Outrageous Marketing Stunts by the Clueless

Over the course of lunch, I overheard a marketing professional discuss how he needed an outrageous marketing stunt to be successful. The belief was that the stunt would generate a ton of publicity and people would flock to his website. "What short sighted thinking," I muttered to my colleague. "Who would notice, and what would people do when they got to his website?" Sometimes overeager marketers simply grasp at 'standout marketing' without a clue.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a publicity stunt, and they can indeed draw an audience. Heck, I ran marketing for a startup that grew from 254 Google search results to 44,000 results in a less than a week. My team leveraged an outrageous stunt on the stage of an AlwaysOn Hollywood event to hit those numbers. The more outrageous the stunt, the more attention you might grab. But what is the quality of that attention and how does that translate to users or sales?

A few outrageous stunts that come to mind are: the Aqua Teen Hunger Force blinky lights marketing campaign, the woman who tattooed her forehead for a casino, the Tokbox taco truck with free tacos for laid off Yahoo employees, and the giveaway of the Pontiac G6 on Oprah. Each was an interesting and somewhat outrageous marketing stunt, but all yielded mixed results.

To clarify my point, some additional facts are in order. The Aqua Teen Hunger force campaign ran in 10 cities, with little to any market buzz until it shut down the Boston Airport. How many of you cared enough, even after the buzz, to watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force for the first time? The woman who tattooed her forehead got a permanent tattoo and was paid only $10,000. Do any of you remember the woman, what casino sponsored it, or visited that casino? Tokbox, who did the taco truck promotion seven months ago, recently let go 50% of it's workforce, and all the founders left, so it's not clear what the gains were there. The car giveaway on Oprah was a big success for Oprah, but it was Pontiac's idea (no one gave them credit), no one remembers that the car was a G6, and Pontiac is being closed as a division of GM. Looks like memorable stunts that didn't do the job in these cases.

So what's wrong with outrageous stunts? Nothing, but the context, goals, and audience need to be aligned to make the sure the stunt even has a chance at yielding returns. In each of the above examples, the stunts were memorable, but not in ways that increased brand goodwill, drove the right kinds of customers or audience, or yielded leveragable attention.

Just being outrageous may make your memorable, but that's not really the point, is it? As much fame and notoriety you may get for the marketing stunt, you still have to drive adoption, registrations, and/or sales. A stunt for visibility sake is no guarantee of success.

No Search Ads for Coca Cola

I was watching the twitcast from revenue bootcamp (#revenuebootcamp) when I saw a message from designmom. It read:

Coca Cola is one of the top 5 advertisers on the world and they don't do search ads.

At first I thought "wow", but then I thought "why should they?"

Coca Cola is a major brand offering a product that is largely a consumable impulse buy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but have any of you searched for anything related to Coca Cola before buying a Coke? I know I haven't, and I don't know anyone who has. To put it in broader market perspective, do college or high school students search for "Coke" when they want to buy one? Do your parents or grand parents search for it? What if we broaden the scope to not just Coke, but to other comparable consumable impulse buys in the same category. Does anyone search for Sprite, 7up, Pepsi, etc? In reality, the Coca Cola company does run search ads for coke rewards and other loyalty programs, yes, but not for the consumable.

Maybe there's a lesson here that a subconscious truth for me may be explicitly proposed as a general rule of thumb: Consumable impulse buys have an inherently short buying cycles and are poor search advertising targets. This matters in the bigger picture of advertising. Even in a recession, a flight to measurement and ROI does not guarantee increased usefulness or applicability of search advertising for the product itself.

Now the real lesson here, is that advertising is situational - it has a time, place, and context. Not all forms of advertising applies for all products, and, some advertising only makes sense in certain contexts as well. Thus is makes sense to advertise Coke in movie theaters, since it could influence you to buy more Coke, and a search ad wouldn't apply there. Your situation is an entertainment venue where people eat and drink. On the other hand, if you love Coke and are going to a Coke Museum, when you search for Coke or Coke Museum you may get search ads for the Coke loyalty program, Coke related film shorts, or other promotional programs. The context is looking for information and the search ad is intended to further loyalty and word of mouth, not satisfy an immediate need to eat or drink.

So, @designmom, thanks for the topic, and for reminding me about the rules of advertising, the importance of context, and that search advertising isn't the necessarily the answer to all revenue problems.

Who is supporting your customers?

There are three truisms about supporting customers, regardless of your product or service:

• A customer's primary goal is to have what they bought, or even are using for 'free', work the way that they expect
• Huge numbers of people feel ill-served or ignored by the companies they've patronized
• You can't control the conversation about your products - and you may not even know the conversation is taking place

Even consumers who aren't technology mavens are likely to start trying to solve their problems with a basic internet search. Do you know - have you ever looked? - what two or three top search results they're going to see? Does a company-sponsored site show up? Do you know about the sites that do?

As a simple test, I did a Google search on 'Canon S2 Camera Problems'. The top search returns? fixya.com, cnet.com, amazon.com,and dpchallenge.com. No Canon sites showed up in the first 4 pages of results. In fairness to Canon, if the search was 'Canon S2 Camera Support' then a Canon USA site was on the top of the list. But the point remains valid - you have to know what your customers are seeing and where they're seeing it.

One example from two of those sites (cnet.com and fixya.com)was a 'stuck shutter' reported by an seemingly large number of people. The fixes suggested including 'jogging the shutter open by tapping the camera against a wooden surface'. This was not from a Canon representative, so it 's hard to know if this is a recommended solution (seems unlikely), or if Canon is aware of a problem with this particular model. But it might give a consumer pause - and the lack of a response from Canon doesn't help the perceptions.

The simple fact is that most of the entries in discussion/tech support forums are going to be negative by their nature - after all, not too many people post a lack of a problem. There are more and more independent support sites like GetSatisfaction.com that actively solicit participation by vendors - and implicitly set customer expectations around that participation.

Shopping and review oriented sites may be somewhat less negative since many consumers feel compelled to defend their purchase choices, but there is still plenty of 'dirty laundry' hanging out there. All of these sources are having an influence on future purchase decisions for everyone who visits.

So some things to ponder until my next post:

• Do you really know what people are saying about your products?
• Are the customer support resources you've invested in, like FAQs and knowledge bases, doing the job based on the questions being addressed elsewhere like FixYa and GetSatisfaction?
• Is there something you can do to reach out to customers with a problem, rather than hoping that they find you?