have too many hyperlinks in your body copy – you’re just making it easier for people to go elsewhere. Instead, put them at the end (just look below).
• Know the end point before you begin, so you can lead the reader quickly and effectively to their destination. Want them to sign up? To purchase? To fill in a form? To call for more information? This way please…

The internet may be changing how we think, but we still want information. It’s just a matter of how it’s packaged that’s changed. We may not be chunky-novel readers any more, but we still want a good story.

As long as it’s a short story.

Find out more:

• Deep throat. Is Google making us stupid? by Nicholas Carr at The Atlantic magazine (seven pages if you print it out).
• Mind control. Carr drives his point home in The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember at Amazon.co.uk (384 pages, if you can cope with it).
• Digital deluge. Historian Lisa Jardine on information overload on BBC Radio 4′s Point of View (go on – it’ s only 10 minutes).

Related posts:

1. What’s the point of social networking?
2. Just what you wanted for Christmas
3. I just know they’ll love it
4. Don’t know what your clients want? Ask them.
5. Want more? Ask for less.

I’ve seen the future – and it’s coffee-bean shaped.

A big metal coffee bean that’s been sliced in two. Smooth, shiny, pleasingly heavy. This bean has magical properties, and will transform your drinking experience.

Simply put it in to your tea, coffee or other hot drink, and hey presto! It drops to a drinkable temperature three times faster than normal, and remains there twice as long.

It sounds like the stuff of fantasy – like the Lost in Space washing machine that washed, dried and vacuum-packed clothes in seconds (I still want one).

But no, it’s reality. And it’s available now.

It’s not normally the sort of thing I’d go for. But then, I wasn’t buying the bean – I was buying into the story .

The heat is on

They’re called Joulies (from joule – a unit of heat) and when I heard about them, they were still an idea on the drawing board, without funding to make the leap to reality.

Which is where I came in – and thousands of others. Through the Kickstarter website, we pre-purchased these miracle beans so they could go into production.

Why? I’ve never done anything like this before. Let’s face it – there are lots of far-fetched ideas that never make it off the drawing board. So why this one?

Emotion.

• The Kickstarter angle appealed to me. What a novel way of providing startup capital. Help the inventors bypass the greedy VCs, and be part of something different and slightly off-the-wall.
• The name made me smile. Clever, but not cutesy, and one I wish I’d thought of.
• The founders won me over. They’re called Dave and Dave (one on the East Coast of the US, one on the West) and they’re two down-to-earth guys trying to make a dream come true. They send folksy emails and updates, and post photos of the production process, so you feel involved.
• The metal beans looked really nice, so even if they didn’t work, I could turn one round and round in my pocket like a worry bead, or use it as a paperweight, or just let it catch the sunlight streaming into my office.

And lastly, the The Lost in Space weirdness appealed to me. Sorry, but it did.

And the business case? The cost-benefit analysis? The opportunity cost (what else I could have done with the $48 I spent on five chunks of metal)?

Forget it. I wasn’t using my head when I made this purchase.  It was 100% heart, and I never regretted it for a second.

Or even for the six months between the time I shelled out my money and the day the Joulies finally arrived, nestled in a custom-made jute bag with a drawstring.

Do they work? Yes, they do.

Do I use them? Yes, sometimes, though it’s a bit of a hassle avoiding them when you get to the end of your drink, and they still need to be rinsed afterwards.

Did I suffer from buyer’s remorse? Never.

It was fun being part of the adventure, even if I did pay over the odds (the retail price will obviously be lower than the pre-production price). It wasn’t about the cost – it was about the experience.

Emotional intelligence

It’s not just metal coffee beans that cause us to disregard our logical brain. We do it all the time, whether we realise it or not.

We buy from people we like. We shop at a supermarket that chimes with our values, status and approach to life. We wear designer labels that tell people who we are. And we don’t always buy on price – if we did, why do luxury brands exist?

The common thread is emotion. We all respond to it, whether consciously or not. And the good news is that your customers do too.

So don’t do a logical sell, do an emotional one. Don’t run a logical marketing campaign, run an emotional one.

