Keep Your Eyeballs to Yourself: Engagement Is The Ticket

Just returned home from the umpteenth trade show of my marketing and sales career. I must confess I’m not the type of person who gets a kick out of such events, although I’ve met plenty who thrive on it. Often these people—the event “junkies,” I like to call them–have mastered the art of the pitch, and they visibly enjoy delivering it, like golf pros swing-after-smooth-swinging on the course. These folks live and breathe for the attention, for the moment when they catch someone’s eye and cause a visceral reaction—whether it be delight, surprise, or even just slight confusion.

The next time you’re privileged enough to attend a convention or trade show for your industry, stand in the middle of the floor and just take a look around. You’ll see exactly what I mean. Every single person you see is fairly single-minded—there’s one thing that makes them tick (if they’re lucky) and that’s the single thing they’re here to sell. And you are the selling prospect. Problem is, you have a million other equally worthy ideas clamoring for your limited attention, and one person’s passion for the mineral composition of Himalayan pink salt just isn’t gonna cut through—unless you just happen to be an avid salt aficionado. In this jumbled scenario of overlapping interests and wants called a “trade show,” no salesperson has enough time or interest to figure out your needs, your company’s needs, or what you might in fact be in the frame of mind to buy.

Attention-getting can be easy, quick, and cheap, but like many cheap-quick-easy things, the gratification doesn’t hold up for very long afterwards. (And let’s be honest: we all know the only reason you have a long line waiting to walk up to your booth is they want your free goodies. So thank your promotions coordinator.) I’m starting to suspect that by focusing on attention, whether through our traditional ad campaigns, brand experience design, or viral marketing efforts, we’ve only been chasing after the wrong target. Why?

Because it’s engagement that everyone wants. Not simply fleeting attention. Not in-store traffic, not even eyeballs (after all, what good are eyeballs when they’re positively glazed over from sensory overload?) Engagement’s where it’s at.

To engage a prospect you have to connect with her emotionally. Yes, I realize when you think of emotional connection you envision the end consumer of any of a set of soft, fluffy products—a consumer goods brand…red-soled Louboutin shoes, perhaps… or a type of soft drink. But engagement and emotional raison d’etre are critical for services and for business-to-business selling, too. Besides, everyone has professional pain points, or his boss does, or his board does—and everyone is there because deep down it’s in his best interest to alleviate those pain points by making the smartest decisions possible with the information available. Find the pain point and that’s one golden opportunity to engage.

By engaging the prospect with your product or service in terms of her pain points, or in terms that have emotional significance (i.e., make her feel like a hero with a cost-effective platform for her to finally launch her brilliant new experiential campaign) you generate an instant emotional connection, a reason to be remembered, and a selling window. I’m talking not about an elevator pitch but an experience, about going beyond that initial spark of interest to get the other person’s wheels turning—with brain and heart at least partially in gear.

Engage. Enable the other person to visualize how your offering could solve a specific problem or generate a new opportunity within her own frame of reference and within the context of her own brand, company, budget, and organizational constraints.

A perfect example from my last trade show was a software vendor with a great platform (and a decidedly engaging tool, the fresh new iPad). They have created a practical way for in-store shoppers to find product suggestions based on their preferences—a great way for manufacturers and retailers to cross-market various categories within a store. As I stood for a few minutes with the presenter and presentation, my wheels were definitely turning. I could instantly envision at least three or four applications for something like this, right within the context of my brands and categories, and even our budgets. And for a few minutes, I was engaged and actually excited about this product.

As for the rest of the trade show exhibits, well, some had my eyeballs….but only for a fleeting moment. All I can say is, it’s great to be back home.

Do You Feel…Lucky? (Well, Do Ya?)

An oldie but goodie from Fast Company magazine–call it The Secret meets Norman Vincent Peale with some behaviorial science thrown in. The premise is that luck belongs to those who make allowances for it in their lives, by keeping their minds open to new experiences, new human connections, and new mental associations. It assumes lucky people roll with circumstance and consistently view their glasses as more than half-full.

How to Make Your Own Luck by Dan Pink (@DanielPink).

