 Cashing In By Being Consistent And Bringing The Corn
"Bring The Corn, Sam" Is there an important marketing lesson in an old, black & white movie? It's a 70-year-old film that has been called "schlocky" and "mediocre." How can this film even matter? After all, one of the movie's screenwriters called it, "A great deal of corn, more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined." Remember, this man talking about his own writing. And what is corn, anyway? Ask Oxford, and here's what you get: "Trite, banal, or mawkishly sentimental." Ick. That Sounds Not Good But if you've ever watched this film, you know: the trite, banal and mawkish sentimentality works like a charm. This film is the Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman classic, Casablanca. It's one of the most popular movies of all time. Over 70 years later, it remains one of the single most rented movies ever. This despite being (yes) corny. Even the same people who describe it using words like "schlocky" and "mediocre" also say things like "phenomenon worthy of awe" and "Homeric." (Didn't study your classics? Homer is the Greek poet who gave us epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. He's considered a genius for all time.) Damn The Corn! Full Speed Ahead! The reason Casablanca has been working for the better part of a century is simple: big themes and authenticity. Yes, the movie is full of stereotypes. But the stereotypes are positive and flattering. The movies is rife with emotional struggle. Raw human emotions are at the center of everything. And the key theme of the film is this: Sacrifice. Almost nobody in the movie is without selfishness and greed. But when push comes to shove, everyone you care about sacrifices something. As the great Italian thinker and author Umberto Eco says of Casablanca, "The myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film." Ah, myth. Myths Are The Stories We Tell About Our Better Selves And Casablanca works because it is founded on a myth of things that are good, right and true. Despite bouts of bad acting, erratic storytelling, and ongoing corn, Casablanca is a 102-minute commercial for the myth of sacrifice above personal gain. It's a story about intrigue, betrayal, love, sex, hope--and our better selves. Corn sells in Casablanca, and it can sell in your advertising. Corny jokes, corny sentiment, even corny brands will work--IF they are honest and based on thoughtful, authentic brands. Corn is dad jokes. The comedy may not be skillful or even very funny. But it's delivered with heart. It comes with a knowing wink and a nod by a guy who's a good, authentic human. We've had long-running ad campaigns based on corn. Those corny campaigns have made the advertisers into celebrities. Authentic corn has made them top-of-mind. It has helped them make wheelbarrows full of money. So much advertising at the small-business level is corny. The corn that works does so because it's built on a solid foundation of authentic brand. It works also because it's consistent. It works because it brings the love that underpins the Dad joke. Loving your work. Loving your customer. Loving the pursuit of a better reality. Those things are not dictated by fashion or style. They are predicated on the best of us. And the best of us is a quality that is timeless. LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City
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 Want Your Competition To Love You? Stop Advertising.
I've been having conversations with readers of this weekly screed. It's disappointing (and no surprise) to see a recurring theme. Business owners have stopped advertising. More than one media salesperson is bemoaning an "immediacy mentality over a marketing mindset." (Credit to Debra Carpenter at Michigan's Joy 99 for that gem.) The familiar refrain: Business owners can't understand why they should advertise. Business is slow, inventory is scarce, people are staying home, things are locked down--name an excuse. History keeps showing us the power of advertising when things are bad. It's the power of thriving versus dying. Authoritative sources are always showing that benefits of advertising in a downturn. "But my budget! I have no revenue!" And without advertising, where is more revenue going to come from? We have a friend who owns a remodeling business. When the 2008 recession hit, he was leveraged to the teeth. He also knew: stop advertising, and he would never recover. So he was resourceful. He kept finding creative ways to keep the marketing tap open and flowing. His main competitor did not. Our friend's business is now huge. It's a juggernaut. His competitor never recovered. Freight train, a supertanker, or marathon runner? Pick your marketing metaphor. It's about momentum and the long haul. When your business stops advertising, your customers forget you. Advertising is about keeping your brand in motion. Keeping it rolling. Keeping it afloat. Keeping it running. Stop the momentum, and getting back to speed is difficult. "But what if I can't afford to do it?" Better question: Can you afford not to? The overused word of our time is "pivot." Everyone's pivoting like ballerinas on meth. Yay, pivoting! Despite the overuse of the word, pivoting is about survival, from the macro to the micro, from the economy to the solopreneur. Pivot. Swivel. Revolve. Spin. Swing. Whatever your metaphorical verb, find a way do it. Work on a way to keep advertising. "I can't afford it!" is reactive thinking. "How can I afford it?" is proactive wisdom. And understand how to be effective. Being effective means being