Most marketing campaigns fail due to bad data bases, channel driven obsessions and forgetting who we are trying to replicate when planning a marketing campaign.

Data bases represent information and it is not a mystery to anyone that with bad information we can not identify the right target audience neither can we tell them what they want to hear so that they buy our products.

Channel obsession is a trend that is spreading very rapidly. When you start a campaign with a channel in mind often you will fail. Every time you show me that one communication channel is the best for something, I will show you that it is not the best channel for something else. In most cases the channel should be at the end of the process. I believe being market/product/value focused is more important than being channel focused.

Most channels in the market today will increase productivity in terms of contacting/impacting more individuals in a given period of time. Also, they will allow more contacts per individual in a given period of time. But, in most cases they will not reduce the amount of contacts needed to make a sale to one individual. Sometimes we are so convinced that one channel is the greatest that we obsess with that channel and limit the opportunity to see the bigger picture and build the best campaign possible.

Last but not least, we often forget who we are copying when advertising. We should be copying a sales person on a marketing/sale cycle. How come often do we say things that we would never say face to face? It is very easy to understand the fundamentals of Marketing and Selling. It is about saying the right thing to the right person at the right time in the right way. So, when you put your next campaign together think what a good sales person would say to whom, when and how. The What, to Whom and When to say relate to the information that you have. The How relates to how that information is used (sensitivity), presented (creativity) and delivered (channel).

"Advertising is what you do when you can't be there in person." - Fairfax Cone

This is indeed what your customers are thinking when they look at you. But what do your customers really want/need? Do they want better printing or better communication? What is imperative to achieve an effective communication?

Is relevance what you need to sell? Could relevance be your value differentiator? Can your competitors sell relevance too? You bet! The good news is that you not only rely on the technology when you help your customers achieve relevance but most importantly on the people and people can not be copied by your competitors. Often, it is not with their products that your customers/marketers beat their competitors but with relevance. The product today is often taken for granted. In most cases what helps companies succeed relay on how, when and to who they communicate the value of their products.

So are you interested in helping your customers be more relevant in their communication activities? It is clear that is precisely what they need and want to market and sell their products! It is also obvious that selling their products is the only thing they care about.

But how do I sell relevance? Even though it is extremely hard to achieve today, relevance is not new to us. We have always constantly tried to be relevant since an early age so we could get what we want. Relevance is about four things and all four are equally important. "Saying the right thing to the right person at the right time and in the right way." The right way is about sensitivity, creativity and the channel/vehicle that we use to deliver the message. Your customer will not be relevant if they fail in one of the items just mentioned.

Most people in Graphic Arts just focus on creativity and one channel (printing). But will a high quality printing piece with fantastic creativity achieve relevance TODAY? So where will you be investing your money, time and efforts in the FUTURE?

If you want to make good money selling VDP please stop selling VDP.  For many years we have been selling personalization in an impersonal way and that clearly does not make sense.  We also have been pushing personalization from a technical stand point and have failed to meet expectations.  Does having all the relevant technology to produce a VDP job guarantee success for your customers?  What about having a good data base?  



The VDP opportunity is not only about the large amount of jobs that could be done more effectively utilizing VDP.  Most importantly it is about making sure that every VDP job that we deliver is successful for our customers and perceived as useful for their recipients.  Successful projects will help you sell more. Unsuccessful ones will make your VDP sales harder in the future.  

Most successful VDP sales do not talk about VDP.   VDP becomes a next natural step in the process.  Successful sales reps thoroughly know their customer's business and therefore can put together a personal/tailored marketing project/proposal that their customers can not afford to turn down.  Most importantly they present/sell/price the project linked to their customer's business.  They constantly show real value and gain customer's agreement throughout all the steps of the process. 

"Something you know about your customer may be more important than anything you know about your product."  Harvey Mackay

Is it service, quality or price? What about trust? But isn't trust related to service and quality anyway? And when you think about it these sound like the buying criteria of a commodity business. So how well do you meet your customer's buying criteria and are you interested in challenging or changing your approach?

