Vodafone's advertising is wasted

Every company has some kind of advertising budget.

Even the smallest one-man bands have to set aside some money for marketing their business, whether that’s printing flyers, running a simple website or placing an ad in the Yellow Pages (when they actually were yellow and pages).

The big players on the other hand pour money into advertising and marketing the same way I pour money into food and travel. A quick look around town and a few hours spent listening to the radio, watching TV or browsing the Internet should give you an idea of the sheer reach and depth of pocket of the larger corporates. As an ex-advertising manager, I’ve had years of exposure to the thought processes of corporations and their ad agencies desperately trying to stand out from the herd. From innovative new campaigns to name changes and total shifts in direction, I’ve more or less seen it all.

And after my years in sales and marketing, I’ve come to a final conclusion re. advertising, and it’s one that should be obvious to everyone who’s in business but for some reason, it’s not.

It doesn’t matter how much you spend on advertising, if your products and or services aren’t up to speed, then you will never be as successful as you could be.

This brings me to Vodafone New Zealand as an example of rendering advertising worthless, or at least worth less than it should be. I’ve been a Vodafone mobile customer since I first arrived on these fair shores 15 years ago. The service has generally been okay, much of a muchness compared to all the other players… well, let’s make that the other player seeing as there was a duopoly in place for much of that time. Arguably, there still is but that’s a tale for another day.

I’ve never used Vodafone for home Internet or landline services, preferring to just stick with Spark but after being out of the country for the last year or so, I ended up encountering Vodafone landline-based Internet in a big way for the first time. I’ve been staying with family and friends for the month I’m in New Zealand, and all three of the places I’ve stayed have had the familiar white and red Vodafone router stashed in a room somewhere. The sight of that router has begun to fill me with intense trepidation.

You see, my partner runs an online business that needs to have decent Internet access. She doesn’t need mega speed or gamer-type pings, just enough to make international Skype video calls or VOIP calls. But we apparently can’t do that with any degree of certainty in any of the houses with a Vodafone fixed-line.

Funny that. We managed in Bali, and not just in Ubub and Denpasar. We coped in some far-flung towns on the north coast of the Island; areas where the Internet infrastructure isn’t exactly flash. But not in NZ. How’s that possible?

We were of course also fine in the USA, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. But in New Zealand, the calls drop out with unerring regularity, even in Auckland and Tauranga. This is when we need to fall back to the 3G or 4G on my iPhone (powered by Vodafone ironically enough). That connection is much more consistent, even if it’s not as quick but the price is just silly. I won’t grill Vodafone too much in that regard – the other players are pretty much just as bad in terms of their outrageous data pricing. I fondly remember getting 4.5Gb of mobile data (and 3G speeds close to 20Mb at times) on Thailand’s AIS mobile network for around $15, not the 1Gb for $29 that I get from Vodafone (and yes, I know about the unlimited texts and the 200 minutes). 

Anyway, back to the landlines – wondering if it was just our bad luck, I started asking around. I asked friends and family, and I asked on the social feed of a technology site I run. The verdict quickly became clear – almost overwhelmingly, Vodafone fixed line Internet access doesn’t seem to be highly regarded. The reason most people give for staying with Vodafone is that all the other ISPs are just as bad. So perhaps Vodafone is hanging onto some of its fixed line market share purely because of consumer apathy?

But this will eventually reflect on their bottom line. Sooner or later, one of the other players will start delivering measurably better service instead of something that resembles the bad days of early New Zealand ADSL when micro-outages were common. And they’ll find a compelling way to tell Kiwis about it, or just wait for word-of-mouth to make it plain. At that point, Vodafone can kiss a huge swathe of clients goodbye.

Which brings us to the moral of the story. How much money are you spending on advertising that’s being wasted because some part of your organisation isn’t quite running up to speed?

Is it your gruff-sounding, uninvolved receptionist who makes your customers want to call someone else? Eventually they will, and it’ll be your competition on the other end of the line. Or is it your call centre’s inability to think outside the box while rigidly adhering to their call scripts? Maybe a product with a lid that tends to spill liquid when the container is shaken? A rep in a branded company car that drives like a madman? Every one of these things can and will impact your company.

