Marketing

Marketing Monday: Quality vs. Quantity

Marketing can be ever so humbling.

I distinctly remember this coming up in one of my interviews for my first-ever marketing job, at National Geographic. I was so happy to even have the chance to interview, and I wasn't from a marketing background at the time, and I was trying to just take it all in and not mess anything up. One of the higher-ups that I interviewed with said that it could be very humbling to see what worked and what didn't work in direct mail. I remember listening, nodding earnestly. I didn't fully understand it (I barely understood what direct mail was, at that point), but I was happy to accept it as true, and tuck it under my hat.

Boy how I've thought of that comment in the years since. So often campaigns don't work the way you might expect them to. What's intuitive is not always a win. What seemed cute or clever often backfires. Unlike other areas of my life, I learned not to trust my gut instinct right off the bat, but to sit with new creative, collate feedback, and look again.

Of course as time went on, my intuition became sharper. I learned the business more, I moved up the ranks, and I gained years of experience working with the brands and audiences I marketed to. Of course, experience certainly doesn't mean we all can't be surprised. For me, being successful at marketing means understanding conventional marketing wisdom, while keeping up with rapid changes in the marketing landscape. This means knowing why you're doing what you're doing, but also pausing at regular intervals to question it, to see if it's actually still working. It means respecting the power of metrics and data, and the stories they tell: it means testing and trying new things.

Adapt, or get left behind.

I'm thinking of all of this while digesting this article from HubSpot, addressing a question they pose that we've all surely pondered: Should you create more content of a lower quality or less content of a higher quality?

Marketing Monday: A Fools' Postmortem

Who said Marketing Monday only had to take place on Mondays? Okay, okay. But I love this topic and wanted to be sure to armchair quarterback this: one of my favorite marketing days of the year.

I love jokes. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor. But I have never been a big fan of pranks. I think it's the tendency for pranks to swing mean-spirited or cruel that I really have an issue with. Making people laugh? Aces! Causing people discomfort or stress? Boooooo. BOOOOOOO.

At any rate, on a personal level, I usually dread April first, what with its abundance of poorly executed social media pranks and "jokes" (I'm looking at you, fake pregnancy announcements), the majority of which seem to be unfunny at best, cruel at worst. April Fools' Day: Full of fools! Who knew?! (It's possible I'm just a curmudgeon.)

That said, I find April first absolutely fascinating from a marketing perspective. I love seeing what emails are awaiting me that day, what starts picking up traction on social media, and what brilliant (or not so brilliant; more on that in a bit) things Google tries. It's a day where companies can be fun and funny and show off their wit, but wherein they need to walk a fine line to be successful as well.

Here are a few April Fools' tricks that I think were well-executed, and one or two that I think missed the mark.

This video from Quilted Northern was so obviously a joke, and it was actually funny, well-produced, and on-brand. Potential for going viral (it kept coming up in my Facebook feed), no one gets hurt, brand-centric, all in good fun? A+

Start remembering your bathroom experiences again with our new handcrafted toilet paper. Inspired by the makers of yesterday and today.

Conversely, I opened up my email on April 1 to see this from Sprinkles Cupcakes, with subject line "Goodbye Red Velvet, Hello Black Velvet!":

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First of all, "cupcation" is cute and clever. But as for the meat of it: I know that Red Velvet is one of this nationwide cupcake chain's best sellers. I found it highly suspect that they'd do away with it, especially in an email announcement on April first. With that in mind, I clicked through to their site to confirm that it was in fact a joke, but there was no such confirmation: there was only information about Black Velvet.

I took a look at their Twitter feed, thinking that confirmation might be there. And it was: not in the form of an announcement, but rather in replies to distraught customer inquiries asking if it was a joke. Most of the tweets I looked at were in response to this tweet. Your eyes do not deceive you: that incomplete image is actually what was uploaded to Twitter, and there it remained.

The complete version could be found on Facebook:

Farewell, Red Velvet... hello, Black Velvet! Red Velvet is old news.. we've sent this flavor on a well-deserved cupcation and replaced it with our new Black Velvet. Scroll down to meet your new favorite!

Posted by Sprinkles Cupcakes on Friday, 1 April 2016

They replied to comments there acknowledging that it was a joke:

I don't know about you, but I cringed particularly hard for the bride concerned about the cupcakes she'd ordered for her wedding. Not causing your customers extra stress is, or should be, a primary concern. Fortunately she seemed to take it in stride, but this is exactly why, if you're going to attempt to pull off an April Fools' prank on your customers, you'd better be darn sure of the execution. This could have just as easily gone the other way.

But back to Twitter:

Sprinkles responded to about half their replies to this tweet, then seemed to lose steam. Their replies were similar to this:

The next day this email was waiting for me in my inbox with subject line "Are You a Fool for Cupcakes?":

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They also tweeted this:

From what I could see, responses were generally good-natured. Still, I think this could have been handled better. It would have been perfectly appropriate to have this announcement on the landing page for when people clicked through. The idea behind the special edition Black Velvet cupcake is a fun one, and this April Fools' prank could have been pulled off in a more savvy, customer-focused fashion. To me it missed the mark. People were left really wondering if their favorite product was leaving, and the only way they were able to find out was by tweeting at the company or combing through their replies on social media. Not the best strategy, in my experience. I'd love to hear your thoughts: Am I being too hard on Sprinkles?