Skills for The Still-Employed

No matter how you slice it, right now seems as risky a time as ever to make any kind of career move. On a weekly basis, it seems, I hear from professionals who are either still looking for employment after many months, or staying put in unsatisfying jobs—holding out until “things” get better. Any marketer privileged enough not to have become a casualty of the recession may feel nearly guilty for harboring the slightest bit of career restlessness.

At the peak of the dotcom boom (and doesn’t the term itself sound embarrassingly archaic now), switching jobs–even careers—every few years became professionally acceptable. Job-hopping lost the stigma it held for my parents’ generation. Jobs became stepping stones and resume-builders rather than comfy, cozy corporate rides with company pensions at the end of a dutiful tenure. Heck, many of us adopted the word “downsized” as part and parcel our very modern career, and even that we learned to do with a bit of pride. We had earned it. We had survived.

Jump to 2010, and we’ve mournfully parted with our dreams of retirement and pensions. (Most of us will not even have time or energy to lament the inadequacy of our severance package.) Degrees and tenure no longer guarantee a comfy, clear career path. Downsizing has reached epidemic proportions, so your story of how you lost a job is no longer unique—it’s happened to many of your own coworkers. And to complicate matters further, there is no counterpart firm preparing to welcome you into the fold, to “upsize” you on the other side of your misadventure. At least not for a while.

With things as dire as this, aspiring for on-the-job fulfillment can seem downright frivolous and selfish. Did your parents make you finish all the food on your plate on account of the children of the world without enough to eat? That infamous, now-comical anecdote is a good analogy for what happens to our professional mindsets in the clutches of a recession. Who can afford the luxury of job satisfaction when plenty of her peers have no clock to punch?

If you’re among the crowd of marketers holding out in a job that may very well be sucking the creative life out of you, or simply no longer challenges your skills, you need to take active measures to stay sharp. Here’s what many of my friends and colleagues are doing to combat the job blahs while they hunker down:

1)      Take up a creative hobby, or do more of it. Perhaps that silkscreening, woodworking, or poetry-writing on the side won’t ever turn into a new income stream, who knows, but any activity that puts you in a state of flow (read up on Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi here) is good for your brain, and ultimately more productive for your 9-to-5.

2)      Connect with others in your field. Sounds obvious, but when you’re busy trying to preserve your job you may forget there are others out there doing what you do, day in and day out. You can always learn something new from your peers.

3)      Connect with others outside of your field. Whether you’re eyeing a career transition, a new partnership, or job prospects on behalf of someone else, it never hurts to expand your knowledge of someone else’s industry or occupation. If you’re a marketer, chances are your brain can quickly understand how the role of the person you’ve just met is relevant or somehow connected to yours. Besides, everyone knows someone who knows many other someones, and it’s plain old good karma to pass on your contacts in a time of need.

4)      Bloom where you’re planted. If you’re job-unhappy, the idea of forcing yourself to enjoy various aspects of your work can seem distasteful. Yet it only makes sense to align your activities with your passions and interests as much as you can—to go with your strengths, as Marcus Buckingham would suggest. Look into reorienting or reorganizing your tasks so you can do more of what you’re best at. Delegate if necessary. Delegate to someone who will thrive in that space, if possible. Eliminate non-essential tasks altogether, especially if they are wholly counterproductive or a poor fit for your personal To Do list.

What other approaches are you taking to stay sane through these wild times?

Marcus Buckingham’s Strong Life and Strategies for Personal Branding

In his latest book, Find Your Strongest Life, Marcus Buckingham challenges traditional thinking about what, for a woman, defines and creates a successful life. According to the author’s research, the multitude of lifestyle choices available to women today has counterintuitively resulted in a less–not more–fulfilled generation that in decades past. Partially at fault, says the author, could be the myth of the woman who “has it all” and achieves the coveted state of work-life balance (to use an already frightfully overused phrase). In real life such a balance, it turns out, is not only next to humanly impossible, but undesirable. It is those women who have deliberately skewed their investment of time and energy toward their individual areas of greatest strength that consider themselves most fulfilled.

This notion of focusing on personal strengths flies in the face of all we’ve been taught in our lifetimes of report cards and performance evaluations. Rather than spin our wheels trying to fix what is “wrong” with us—roles or activities in which we don’t naturally excel or feel competent—we’d be wiser to devote more time to the few core things that just…fit.

