Picture yourself in the cereal aisle of the grocery store.  There’s a mom there with her 7 year old son.  He’s jumping up and down with a bright red box of Captain Kablamo’s peanut butter cannonballs in his hand.  He desperately wants the small plastic Captain Kablamo bobblehead doll that’s inside.  Mom knows that he never finishes a bowl of peanut butter cannonballs and she’s sure the Captain Kablamo doll will be lost under the couch in less than week, but she grabs the box and puts it in the cart anyway.  Junior won’t even look at anything else in the aisle.

Mom is on a diet.  She’s been trying to avoid sugar lately, so she looks high on the shelf and finds a green and white box of organic twiglets.  She turns it over to check the ingredients.  Although the first ingredient is dehydrated cane juice, she sees no sugar on the list and tosses the box in her cart. 

Neither junior, nor mom got the product they really wanted, but their perception is that they did.

A few years ago, I read Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson.  In one chapter, he talks about having an idenity for your company, rather than having an image.  I think his point was that it’s not a good idea to portray your company as something it’s not.  The customer might buy what you’re selling because of its perceived value but ultimately, they won’t be happy because they’re not getting what they truly want.

The key here is to present an image that excites the potential buyer to the point of purchasing without lying to them.  That can be a bit of a tightrope walk sometimes.  Let’s look at “dehydrated cane juice” as an example.  All other things being equal, the health conscious person looking at the product labels will almost always buy the product with dehydrated cane juice over the product with sugar - even if they know that dehydrated cane juice is sugar.  Why?  It just sounds more natural.  The word “sugar” conjures up an image of a refining plant with white powdery stuff all over the place.  The words “dehydrated cane juice” conjure up an image of a native person squeezing the juice of a plant into a bowl and leaving it in the sun to crystalize.

Is it deceptive?  Probably.  Is it unethical?  I don’t think so, but I’m certain others would disagree.  In such a situation, you must consider if the risk of backlash is worth the increased sales.  At the end of the day, you need to make sure the image you present matches the identity and the mission of your company.  Just make sure that image translates the value of your company to your potential customers as well.   

Last week, my two daughters were on Spring Break, so we spent the week at Walt Disney World.  We’re theme park junkies and we live only 1 ½ hours away so we’ve been there many times before and I’m always struck by how many people there are arguing with the other members of their family.  While waiting in line for the monorail, I came to the conclusion that the reason for that is simply that many of these people have failed to recognize their goal in going to Walt Disney World.

I suspect that they start planning the trip with good intentions.  It is vacation after all.  They want to get away, relax, and have fun with the family.  Somewhere along the way, though, the costs start adding up.  They start looking for ways to relax and have fun while still saving.  Soon, they start thinking of making that money stretch as far as it can and forget about relaxing and having fun altogether.

In they’re minds, if they’re going to pay $67 for a one day ticket to the Magic Kingdom, they’re going to get there at 7:00 am and squeeze every minute of fun out of that “bloodsucking corporate mouse” until 12:00 am. Thus, they will spend just over 6 ½ cents per minute, which is a whole lot more fun than the comparably priced marathon long distance chat with their long lost cousin Richard in London.

Stay with me, I’ll get to the part that’s relevant to your business.

In theory, this strategy works (More fun for less money per minute of fun, right?).  Unfortunately, heat, crowds and the lack of sleep this plan generates are not often considered.  That results in the aforementioned arguing and much of their time is spent angry and red in the face…

So, if our hypothetical family spends half of that time generally miserable, are they still getting a great deal?

No!

You see, the goal was to be relaxed and have fun with the family.  Now, they’re only spending half their time having fun, so each fun minute is costing them 13 cents instead of 6.5 cents.

If I sleep in, go to the theme park for three hours, have a relaxing lunch, hang out at the pool, enjoy a fantastic dinner, then head back to the park for three more hours in the evening, I’ll be spending a whopping 18.6 cents while I’m at the theme park, but I’ll have enjoyed my whole day (except, perhaps, for the transport time), and gotten more bang for my buck in terms of my goals of relaxing and having fun. 

The same basic thing happens with marketing plans.  The ultimate goal of just about any marketing plan is to “increase sales”, but the means to achieve that goal morph into goals in and of themselves.  Things like “brand awareness” and “high search engine rankings” can be great ways to achieve “higher sales”, but sometimes companies strive to achieve that brand awareness or those high search engine rankings, having forgotten why they’re doing it.

I’ve been approached by several local realtors over the years who want to rank number 1 in Google for the phrase “St. Petersburg Realtor”.  These are the high end realtors – the ones selling the $800,000 condos.  Understandably, there is a lot of competition for that phrase.  Just about every local realtor wants to rank well for that.  Usually, when I ask them why, they reply with something like “Mel and Al are there, so I’ve got to keep up with them”.

As it turns out, nearly four times as many potential home buyers are searching for “Pinellas County homes for sale” than are searching for “St. Petersburg Realtor”.  Moreover, there are only about half as many web pages in Google’s index for “Pinellas County Homes for Sale” as there are for “St. Petersburg Realtor”.  The reality is that a realtor is someone who helps people sell their house, or find a new one.  People are looking for houses, not realtors.  Realtors would spend less moneyh optimizing their sites and sell more houses if they realized that.

Many companies try to stretch their marketing dollars to reach as many people as possible for the least amount of money in the interest of developing “brand awareness”.  Often we get calls from companies who want us to design a postcard.  If they’ve got the money for 20,000 cards, they want to send that card to 20,000 prospects in order to “reach as many people as possible”.

In almost every case, they’d be far better off sending a postcard to 1,000 prospects 20 times over a 5-6 month period.

The repetition serves two purposes.  It reinforces the message in the consumer’s mind over time, and it increases the chance that the message will be delivered at a time when the consumer is in “buy mode”.  “Brand awareness” can sometimes be a means to the end of making more sales.  If reaching fewer people more times results in more sales, however, then that’s obviously a better way to spend your marketing dollars.  You can then reinvest those profits to send cards out to 20,000 people 20 times.

I’ll admit, it’s easy to get caught up in false goals.  Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to avoid them as well.  The next time you find yourself striving to achieve your goals, take a moment to step back and make sure the goals you’re trying to achieve are helping you to achieve the ultimate goal.  It’s not only a smart strategy for your business; it’s a smart strategy for your next vacation…and life in general.