evocative. Your brand is the fuel that informs the emotion of your message. If you don't understand your brand, it's time to change that. For proof of the power of advertising in a downturn, don't take my word. Google "advertising in a recession." The first hit should be a great article from Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2009/04/how-to-market-in-a-downturn-2 After that comes a parade of intel on doing the smart thing. Keep running your marathon, do it with wisdom, and you will beat the runners who quit. LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City  Let's rename item-and-price advertising for what it is, shall we? I admit it. I'm still losing sleep over item and price advertising. We need to rename it. Let's call it "piece-and-price." A piece of merchandise is an item, right? And "piece and price" lets us use the acronym PAP. Yay! Acronyms! PAP advertising! And "PAP" is fitting, eh? As you may know, the word "pap" has two definitions. 1) "Bland soft or semiliquid food such as that suitable for babies or invalids." 2) "Reading matter that is worthless or lacking in substance." Synonyms for "pap" include "nonsense," "drivel," "rubbish," "trash," and "noise." The latter is my favorite. "Noise" is a direct reference to communication science. Noise stands between the sender of a message and the receiver. In our case, noise is a barrier between advertiser and customer. And PAP advertising is just noise. Look at so many car dealers and appliance stores. "Picture! Price! Buy now!" Zero effort to engender a good feeling about their business. Back when I was in radio, my most successful car dealer advertiser sold out their inventory every month. They did it by advertising one thing: Brand. Every message compelled you to feel good about their dealership. They made you want to buy a car because it made them sound like people you want to be friends with. Contrast that with the unbranded competition: "Yeah, we sell that, too. Buy it now!" But...being king is different. Can you be the king of the PAP you advertise? Remember when big-screen TVs were unusual and expensive? Every day, lots of PAP advertisers were showing you big TVs and big prices in their race to the bottom. But not The King. In California, a famous retailer called himself "The King of Big Screen TVs." He had PAP advertising. Big TVs! Low prices! However... The King also showed you his face. He told you his name. He promised same-day delivery and 100% happiness. He said the customer is always right. He also promised, in every ad, "I AM the king of big screens!" He had a brand and he advertised it. One can argue: it is an imperfect brand. But it IS a brand. It is not just PAP. And for 30 years, he built a reputation as the leader in big-screen TV sales. At his peak, he was selling $30 million in big TVs-out of a single retail store. Yes, TVs. One store. 30 million bucks a year. When he died in 2015, he was famous. Big newspapers and magazines wrote stories about him. He remains a celebrity even today. His brand outlasted his business. People loved him. Nobody loves PAP. Unbranded PAP is racing to the bottom of the barrel. Human beings are irrational, emotional creatures. They make decisions using emotion. This is not my opinion. This is Nobel-prize winning science. Winning people over requires appealing to their emotions over the long term. Your business must feel right. Making it so requires brand. What if you are afraid of paying too much for a big TV? Who would you trust? a) The generic appliance retailer, no branded personality, displaying pictures and prices (PAP!) of washing machines, refrigerators, ranges and, oh, big TVs? Or... b) The guy who spends 30 years displaying pictures of big TVs at low prices while saying "I'm the king of big TV and you're the boss!" It's not high art. It doesn't need to be. It needs to be authentic, resonant and consistent. It needs to feel good. It needs to be something besides PAP. Know someone who needs to electrify their branding for business as unusual? There's still a free copy of Lightning Branding: How to Generate Revenue Faster With An Electrifying New Brand is still available by clicking here. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City  It's nice getting ammunition from the industry's big guns... I've just been writing some radio advertising to promote radio advertising. (I'm not a narcissist. Really!) The message is going to ring inside your little marketer's heart. But I can't name names yet. That's because not all the intel is in my hot little hands. Yet. But here's the top line info... One of the biggest gorillas in market research says you are right! Let's face it, there's one reason you're here: on some level, you subscribe to the idea of branding big for a healthy tomorrow. You come back here each week to celebrate successes, laugh at the lunacy, and pick up new tools for more powerful marketing. And at the core of all this relentless screed is a simple idea... Branding your business with purpose and intent leads to power. You get beyond the challenges of endless "me-too," buy-now advertising. You get to join the ranks of the commanding and authoritative brands that lead the pack. Well, that previously mentioned market research gorilla agrees. They have intel. It says as much as 70% of advertising is selling for today. As little as 30% of advertising is branding for tomorrow. Those numbers should be flipped. (At least, IMHO.) In simplest terms, advertisers are yelling "Buy now!" to people who aren't gonna. Most customers will not buy now. And by putting all effort into pushing the idea