Sometimes things just won’t work. You made a nice communication concept, build a campaign and everything the execution was impeccable. But when you and your client look at the results they don’t meet the expectations. Now what should you do? Normally we would think that we would try harder – but you shouldn’t.

The misunderstanding

It’s a common misunderstanding and our language and how we we all have been brought up leads us into this. You have to get “through”. You have to “win over”. We have to “resist” etc. This concept of being stronger than our counterpart to accomplish our goals is common in all our life. To make an everyday example: Everyone tells you, that if you want to conquer a woman, you have to show your interest, buy her flowers, call her often and in the end eventually she will fall for you. We all know that this happens only in movies and that in reality she will be more likely to be annoyed or drop you of for the next best guy who doesn’t care less if she diggs him or not.

To make a long story short – we think, that if something doesn’t work we just have to try harder. But as you can see, just by doing more of something that doesn’t work doesn’t make it work. Taking down a wall with bare hands doesn’t work just because you punch harder.

The solution

To get out of this situation is fairly easy and difficult at the same time. If something doesn’t work, stop doing it. Try something different – maybe even exactly the opposite. This doesn’t mean that if you do advertising, you should not advertise – but if you try to sell out a product throwing one sale after another you maybe off better if you make the product high class or you limit the availability.

It may seem counter intuitive – and that’s good. If something is counter intuitive it’s different and if something is different it catches the eye. Getting the attention is one of the main goals in advertising and graphic design, so if you get that a good part of the job is accomplished.

Now it’s obvious that you still should have a valid product and have done your “homework”. If you have the wrong product for the right audience and the right communication, then you still will not sell. You may want to change your target group instead of changing the product.

A famous example of such a shift is the post-it from 3M. You know probably the story. The original goal was to make a new strong glue. The result was a weak glue which doesn’t leave traces when removed. A failure for the intended target group, but by changing the use and therefore the target group it became a success.

In short: If something doesn’t work the way you planned it, take a few steps back and look around. There is maybe another way you can go.

Image by dots and spaces

Just had to share this with you – hilarious. BTW Monty Python has increased their DVD-Sales by 300% by openining their own Youtube Channel, giving away some of their best sketches for free. What a fine example of marketing 2.0 – Click on the image to view the video.

This is a short story about a nearly failed campaign – and we all know, we learn from our failures, not from successes. Find out why you should not always believe statistics.

Offline campaigns do not always convert well to online

Being online is state of the art, actually is a mass medium these days. If you are looking at statistics you may think that everyone uses the internet in one way or another. This is a short story about a nearly failed campaign – and we all know, we learn from our failures, not from successes.  Find out why you should not always believe statistics.

The campaign

My client launched a new product and wanted to promote it to its clients and to architects and other opinion leaders and multipliers. As my client works in a quite specialized B2B sector the main medium is print and direct mailings. There are no internet sites related specifically to the market and even the magazines are pretty bad. Anyway, the new product had so many new features, a sort of revolution, that just lining out the main features would have overloaded the ads.

We decided to put on the ads just as much information as needed and made a special landing page on the website where the visitors could find out every detail about the product and contact a local salesman for a personal presentation.

The client suggested to not put just the landing page on the ad as he stated, that the market (Italy) is now ready for the internet. In fact over 60% of the business with his clients is made through the internet.

Beyond the advertising in magazines we made also a mailing through a postcard-stack (you know, where you get a stack of postcards with advertising ready to be sent back to the firms).

The results

To understand how weak the response was you must think that the circulation of the ads where about 16.000 (+200.000 off main target), and the postcards where send to 5.000 persons. We’ve got 12 visitors to the landing page in one month and about 150 postcards send via mail or fax. Pretty bad.

Why it failed: no awareness

Some of the target group didn’t realize the potential given by the new product simply because it solves problems ignored until now. Especially the off main target (end consumer) was not aware that the products on the market had problems so they didn’t care. The target group ignoring the problem is another thing. The ad couldn’t spark the awareness but this was not the goal of the ads and so they failed.

Why we failed: digital divide

We read the statistics about the internet use wrongly. We looked closer and found out that the 60% of the business mentioned earlier made through internet was made by only 10% of the clients customers. The rest made the orders via fax or phone. It’s a numbers game, the big part of the market where my client operates is formed by very small firms and craftsman – you know father & son businesses who sometimes grow a little bit bigger. This small workshops have a internet connection, but the owner often doesn’t use it – the younger ones do. It’s the digital divide at its best. Especially in Italy we have 50% of the population who has never accessed the internet and many of the customers of my client fall into this 50%.

On this subject I discussed with a leading manager of a training organization in Italy. He told me that 95% of the bookings are still made through fax. The online booking platform they installed is rarely used.

In the end it wasn’t a failure

By reading this you may think that the whole campaign was a big failure. If you where looking only at the numbers you may be right. If you think about the conversions you may also be right. If we had put a toll free number on the ads we may have had better results, but on the good side I can mention, that the costs of this whole campaign where fairly low and that we could measure this campaign well and analyze it.

By failing we could focus the whole marketing strategy on other mediums. We now know (for now) that the target group is not online. The money saved in a costly internet presence (induced by web user statistics) and advertising campaigns gave more ROI (return on investment) than the campaign did cost. By switching the strategy we actually converted quite well and the client was obviously happy.