And don’t hide behind logic in your copy, online or offline. Show some emotion, even if it feels a bit uncomfortable at first. The flip-side is that it’ll make your prospects feel more comfortable. And that’s always a good thing.

Right – time for a cup of coffee. With a big metal bean, naturally.

Happy New Year.

Find out more:

• Drinker’s delight. Want coffee that’s cooler faster and hotter longer? Grab a bag of Joulies today.
• Enjoy the ride. Help big ideas get off the ground, with Kickstarter.com.

Related posts:

1. Do loyalty cards make customers more loyal?
2. Four things I’ve learned
3. Spaghetti sauce and Shakespeare's dad
4. Think smart and beat the downturn
5. Does your service go the extra mile?

“You are joking?” said my client. “At least I assume you are – I mean, how can a campaign be too successful?”

Very easily. I should know.

Back when I was a software bod, we loved running special offers. What better way to boost sales? You didn’t have to rack your brains to think of inventive, creative, eye-catching marketing campaigns.

All you had to do was play with price, and the sales followed.

Buy one, get one free (which revels in the delightful acronym BOGOF), Free upgrade if you buy in the next 30 days, and the ever-popular software bundles (software + keyboard/mouse/training/printer).

It almost reached the point where special offers weren’t that special – they were the norm. To the point where they virtually – until we reined them in – killed regular sales.

And on one memorable occasion, we had a runaway success that almost ran away on us.

Thank heaven we had a success-recovery plan: the device that enables you to slam on the brakes when your promotion becomes unstoppable.

And uneconomical.

Recipe for disaster

It’s a scenario that Rachel Brown is all too familiar with.

Rachel owns the Need a Cake bakery in Reading, west of London, and she decided to run a promotion on Groupon.

As you may know, Groupon brings together sellers with special offers, and buyers, hungry for great deals. You make the offer, they find the punters, and they take a cut. It’s a win-win-win situation.

Or so you’d think.

And Rachel did win – at first. Her offer of 12 cupcakes at 75% off (£6.50, instead of the usual £26) brought the orders flooding in.

And in. And in.

In all, over 8,500 people subscribed to the offer.  And just in case you can’t quickly multiply that by 12, let me save you the trouble: it’s 102,000 cupcakes.

The offer was so ‘successful’ that Rachel ended up losing £2.50 to £3 on each batch. She also had to pay her staff £12,500 in extra costs to bake the cakes.

“It’s been a nightmare,” she said.

In fact, it almost put her business out of business. In the end, she had to call a halt to the offer.

Hope for the best, but…

When you plan a marketing campaign that involves a special offer, it’s always good to imagine what you’ll do if it’s wildly successful.

Will you have the staff to cope? If not, can you call on temporary help?

Is there a limit? What is it? Can you exceed that if you want to? If you have to? And what’s the absolute cut-off point? When and why will you bring the offer to an end?

A special offer has to work for you and your prospects. And remember, each one acts individually, so they have no collective sense of what they’re doing. They just see a good deal, and grab it.

But the frenzy can cost you dear, and in more ways than one.

Trony, the oddly-named Italian electrical store with the catchy tagline Non ci sono paragoni (There’s nothing like it), recently opened a store in Rome.

To create an Apple-esque sense of anticipation, they announced never-to-be-repeated offers that would bring the shoppers in.

They had iPhones at €399 (£340/$535), washing machines at €79 (£68/$105), PCs and flat-screen TVs at just €99 (£85/$132) and mobile phones at €9 (£8/$12).

The opening was on a Friday.

On Thursday evening, people were already in their sleeping bags in a long line outside the store. At 8am the following morning, there were 25,000 people waiting for the doors to open.

It took 250 policemen and 100 security guards to keep them under control. A monster traffic jam gridlocked Rome, and 28 bus lines had to be rerouted.

Inside the store, there was a tw0-hour wait to get to the tills – even after the special offers had sold out.

Trony raked in €2.5m (£2.15m/$3.35m) in just one day, but they weren’t laughing all the way to the bank. Extensive damage was caused to the area, and local residents were left shaking their heads in disbelief.