of immediate purchase, you're sacrificing sales tomorrow. Tomorrow is when many, many more customers are going to buy. But putting money behind branding instead of buy-now'ing (that is a word--as far as you know), there's more opportunity for long-term health. Know your brand, know your customer, and know that this is a long game... Instead of having ongoing fire sales, you light a fire in the heart of your customer. And that goes a long way towards attracting them to buy, winning them as fans, and having them refer your business. BOTTOM LINE: it makes no difference whether you're marketing your own business or doing it for a client. Building brand today is about more sales tomorrow. The numbers are on your side. Not yet downloaded your free copy of Lightning Branding: How to Generate Revenue Faster With An Electrifying New Brand, there's still time. Just visit http://www.lightningbrandingbook.com. For information about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City  I
At our house, we watch some delightfully dumb TV shows. Among them is Beat Bobby Flay. This is another silly competition show on The Food Network that doesn't make a lot of sense. No doubt, it's profitable. Just 25 seasons and counting. It's maybe not as profitable as Worst Cooks In America. We're talking 20 seasons of a show that could be called Shameless Kitchen Idiots Bang Spatulas On Their Heads And Cry. But we don't watch that. For some inexplicable reason, we enjoy watching Bobby Flay get thrashed. What's that? You don't know this icon of "unscripted" food-TV goodness? Here's how it works: for 20 minutes, two frenzied challenger chefs conduct a kitchen haboob against each other using an ingredient chosen by Bobby. The winner of that first round gets to face off against Bobby in round two. In that round, Bobby and the challenger have 45 minutes to cook a challenger-specified "signature dish." Three professional judges (who are clearly not smart enough to figure out which dish came from one of the most famous chefs in America) choose the winner in a blind taste test. All throughout, there's trash talking against Bobby. Benign hilarity ensues. Bobby's got a 62.5% winning record. There's almost 100% universal desire to see Bobby get spanked on national basic cable television. Whee! Anyway, here's where the marketing fun comes in... In a recent new-to-us rerun of this guilty pleasure, Bobby had to face-off against a chef who challenged him to make cacio e pepe. Whassat? You no know how to say? Pronounce it like "catch-eeo ay pay-pay" and you're close enough. It's a traditional Roman dish of spaghetti, pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper. It was once a staple food of Italian shepherds because it's practical and easy. The ingredients keep well for a long time. Besides being stupidly simple to make, it offers the bonus of being really tasty. You can use it to impress a first date with your kitchen prowess. (Just keep your time amongst the sheep out of the story.) It was clear: this challenger was ready to crush Bobby with her signature dish. She was cocky in announcing the cacio e pepe challenge. During the bout, she was over in her station making fresh pasta. She was making a special parmigiano-Reggiano stock for cooking the pasta. She was making special parmesan cheese toast crisps to go with. What was Bobby doing over in his station with his 45 minutes? Making a traditional cacio e pepe with dried spaghetti. Three basic ingredients. It doesn't take 45 minutes to make. So he did something interesting: he made the dish twice. The first time was a test run to make sure his dish was sound and competitive. The second time was his dish for the judges. Fresh, fresh, fresh means win, win, win! Right? The clever version of the dish had all kinds of problems for the judges-not the least of which was: it doesn't taste traditional. And the fancy stock made for cooking the fresh pasta? It made the fresh pasta gloppy. The parmesan toast crisps, well...did the Italian shepherds make those, too? But Bobby's simple, pedestrian edition of a favorite staple food was admired by the judges. Bottom line: the chef who didn't get clever and ran a test run of his dish crushed it. So, are your advertising dishes getting too clever? Or are they sticking to a proven model? Are you doing test runs against the proven dishes? Maybe most important, are they accused of being too clever? Are you just not listening to that feedback and testing it anyway? I've done that. Sometimes, the ad you'd thought would work simply doesn't. And sometimes, the ostensibly too-clever ad outperforms the proven dishes by 4:1. Bottom line: there are good ideas, and ideas that aren't as good. And occasionally, there are going to be ideas that crush it by a factor of four to one. Sometimes, you don't know you've made a gloppy, over-fancy cacio e pepe. And once in a while, you'll know you've made a classic. But only the judges will confirm it when they vote with their dollars. Let them judge. Now, about that free book and a few other things... The Fabulous Honey Parker and I have a new book called, Lightning Branding: How To Generate Revenue Faster With An Electrified New Brand. It's yours free by clicking here. For information about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City |
AuthorBlaine Parker is prone to ranting about any and all things related to brand. In many ways, he is a professional curmudgeon. While there is no known vaccine for this, the condition is also not contagious. Unless you choose it to be so. Archives
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