It’s that day when an entire nation (if not the entire known universe) sits down to watch commercials. Oh yeah, there’s a game on too. But come Monday morning, most of the office talk will be about the commercials, not the game. Fortunes have been won and lost on Super Bowl Sunday – not on the field, but in the offices of senior marketing and advertising executives.
There’s one other thing that Super Sunday is known for. It’s the biggest snacking day of the year. According to the Snack Food Association, Super Bowl fans consume 11 million pounds of potato chips, 13.2 million pounds of avocados, 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips, 4.3 million pounds of pretzels, 3.8 million pounds of popcorn and 2.5 million pounds of snack nuts. And that’s before all the pizza and chicken wings.
What's your favorite Super Bowl snack? Take our Super Snack Sunday survey, and be eligible to win a brand new 40" flat screen TV!
Doug Grant
CEO* at WAG
*(Chief Eating Officer)
The Super Bowl champion is usually the team that excelled at the “basics”. The big game is rarely won with trick plays or flashy personalities – but rather by executing good old fashioned “blocking and tackling”. Likewise, to win in the game of marketing, you must build your playbook around proven methods and messages. Flash may be fun, but it’s substance that sells.
Here's some key terms to include in your Marketing Champions Playbook.
Go all out. Surround and overwhelm your target audience (in a professional way). Use multiple media to spread your message. But remember to keep the message itself both consistent and relevant.
You get what you pay for. Beware of “free” or “cheap” marketing methods. Take email for instance. If used as one weapon in a cross-media campaign, it can be quite effective in boosting response rates. But if it’s the only weapon you use, you may be shooting blanks. There’s always a penalty flag thrown for cheap shots – and cheap marketing could cost you serious yardage off your sales charts.
The best one is a good offense (but you’ve heard that before). Don’t hold back. Take some risks, mix it up, try some new marketing tools. There’s power in the new “integrated marketing” technology that integrate multiple media channels into a coordinated marketing effort. Seek out a partner (like us) that can help you.
Many games are decided by just one point. It’s the slightest margin that can separate a winner from a loser. Many times it’s the little things that separate the marketing winners from those other guys. One of the best books about developing organizational and service excellence is Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. Ken talks about “Deliver Plus One”. To stand out from the crowd, consistently deliver what your clients expect – then give them just a little more. Just one percent more will be noticed and appreciated. It’s the extra point that will keep you on the winning team.
Your sales department is screaming for new collateral. You’ve got a campaign that’s almost ready to launch. You’ve got a deadline. So you pull the trigger, only to find out later what you coulda/woulda/shoulda done differently. The penalty for a false start in football is 5 yards and a replay. In real-life marketing, the penalty for an unprepared launch is a lot worse. Take a time-out if you have to, and get your strategy right before you make your play.
Here’s your chance to win a brand new TV! You don’t even need to know anything about football. You just need to trust your gut (pun intended). Tell us your favorite Super Bowl snack food, and we’ll enter your name in our Super Snack Sunday drawing for a new 40” flat screen TV.
CLICK HERE to cast your vote and enter our contest. Good luck, and good snacking too!
Tivo’s and DVR’s are the best thing to happen to television since the remote control. All during the year these wonderful inventions allow us to record and skip past all those annoying commercials. That is, except for Super Bowl Sunday. On that day, we all stop what we’re doing and stare into our big screens, mesmerized by what we see. Oh yes, we look forward to the Big Game. But not as much as the anticipation of catching that Next Big Commercial.
This year, advertisers will shell out close to $3 million for a 30 second spot in the Super Bowl. That’s a whole lot of dinero for Doritos. Speaking of tortilla chips, have you entered our Super Snack Sunday contest to win a big screen TV? And speaking of Doritos, Frito-Lay is partnering with PepsiCo to offer their 5th annual “Crash the Super Bowl” challenge. Winners of the top consumer-created ads for both Doritos and PepsiMAX will receive up to $1 million if their ad ranks No. 1 on the USA TODAY Ad Meter. Go to CrashtheSuperBowl to preview the top ten finalists and cast your vote, and you’ll be eligible to win a pair of Super Bowl tickets.
What’s the top-ranked Super Bowl ad of all time? It’s still the “Apple 1984” commercial. Check it out - plus all your other favorite Super Bowl commercials from the past at Superbowl-ads.com.
You can’t see them – so how do you sell them? That’s the problem with services. A product is tangible. You can see it and touch it. A service, by contrast, is intangible. In fact, a service does not even exist when you buy it. You order it - then you get it.
These are excerpts from a book summary I did a few years ago on “Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith. I stumbled on the summary recently, and it again convinced me that this may be the best book of all time for how to market a service business. It’s not so much a how-to book, but rather a how-to-think-about book. Beckwith begins with the core problem of service marketing: service quality. He then suggests how to learn what to improve and moves to some service marketing fundamentals: defining what business you’re really in and what people are really buying, positioning your service, understanding buying behavior, and effectively communicating your marketing message.
Selling the Invisible is chock-full of simple yet powerful “bite sized” nuggets of marketing wisdom. Here’s a few of my favorites:
If you’re having trouble writing copy for your own advertising, your product or service may be what’s flawed. Write an ad for your service. If after a week your best ad is weak, stop working on the ad and start working on your service.
Beware of a total focus on merely “total quality”. America’s great service successes are not the companies that did what others did but a little better. Rather they are the companies that decided to do things a whole lot differently. Beware starting a planning session with “let’s look at what we did last year, and do at least 15% better”. Fifteen percent better works fine for a time. Until another company comes along and does business 100 percent differently. Don’t just think better. Think different.
College and grad school teach us that technical competence is all. Knowing your stuff is what counts. However, this lesson of college conflicts with the lesson we learned immediately before it, in high school. Children and teenagers learn to value well-roundedness and traits that are likeable. Life is like high school. Those things that made you popular start mattering again. Be competent, be likeable, and you’ll win more business than the brilliant but socially deficient expert. In large part, service marketing is a popularity contest.
People cannot see your service. So they judge your service by what they can see. Look at your business card, your lobby, your proposal, your shoes. What do your visibles say about the invisible thing you are trying to sell? Watch what you show.
Your prospects want to know: what makes you so different that I should do business with you? It’s a simple request that begs for a simple response. Don’t give a complex answer. Your prospect doesn’t want more to think about; your prospect wants less. Meet your market’s very first need: give it one good reason.
Get your very own copy of Selling the Invisible (I’m certainly not going to loan you mine – it’s way too valuable). May it inspire you to new service marketing heights!
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