“It reminded me of the first distribution of bread after the war,” said one old lady.

To try to make amends, Trony dug deep in its decidedly full pockets, and forked out €110,000 (£95,000/$147,000) to pay for the policing and the damage caused.

So it was a commercial success, but a PR failure. A good idea, but one that quickly spun out of control and did damage the company’s image.

…expect the worst (or at least plan for it)

Before rushing headlong into a promotion, it’s always a good idea to stop and think about the downside.

Promotions can have  a seriously negative impact on you business:

• Cannibalising your regular sales, so you’re making low margins on high volumes across the board.
• Pushing up your costs, as you draft in extra help to cope with the workload.
• Causing brand damage, as you struggle to fulfil orders, with longer lead times, slower response and lower levels of customer service.
• Alienating regular customers, who don’t see why bargain hunters should be rewarded when they’re the ones who are loyal.

So special offers can be ‘special’ in a way you didn’t expect and don’t want.

So don’t just think about disaster-recovery plans. Make sure you also have a success-recovery plan up your sleeve.

It’ll stop your wildest dreams turning into your worst nightmare: the Curse of the Cupcakes.

Find out more:

• If you can’t stand the heat: 102,000 and counting, as Need a Cake’s Groupon offer bakes up a storm.

Related posts:

1. What does success mean to you?
2. Three tips to sharpen your writing
3. The pitfalls of special offers
4. There’s never a right time (so do it often)
5. Who are you?

As the Eurozone inches ever closer to the abyss, I’ve been trying to get my head around the numbers. So have the EU bigwigs, but so far, it seems like they’re having as much luck as me.

Which isn’t much.

The trouble is – for me, at least – the numbers are just so huge I don’t know what to make of them.

It’s a bit like being told that dinosaurs walked the earth 65 million years ago, or that it’s 70 million miles to Mars, which I discovered when I read about a remarkable trip that was simulated in a Russian warehouse recently.

When it comes to effective copywriting, numbers can be your friend. They can bring a piece to life, illustrate a point and win the argument.

But only if they make sense. And only if you’ve done the hard work.

The final countdown

So how do you get that figure you’ve always wanted? Simple – just follow these five steps, and you’ll be counting the customers and summing up the sales.

1. Make them relevant.
Big numbers are meaningless, unless it’s money in the bank or sales on your bottom line. If somebody’s worth $500m, people can relate to it. It they’re told 500m telephone directories would stretch to Mars, they can’t.

It’s the same with debt, deficits and cuts. People don’t get it unless you make it relevant. Even breaking down debt by head of population (£x for every man, woman and child) still doesn’t get the point across.

Instead, make it relate directly to people’s everyday experience.

It’s precisely what a French journalist did recently. To make sense of the jaw-dropping numbers being bandied about by politicians, he simply scaled it down to a human level.

He said that France’s  situation is like spending €5,700 a month when you earn €3,000 a month, while starting out with a debt of €339,000 (which – you guessed it – increases by €2,700 a month).

Bingo. Now people get it.

2. Make them obvious.
Don’t bamboozle people with complex calculations, and don’t let them do the hard work.

Recently, UK book chain Waterstone’s announced the end of its famous 3-for-2 promotion, which has run on and off for years. It’s been fabulously successful, often shifting books (the third one, usually) that wouldn’t otherwise have reached such numbers.

There are downsides, of course. If you can’t find that third book, you don’t bother with the first two. It’s an all-or-nothing choice, which isn’t the best idea.

But the key thing is, it’s obvious.

If they’d simply said up to 33% off (which is what 3 for 2 is, of course) the result would have been threefold.

First, people wouldn’t have thought of one of the books as ‘free’ (the cheapest one, unsurprisingly). Second, they wouldn’t have bought three books. And third, the ‘up to’ would have watered down the proposition (it’s only 33% if all three books cost the same).

People think in simple terms: 3 for 2 / buy one, get one free / buy one, get one half-price. They make snap decisi0ns, so they need simple, obvious choices.

And that’s your job.

