How to Waste Lots of Money to Get Bad Customers

Most readers have had marketing projects that didn’t exactly perform as well as they had wanted. And they probably know why they didn’t. Hindsight is always 20-20, but I thought I’d speak with astute members of the marketing community to discuss some common mistakes made by desperate marketing folks. Here are some of their favorite bad ideas.

Create ridiculous promotions: One way to muck up your prospect file is to offer promotions that have nothing to do with the interests of your target customers.

Take a recently bankrupt Natural Products Company, for instance, which thought that a trip to Las Vegas would be great to offer its highly targeted list of Natural Products Consumers. This may seem to the average marketing Joe a decent idea, but if you look at the interests and habits of the typical Natural Product Consumer, you’d realize that Las Vegas is the last place on the planet they would choose to go. A more appropriate promotion would have been a free health evaluation from an expert, or dinner with health guru Dr. Weil.

One rule of thumb when using travel as an incentive: the more affluent your customer base, the less likely they are to care. Time is their most precious commodity, and affluent consumers will always choose where, when, and with whom they travel.

Treat your boss’s favorite media as your customer’s favorite media: “John, we’ve got to be in this magazine” is a quote I have heard far too many times. Sometimes your under-sexed ceo drops a copy of Swimsuit Models Exposed or Bird Hunting Quarterly on your desk. People often think that if THEY read a certain publication, everybody else does, too.

Well folks, if you think running an ad in these usually inappropriate publications will get you a raise or score big brownie points, go for it. But if you are held accountable for the money you spend, make sure you run the numbers first.

One warning: The most commonly suggested media is The Oprah Show, followed closely by The Rosie Show. Unless your target is stay-at-home women concerned about their weight and their grocery list, forget them.

Assume that p.r. is the answer: Make sure you appoint an egomaniac to run your p.r. efforts. The budget will immediately be referred to as “his” budget, and every media placement will prominently feature a large color picture of your p.r. director.

Another way to really get some miles out of that precious p.r. dollar is to blow it all on an event. A great example of this is the typical soon-to-be-bankrupt dot-com “launch party.” I have been to or heard of such parties that included jugglers, topless women on horses, live ice sculpture artists, mimes, buckets of caviar (who eats that stuff anyway?) and – last but not least – Mariah Carey. Come on, how is paying Mariah Carey $10,000 to show up at a party for an hour going to sell mortgages online?

Another brilliant p.r. tactic is to create a huge press kit with glitter inside that will spill all over the reporter’s desk. Make sure you include lots of boring black-and-white head shots of the pasty management team, address them to “recipient,” and pitch reporters from your cell phone unprepared. Oh, as a last note, make sure you ignore all of the really unsexy but terribly relevant trade and niche publications that are appropriate for your product; they don’t look good on the ol’ resume.

Remember that branding=buying: Hire a really expensive branding agency to do all the work for you. They will promptly give the assignment to three 20-year-old interns who have just discovered SRDS and plan to use your media plan as their semester thesis.

Branding has gotten a bad rap from the DM community as of late, but branding has its place among your customers both targeted and existing. All too often, agencies that get paid to spend your money confuse branding with spending. Branding does not automatically mean mass media, and mass media does not always mean branding.

My definition of branding is very close to my definition of dating: it is the process of building a relationship, carving out a set of unique attributes in your customer’s (or date’s) brain, and creating pleasurable memories that are associated with your product or service (or you).

With few exceptions, branding in today’s media-clogged society means creating positive customer experiences one at a time. So branding is as much about operations and manufacturing as it is about marketing.

But hey, it’s your budget.