Service has, is and always will be extremely important. If you miss a dead line it can cause a lot of harm to your customers. But does great print quality and low price per print guarantee success for your customers/print buyers today?

Good printing quality among other things is imperative to attract consumer's attention. But is this enough today for your customers to make a sale? Time was something we all had more of in the past: Consumers had more time and an attractive document did stay longer in their hands. Marketers also had more time and often did not have to achieve relevance in the first page of their marketing document as long as it was attractive. In some cases consumers responded because a relevant message appeared in page 10, 15, etc. It was almost like consumers felt guilty throwing away a high quality document without glancing through the pages "if it is pretty it must have something relevant for me". But what is in the consumer's mind today? "Very pretty but its not talking to me, so quick - into the bin" So if printing quality is imperative but not enough on its own, what else are you going to do for your customers?

Price? Does a lower price per print guarantee better business results for your customers/print buyers? In the past it probably did. Lower price per print = Buys more impacts = More responses = More sales. However it is much harder for your customers today to achieve relevance. They can flood the market with promotional documents simply because they bought them at a lower price, but this will still not guarantee they will get a response. In most cases today the quality of the impact is more important than the quantity of impacts. Now I am not just talking about quality of the output but most importantly about the quality of the outcome.

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"What are you selling?" is my favorite and most important question when I meet/work with sales reps in Graphic Arts.  I watch their faces as they struggle to say something unique that differentiates them from the rest.  Interesting enough at the end what they say is more of the same.  

What you are selling should be related to your market needs and value differentiators.  So how come I get a large diversity of answers when I ask this question to employees within one company.  How can they be successful if they are not unified in what they are selling?  

In this very competitive market that changes everyday we need to go back to the basics. We should identify what we are selling, to who and how.  Then decide on the resources/strategy needed.   

I do not know about you, but in a B2B model I sell what my customers sell.  It is what they really need and care most about.   Luckily this is not an easy task otherwise everyone will do it.

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Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear! We ended the last year with messages like these.  In every crisis you also hear positive messages of opportunity!  I personally believe there is a great opportunity ahead of us all.  It has been often said that we grow at the cost of adversity/challenge.  That is precisely what we have right now.  

I am a strong believer that in most cases the winner is the one that knows their customers better than their competitors do.  At this time when all businesses are more vulnerable and need more help there is a greater opportunity to get closer to our customers.  The business goal at this difficult time should be building stronger relationships/ties with them.  This will not only build your trust tremendously but most importantly will provide you with better information about your customer's businesses.  This could be utilized to better link the value of your services/products/support to their business challenges and opportunities.

Someone I know could not understand why businesses are cutting on marketing investment when they should do the opposite. The fact is that print buyers know that their consumers/market are not spending, so they reduce their budgets in order to match the actual climate.  

There are less consumers buying these days.  The challenge for the print buyer is to identify the ones that are buying and effectively communicate to them.  This is an extremely difficult task as consumers are very different today than they were sometime ago.   It means that everyone has to do more.  The print buyer has to make a bigger effort to sell.  Now is the time to go the extra mile and really help our customers be successful when communicating to their target audience.  It means sometimes stepping out of our comfort zone.  I do believe if we do it carefully and with the right partner the effort will be worth it.  Going the extra mile will get us closer to our customers, and again that means more trust and better information/relationships.

I know of a print service provider who had been trying hard to sell a different value to their strongest customer.  The print buyer did not really have the time to look into what was suggested.  My customer just told me that now they are looking at his customer's whole marketing process to try to make it more efficient/effective, in other words help them reduce costs and increase sales.

Someone said to me that all crisis are like driving into a tunnel where you know what shape you are in, but for sure you will come out completely different.   I really hope this tunnel will make us all stronger, if not in earnings but in knowledge and customer relationships.

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