3. Make them comparable.
Would you rather have 50% more minutes on that mobile phone contract, or a reduction of 20% on your bill? Or you could extend the contract  to 24 months, and get a ‘free’ phone? Or get a bolt-on package to make landline calls, which could reduce your monthly bill by 25%, depending on your usage?

Clients faced with a this-but-that-but-the-other type of choice often simply freeze.

I do, all the time. And my standard response when confronted by choices whose relative merits I can’t weigh up is to do nothing.

Buying is stressful, so don’t add to it. If you know what you’d ultimately like your customers to do, arrange the numbers so they tell a story that makes that end-point seem obvious, easy and achievable.

4. Simplify them.
Yes, you have lots of numbers. You can build a business case from the ground up, stacking numbers on numbers till you have a solid structure composed of figures that you feel confident about.

Great. Now throw it all away and start again. Take the headline figure, and discard all the rest.

Recently, I wrote a cost comparison for a client, showing just how much business travellers could save using serviced apartments instead of hotels.

The raw data was in a 3D matrix: number of nights (three different numbers), locations (four of them) and whether food was included (a simple yes/no). The result was a complex number of permutations, showing average savings in pound terms.

It was completely baffling.

So I rolled up the numbers by consolidating the locations, showing only two lengths of stay (short/long, which maximised the difference) and displaying percentages, not figures (why let the reader do the hard work?).

The effect was immediate, obvious and striking. One glance and you could see which choice to make.

Job done.

5.  Use magic numbers.
If you’re going for simplicity – and you always should – round your figures up or down. Use whole numbers or nice big chunky ones (25% off! Save on average 30%!).

Or you can take the opposite approach if you want to show rigorous research. Simply follow a tip an old boss gave me many years ago: use two decimal points. (87.65% of clients saw an improvement in productivity over a three-month period).

Nobody ever argues with decimals, and people are invariably impressed by your thoroughness.

Use numbers that resonate with people (Top 10 reasons to use serviced apartments / Three ways you can cut your costs). Don’t use unusual numbers (Top 4, 7, 9, 11 ways… ).

Also remember that all language is musical – so tap into the rhythm. And remember the subliminal power of three.

If you  read Shakespeare – or even my blog – you’ll see that what’s called the triadic form is used extensively. Put simply, it’s things listed threes. Cut your costs, improve your productivity and increase your bottom line. Add a fourth element, and the sentence falls apart. Cut one out, and the same thing happens.

Why?

It just does. Don’t question it – simply use it. It’s powerful, effective and appealing.

See what I mean?

Find out more: 

• All aboard. Men are from Mars – well at least they are in a Russian warehouse.

Related posts:

1. The power of numbers
2. Three things you should remember
3. Three things to make you think
4. It’s a numbers game – and one you can win
5. Three things you shouldn’t do

One of my local branches of Starbucks – a test site, I’m guessing – has improved its ordering process.

Well I say improved, but what I actually mean is ‘improved’. Which means, of course, it’s considerably worse.

And yet I’m sure they started out with the best of intentions. It’s just that somewhere along the way, things didn’t quite work out as expected. And so in the face of a little local difficulty, they did what most misguided people do. They ignored it.

Here’s how it used to work:

• I brave the queue, reach the till and order my usual: a grande, skinny, sugar-free hazelnut, decaf, extra hot, wet latte. A mouthful (in both senses) but no great challenge when the Starbucks till wallah has a thick felt pen and a little adhesive slip with boxes they tick or write in (or over).
• Then, the slip is passed to the barista, stuck on the gleaming metal plate over the hissing pipes and gurgling outlets.
• I pay, and move along to the end of the counter.
• (I try to connect to Starbucks’ free WiFi, usually fail, and wonder why I bother. Not really relevant, but why pass up the chance to moan?)
• The barista delivers my coffee, and I move off to the toppings, where I shower it with an obscene quantity of chocolate powder.

So far so good. Or at least it was.

Last time I was there, the till wallah had a touchscreen, with a slightly hesitant finger hunting and pecking the appropriate button. Grande (peck), skinny (peck), sugar-free hazelnut (peck), and so on.

“Very high tech,” I said, as he pecked his last and looked up.

“Hmm,” he replied, as if not convinced. And then I saw why.