(I'd also like to have a word with their copywriter about several things, but particularly about Fools vs. Fool's/Fools', and a lack of consistency. And okay, yeah, about making their own name possessive correctly.)

And finally, the master of fooling: Google. There is even a Wikipedia article outlining past Google April Fools' Day pranks.

This year, two caught my eye. One, because it was ill-conceived and predictably went pear-shaped (adding a "mic drop" to people's emails, and what happened when they didn't realize it, then blocking any replies to that email so the sender would never see the conversation again) and got pulled early, and the other because it was cute, funny, and started out as plausible but by the end was clearly a joke.

Enjoy!

What marketing pranks caught your eye this year? Is there one you've always wanted to see?

Marketing Monday: Reading

You know what they say, it's Monday somewhere! No one says that. It's not Monday, I realize, yet here I am, posting Marketing Monday anyway. Sometimes that's how these things go.

If you've been around here or my Twitter or Instagram accounts at all, you might know I love reading. I love it recreationally, but it's also important to my work. The more I read - of anything - the more voices, vocabulary, and points of view I'm exposed to. The more of that I'm exposed to, the better a writer I become.

When I was in sixth grade, there was a class spelling bee. I remember vividly how we all lined up along the wall and went down the line, taking our turn trying to spell the words the teacher said aloud. At one point she asked for the word 'click'. She went down the line, and student after student said "Click. C-l-i-c-k. Click.", and it was wrong. Everyone was puzzled. But as their puzzlement and murmurs grew, so grew my excitement. I knew what word she was asking for, and it wasn't click.

At that point I read and re-read a lot of Sweet Valley High, The Babysitter's Club, Nancy Drew Files, and anything else I could get my hands on, especially if it had to do with friendship and characters that were close to my age. I knew exactly what word she was talking about. When she got to me, I said "Clique. C-l-i-q-u-e. Clique.". She smiled. I was correct. My classmates were all impressed and confounded and I felt triumphant. I remember vividly feeling like there was a secret I was in on, and I had unlocked it simply by doing something I loved and that came naturally to me: reading.

I had unlocked it by sneaking books outside with me when I was told to put that book down already, go outside and play. I had unlocked it with all those late night (you know, really late for an 11 year old, like 9-10 p.m.) sessions in my room, sneakily reading by the light of the closet, the method for which I had perfected by turning on and cracking the closet door just so: enough light to read by, but not enough to get busted. I'd unlocked it reading by the light of the tiny Christmas tree lights in my room, which I loved so desperately. I'd unlocked it with all those times I brought a book with me everywhere I went, and my poor mother would want to use our solo time in the car together to chat and catch up: But I couldn't help it, I couldn't bear to tear myself away from the words on the page. (I'm sorry, Mom! In my defense, you did have children with someone who magically goes deaf when he has his nose in a book.) (I can't tell you the number of times one of us has stood in front of my Dad's chair while he's reading, calling his name, literally right next to him, and he has been blissfully, completely unaware. These are my genes. I cannot help it. I come by it honestly.) I'd unlocked the secret by befriending the school librarian in fifth grade. She made recommendations for me and would set aside books for me. I'd unlocked it by reading anything I could get my hands on, and letting myself get lost.

Reading was transportation for me. It took me to other places and showed me other ways of thinking, of being, of seeing. It's still that, as an adult. But as a kid, I can still remember the impact of certain books, and how they became part of me as I learned and grew and got to know the world around me, beyond me. Reading taught me things I couldn't have learned anywhere else, and let me safely come home. Reading was an endless selection of windows into different worlds. Reading is very important to me now, but it was important to me then in a way that was different. It's why I've mostly given up on giving cute clothes and shoes to the new babies in my life and instead have taken to giving books, books, books. It's not that I don't love a cute baby in cute clothes, because boy do I ever. It's that the clothes won't last, and the books will, and how often do we get to be part of that in someone's life? My parents recently gave me a stack of books from my childhood, and I found myself gobsmacked at the memories that came flooding back. Things I'd completely forgotten suddenly came to life again on the page, just by reading. A friend of mine told me just yesterday that her tiny son loves the books I got for him, and asks for some of them by reciting some of their lines ("la la la"). It's a privilege to be a part of that. Making memories with books: this is what excites me.

So, Marketing Monday. Reading is important to my writing. I am constantly searching out things I want to read more about. As someone who works for myself, it's one of my primary learning tools outside of the actual work I do for clients. Marketing Monday is a place to share some of those interesting things I find, similarly to how the Friday Find is a way to share anything fun, light, and interesting

This week I want to share this HubSpot article on some samples of really good copywriting: 10 Companies that Totally Nail Copywriting. Also has some good insight if you still want to get your head around more of what copywriters do

Thanks for reading, friends.