Advertising/Marketing Business

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Add Jabra to Your List of Companies that “get” Social Media

August 23, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business | 2 comments

A while back, I wrote a post about companies I’d had experience with on Twitter – the good, the mediocre and the bad. I got some feedback from three of the companies I mentioned, plus a comment from a guy named Adam Waid with a much worse experience. Now that I’ve had another interesting interaction with a company on Twitter, I figured it was time for another post.

I bought myself a new Bluetooth headset about a month ago, after losing my previous one. I probably use it for a total of 1 hour a week, at the most, and I don’t walk around the mall with it on my ear as a fashion statement. So I went to Best Buy and found a low-end Jabra (BT2070) for $29.99, I think. After getting it home and trying it for a while, I just couldn’t get it the speaker part to stay in my ear. It kept falling out so I had to hold it in with one hand to hear people, which kind of defeats the point of a Bluetooth headset.

Not feeling like driving up to Best Buy, I posted a message @Jabra_US asking if I was doing something wrong or if they had any tips. Within an hour or two, I was trading messages with Wayne (part of the @Jabra_US team). Wayne did some research, asked me a couple questions, and finally sent me this DM.

Effective, friendly, personal communication - perfect.

So I sent him my address, not sure what I’d be getting. We traded a couple more messages, including one after 11 PM (Wayne, you work too hard!). And then a package arrived with a brand new, Jabra BT2080 arrived at my door – a much nicer headset that costs almost twice as much at Best Buy. Wow. They sure didn’t need to do that. They could have apologized and recommended I take it back to Best Buy, and I would have thought that perfectly reasonable and been fine with it. But instead, they went above & beyond with fast, friendly service, they took care of my problem, and they’ve now got a customer who will recommend them to others and probably not buy another brand in their category ever.

To the @Jabra_US team (especially Wayne), I say, as a consumer, thank you! And as a marketer myself, I say, thank you for another example of a company that truly “gets it.”

Jabra did not ask me to write this post or do anything in exchange for the replacement headset; I’m posting this because I’m suitably impressed.

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5 Year Milestone

August 9, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business | 2 comments

Like 95+% of blogs out there, I’ve been sporadic at best with updates. Though I consider myself a pretty good writer, I’m not phenomenal like my good friend Paige Worthy so great ideas to write about don’t always come to me. Figured it was time for a few reflections though, now that I’ve hit my five-year milestone at ER Marketing.

Five years ago, I had just finished my 90-day full-time “trial” at ER. I interned throughout second semester, graduated in late May and started on the trial then. My first day was July 17, 2005 and I already realized that I’d just graduated from a highly-rated school of journalism and I knew…next to nothing. But thanks to Rachel Hack, my former boss during my internship for AAF-Kansas City (it was the Ad Club then), I’d landed at a perfect spot to start my career, with two bosses that gave me the opportunity to learn, succeed and grow…as well as failing when necessary.

I failed big time in May of 2006, enough that I met with my two bosses on that Monday morning and told them I couldn’t meet the higher expectations they’d set, and I left the company. For the next eight weeks, I searched for jobs, sat around being lazy far more than I should have (short-term vision and a generous severance will do that to a foolish 23 year old) and, eventually, started thinking about what I really wanted to do next. About that time, desperation began to sit in as the new opportunity I thought was just around the corner didn’t happen. I stayed in touch with my former bosses at ER throughout those eight weeks, and when they asked me to return to the company, I was relieved and optimistic that things would be different this time around.

For the past four years, they have been different. And as my sixth year at ER Marketing begins, I’m excited for what comes next and I know that, when/if I ever leave ER, telling Renae Gonner and Elton Mayfield I’m leaving will be harder than anything I’ve done so far. The respect & admiration I have for them is tremendous, and continues to grow. Thanks Elton & Renae.

With that, I’d like to share ten things about this business I wish I knew five years ago:

  1. You know nothing…and that’s ok.
  2. Be curious, every day.
  3. It’s ok to raise your hand and say, “I can’t do this” or “I don’t understand this.”
  4. Yes, we have the Internet, iPhones and social media, but the business hasn’t changed that much since David Ogilvy penned this classic guide to advertising – the core truths still hold true.
  5. Find a way to measure it, whatever it is, whenever possible.
  6. Ask somebody to grab a beer and learn something new – your peers are always ready to help.
  7. Big clients & big agencies aren’t the only way to have fun in this business.
  8. B2B can be as fun as B2C.
  9. An internal campaign that unites a company can be more valuable then the greatest Super Bowl ad you’ve ever seen.
  10. Manage Expectations of your peers, your bosses and your clients…every day.

Here’s to the next five years – cheers.

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Brilliantly Simply Marketing from Gillette

May 10, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business | 3 comments

In the mail today, I received a box from Gillette, containing its newest razor – the Gillette Fusion ProGlide; I found a free razor offer on one of my favorite sports blogs, All Left Turns (a NASCAR blog), and signed up to try it out. When I got the box (seen below), it brought back memories of the fall of my senior year of high school, soon after I turned 18.

Nicely done packaging with a coupon offer, just what you'd expect from P&G

What does every boy in this country do at age 18? Register for Selective Service, just in case we ever need to bring back the military draft. It’s sort of a rite of passage, though not as exciting as voting, buying cigarettes or going to a strip club. And soon after that registration, all those boys receive a new Gillette razor in the mail – for me, it was a Mach III but I’m assuming they give Fusions today. What a brilliantly simply piece of marketing.

All Gillette does is buy that list of boys, and send them a product sample. Once they try that razor, they’re customers because it’s a great product, at a premium price, that’s truly worth the extra cost.

It’s just my opinion, but I bet this ongoing initiative drives more business for P&G , with better ROI, then any broadcast campaign with Tiger Woods/Roger Federer/Thierry Henry, silly NASCAR YoungGuns promotion or any social media strategy they run. I wonder if Gillette has any idea what percent of those samples get turned into additional cartridge sales, and how many are regular customers 1, 5 or 10 years down the road. Other than following a sample audience and projecting those numbers nationwide, I’m not sure how they could track it. But then again, they’re P&G and have a marketing budget bigger than the GDP of some countries, so maybe they have more precise numbers.

This is truly marketing at its core – identify the target audience and get the product in their hands. It doesn’t require celebrity endorsement, over-the-top promotion, YouTube videos or any silly consumer research about “online conversations.” To quote The Ad Contrarian’s blog post from earlier today, sometimes, “marketing people take the obvious and make it incomprehensible.” Gillette, thankfully, hasn’t let that happen – brilliantly simple.

When I’m thinking about clients and our next strategies for them, I’m going to try and keep this example in mind – hope you do too.

http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2010/05

/going-through-life-rolling-my-eyes.html

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