“Grande, skinny, sugar-free hazelnut…” he barked over the hissing and gurgling to the bemused, foreign (Hungarian, I think) barista.

Who duly wrote it down with a thick felt pen on a little adhesive slip and put it where, just a week earlier, the till wallah would have placed it.

So the ordering end of the supply chain is automated, and production end is slowed down. Not very clever.

“Wouldn’t it make sense to transmit the electronic order to the barista?” I asked with an air of amusement and feigned innocence.

“They do that in the US,” he said wearily, “but not here. Yet. At least I hope not yet.”

I felt his pain and smiled sympathetically.

“Everybody here thinks it’s a really bad idea,” he continued. “But nobody listens to us.”

The only constant

Change, change, change. It’s the byword and the watchword and the gospel according to Marketing. Without it, companies grow stale, wither and die.

So we become change maniacs. Upgrades, rebrands, repurposing, repositioning and reorganising. We just can’t get enough of it.

But often, we make changes that are pointless and unnecessary.

You’ve done it. So have I.

I ploughed ahead with a website upgrade (I use the term loosely, as it was more in the down direction if I’m honest) that I half-knew was doomed before I pressed the Big Red Button.

And still I did it. Why?

Because I’d invested so much time in it. Because I was propelled by the unstoppable impetus of project mode, and the looming inevitability of a (self-imposed) deadline. Because I was tired of the old site – which in the end I had to revert to anyway.

The thing is, it’s often for our benefit, not our clients’. They’re quite happy with what they’ve got, thank you very much. But we tell ourselves they develop ‘brand blindness’ and ‘product fatigue’ and that we need to change or else the world will pass us by.

But does it have to be so radical?

‘Disruptive’ is on the lips of marketers across the global village. Challenge the established order. Break the mould. Dare to be different. Question orthodoxy. Go on – you know you want to. Just do it.

Which is fine. Disrupt the market, the sales process, the retail channel, the production engine, the business model, the marketing mix.

But don’t disrupt the customer.

If you roll something out, make sure it’s thought out. Properly. If there’s a potential problem on the horizon, don’t brush it aside as I blithely did, and hurtle towards the adrenaline rush of the Big Red Button.

Inside the comfort zone

When was a kid, I sometimes mistook stock phrases.

We all do it at that age. My sister thought ‘to all intents and purposes’ was ‘to all in tents and porpoises’, which is infinitely more memorable and certainly more fun.

The one I remember was ‘familiarity breeds contempt’.  My innocent ears heard this as ‘familiarity breeds content’. Of course it did – your familiar teddy, toy, TV programme, blanket. Why wouldn’t you be content?

You can imagine how crestfallen I was when somebody pointed out my error.

And yet, and yet. To this day, I still believe that my mishearing had a grain of truth in it.

Familiarity does breed content.

Don’t underestimate how happy your clients are with things just the way they are. Everything changes all the time, and the pace of change seems to get faster and faster.

So give them a marketing teddy and stop changing, already. Unless it’s a big, exciting, eye-popping, game-changing, forget-all-that-came-before change.

Make your change work for them, not you. Or them before it works for you. Because they’re what pays for the change through their continued loyalty and returning custom.

The refill drill

Meanwhile, back in Latteland , Zsa Zsa handed me my steaming drink and beamed a broad smile.

Just to be on the safe side, I ran though my complex order.

“Extra hot?” she said quizzically, then looked down at her scrawled slip. “I don’t get that.”

Didn’t, I silently corrected.

“Well I definitely asked for it, ” I said in my most conciliatory tone, topped off with a smile that belied my unshakeable determination to have my order in all its glory.

She took my coffee back. She couldn’t just heat it up, of course (Health & Safety – what else?) so she had to start all over again.

So there. Delay, waste and frustration. Unhappy customers and staff. Another triumph of change.

I stepped back to make way for the next disgruntled customer and fiddled with my smartphone to see if I could get WiFi working.

And landed on a brand-new Starbucks WiFi login page.

Oh joy.

Related posts:

1. Time for a change?
2. Good lessons from bad service
3. How to turn bad news into good news