The Postal Service Delivers

Have you noticed the latest ads being run by the United States Postal Service? In addition to the “if it fits, it ships” campaign, the new campaign is designed to highlight the security of mail, the personal nature of the friendly letter carrier, and a sense of trust in the whole process. The commercial begins as a woman uses a magnet to put a piece of mail on a refrigerator, “A refrigerator has never been hacked…” The same message – security – as a woman tacks a bill to a cork board; “An online virus has never attacked a cork board.” Finally, “A piece of mail has never disappeared with a click.” The message is that mail is good for business and their customers. If you haven’t seen it yet, you probably will. These are tough times for the USPS, but tough times can also help you re-focus your message.

Meanwhile Facebook has once again announced sweeping new changes to the world-wide social media site. Facebook’s newest idea is to make its platform a 21st century form of scrapbooking, and to help you “scrapbook” your entire life “frictionlessly”. The new “timeline” is designed to help you share more of yourself; your taste in movies, fashion, music and about everything else you might post. It is designed to allow for another level of privacy for Facebook users, while in truth it will generate an enormous amount of critical information for marketers. However, it will present a challenge for your small business page to break through this new gatekeeper. You’re going to have to work harder to get noticed. In the good old days, you know, about two months ago, when you posted on your business “wall” it would show up on all 2375 of your followers “walls”. If you were lucky some of them would share and your “impression count” – the number of walls your message was seen on – might be half again as much, or in some cases, two or three times the number of your fans.

Fast forward a couple of months and you’ll notice your impression counts have sunk like a stone. In some cases we’ve seen Facebook pages with close to 4700 followers receive less than 200 impressions. Ouch! These new changes from Facebook are designed to protect you and your personal Facebook page from all those messages (they decide) you don’t want to see. And for good reason. If you’re like me you have probably noticed some really weird Facebook posts from people you’ve never heard of. So in an effort to improve your quality of life, Facebook has begun to filter your messages for you. I guess you can have too much Facebook.

Wait, haven’t I been here before? They have hacked the code. They’re invading my Facebook page! Just when you thought you’ve got all your bases covered those insidious marketers show up and crash the party. Darn. So Facebook builds a wall, yet another level of privacy settings, that will allow you to block those nuisance messages that have become so pervasive. I guess we will always need some kind of filter to protect us from ourselves.

Remember those annoying phone calls around dinner time? Congress passes the “no call list”. Too many ads on TV? Just set your DVR and speed right past them. More commercials than music on your FM radio? XM radio. As the sheer number of websites grew we had to come up with pop-up blockers, relief from unwanted ‘cookies’ and protection from Spy-ware. E-Mail? Your in-box has become a vast abyss where it takes more time to delete all the mail you don’t want, as it takes to read the stuff you really want to see. Remember how “You’ve got mail!” was kind of neat? Now it has just coined a new phrase in our cultural lexicon – spam.

There is a pattern at work here:
New medium, early adopters, critical mass, exploitation, filters and eventual decline.

Consumers have more power to pick and choose who they want to hear from, and how and when they want to receive the message. Advertising in this new digital age is seen as just a series of interruptions to our daily life. Too much clutter. So we ratchet up our spam filters, watch only the shows we’ve DVR’ed, and tune into music services like iTunes, Rhapsody and Pandora.

“To me, marketing is about values.” – Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, 1997. “This is a very complicated, very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.”

When Steve Jobs passed the world lost an innovator of the highest order. He is responsible for revolutionary changes in the way we experience the world around us. He was also a great marketer. He was a visionary. He once famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Ironically, he was an old-school advertiser. Apple now spends over half a billion dollars in advertising each year and the majority goes to TV, print and billboards. However, Apples spends less than 10% of advertising on the web. They are very specific about ad placement. He carefully crafted each message. From the iconoclastic 1984 Super Bowl ad where a lone woman charges through an audience of drones to smash the status quo of ‘Big Brother’, to the classic Mac and PC ads. He created a culture that cut a clear distinction between Apple and everyone else.

Great marketing is about telling your story. Who you are, what you do, and what you can offer others. A story that’s true. This doesn’t mean you need to write an opus, it just means you need to be clear about what your company stands for, create definition and an engaging message about what makes you and your product better than the next guy.

You know one thing I failed to tag onto that trajectory of technology was nostalgia. What is old is new again. Even in these days of iPods and digital downloads, there is a growing market for vinyl. Those cookie-cutter tract houses that spawned strip malls across America are now sold as “mid-centuries”. Retro is back; which brings us back to the good old USPS. So you have ads from the Post Office that promote the solid, comforting notion of a letter being hand carried to your door.

I have always liked direct mail. I have also been a big advocate of what author Seth Godin coined as “permission marketing”. One of the first things we suggested besides newsletters and postcards was a sign up box. The approach was simple: transparency. Let them know what they will get from you when they give you permission to contact them. Simple. Whether it is a ‘Girls Night Out’ event, a special loyal customer’s only sale, or even just to send them a birthday card, just tell them what they’ll get and keep your word.