It reads like good advice from a marketing angle, too—a reminder that the brand is diluted when it tries to be everything to too many audiences. To be strong and authentic your personal brand must have a distinct value proposition, and your “business model” must fall in line with delivering those core elements of value. Define what you honestly and naturally do best (not what you got your degree in, what you managed to force yourself to learn, what you’ve been doing diligently and unhappily for all these years, or what your family or friends expect from you). Then, quite simply, stick to that.

The book’s premise and research behind the method are certainly eye-opening, and the easy Strong Life test helps the reader pinpoint and understand the Lead Role and Supporting Role (or top two core strength areas) she was born to play in various dimensions of life. One relatively weak section of the book is the hurriedly put together chapters on practical advice. The troubleshooting how-to for career, relationships, and parenting is overly general and reads in places as if it’s been lifted from a college-prep handbook. Perhaps the author felt he had given enough advice on designing a life around your strengths in his previous books. The concept of playing only to my strengths is so enlightening that I’ll be going back to them to figure out how.

In case you want to know more, a book trailer from the publisher right here.

Full disclosure: A free copy was provided for review by publisher Thomas Nelson.

Bookselling Giant Adapts to Stay in the Game

It comforts me to see the book trade doing what it needs to do to stay afloat and thrive, in light of tough economy, changing consumer preferences, media consumption trends–what-have-you. Borders refuses to let itself be dragged down by the decline of brick-and-mortar music and movie sales. Instead, it adapts by reformatting its stores to replace that footage with micro shops devoted to teen cravings. Smart. Interesting.

And if my 16-year-old niece’s predilection for Borders and teen fiction is any kind of barometer for what’s big right now, this is big.

Borders Aims to Capitalize on Teens with New Shops

It Takes A Recession….

Who would’ve imagined that food out of a can would become not only practical, but popular again? Now big food companies such as Del Monte are spending big bucks to remind us that ingesting canned foods is no worse for us than ingesting “fresh” things. Most new product introductions this year will not come in the form of fancy packaging or newfangled cooking methods (steaming in a microwave bag is sooo 2008), but rather in the good old-fashioned form of humble aluminum cans, in the center of your grocery store.

Canned foods marketers, rejoice, and piggyback on being cool, again. Cans Are Hot! Brandweek Article, May 2009.

The Package Says It All

I’m enthralled by packaging—so much so that if I let myself get carried away in a store and stand there staring at the shelves I’d probably alarm the staff…after a while. Instead I sometimes peruse through packaging magazines, or websites such as the lovely TheDieline.com.

The expression of a brand you can hold in your hand. How brilliant.

Fast Food Ad Antics

Saw the new Jack in the Box ads, and like the new logo….just think Jack is awfully ripped for having been in a coma the last couple of months.

More Retro Comfort Food, Courtesy of General Mills

Some good old brands just make you…feel better.

General Mills, Target Play on Consumers’ Nostalgia:
Retro Designs of Their Youth Appeal to Stressed Shoppers’ Desire for Comfort

Are You Feeling Guilty…Yet?

Target is once again telling us what is cool, but the notion of “cool” has taken a sharp turn to–well, somewhere else. Nowadays it is cooler than ever to be thrifty, and not cool (in fact, it seems downright offensive) to indulge in the small luxuries of life–things like pedicures and store-bought espressos and gym memberships and trips to the hair salon. Things we used to take for granted. This is a commercial from Target’s latest TV campaign.

Along the same guilt-inducing lines, in a recent ad for Sonic Drive-Ins, a tweenage son berates his mom for buying herself an expensive handbag at the mall. The son, it appears, has a much better handle on the value of a dollar, as he’s treating his mother to a few items from the varied Sonic dollar menu.

And this widespread feeling of badness is affecting the super affluent as well, not just the rest of us. In this Washington Times article, we see how even those purchasing luxury goods are no longer comfortable with flaunting their favorite brands.

All this leaves me with one question about where marketing goes from here. As the economy continues to take a beating, what will the toll be on branding? As customer loyalty takes a back seat to the quest for value, which brands will become more significant, and which simply become obsolete?