No business is perfect, which is why the people at the top need to be rigorously auditing every part of the machine to find and eliminate the weaknesses, whether that be product, people or processes. Find a way to improve your company in some small way every day and you’ll be stunned at what you end up with. Unless the rot does in fact come from the top, in which case, you might as well fire the marketing team and shut the doors because eventually, the competition will eat you alive.

Spend a dollar improving your company before you spend a dollar telling people about it. You’ll be far better off in the long run.

How can you work without passion?

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the staff just don’t care? They don’t have to walk over to your table and declare that they don’t give a damn; you just know they don’t.

I’m not too sure why, it could be a number of things but what happens when the management doesn’t care either? What happens when they care even less?

Last week I was at a client. We were having a meeting with a web design company; they’re very well known, they have 25 staff, posh offices with a foosball table, and for diplomatic reasons, I can’t name them, but let’s refer to them as “The Company”.

About a minute or so into their presentation I knew that “The Company” just didn’t care. I had my suspicions about this right from the start. You see, it had been exactly five weeks to the day since I first approached “The Company” to generate a quote to upgrade my client’s website. In all honesty, it shouldn’t have taken them five weeks to get the quote done, but it did.

Twenty minutes into their presentation, after they had spoken at great length about their own awesomeness and the majesty of their client list, they simply left without even going into the actual numbers they’d been asked to present. Instead, they handed us a bound document and walked out.

When I finally found the quote (and it was skillfully hidden in the middle of the doc and not on the last page) I was amazed. Amazed because they wanted $45,000 to do the job and they weren’t even prepared to discuss it or substantiate it or even allow us to query it.

In this situation, the rot started at the top. The head of “The Company”, who’s been in charge for 15 years, took us through the presentation so I can’t say this is the fault of some junior execs that were too unprepared or cocky to believe they could fail. Right from the very start, it was clear to see that the only way to get passion out of “The Company” was to buy it. And apparently 45k simply isn’t enough.

There are lots of people out there who are passionate beyond belief and who don’t need Steve Jobs to tell them to do what they love because they knew it before they knew who Steve Jobs was. They know they will not find their passion in a call centre or behind a counter at a Burger King. They are the lucky few that will be labelled either crackpot or genius. To them I say don’t give up. Don’t let those that have lost their passion destroy yours. But once you find your success and you make your mark, don’t let your own success poison your passion like it did at “The Company”.

From one Junior Creative to another

There’s a true story about an advertising graduate who put herself into a coffin and had it delivered to a Creative Director’s office in Wellington. When the coffin arrived, she popped up and said: “I’m dying to work here”. She didn’t get the job.

Some advertising graduates go to extraordinary lengths to be noticed by a Creative Director. After all, seeking employment in an advertising agency can be a very daunting and challenging prospect for a young creative.  Like many creative industries there is an abundance of candidates competing for only a handful of positions. An Art Director once told me that advertising agencies are looking for someone who can “put a man on the moon!” When I asked him to elaborate, he explained that the ideal creative is someone who can find a way to do the impossible without going over budget and without going off brief.  Sounds pretty straightforward?  If you’re a graduate and you’re not still nodding away at this point then typically you’ll be the type to settle down in another department or rethink your career options altogether. Those who possess that killer instinct will be quick to put their hand up. The reality is that the right candidate probably wouldn’t be able to meet all of those expectations, but they would be prepared to give it a damn good try and that is what’s important. Apparently advertising agencies are looking for someone who is tenacious, confident in their creative ability and also incredibly resilient. These individuals view an advertising agency as a channel through which they can express their creative flare. They’re excited about a career in advertising because they’re confident that one day they may be part of a revolutionary Google campaign that will reach millions of people worldwide or perhaps they’ll put a man on the moon as part of a game-changing Red Bull campaign.  
 
It is plain to see why self-confidence is essential in the advertising industry - if the creative isn’t confident in their own ideas then why should the client feel any different? The industry is not always friendly nor is it very forgiving and young creatives are prone to being a bit sceptical and hyper critical of their ideas. This can lead to a state of paralysis. While studying at Award School of Advertising, every week I was required to present campaign concepts to experienced Copywriters and Art Directors at a critique session. Presentations involved standing up at long conference tables and sharing ideas to a room full of intimidating creatives and my twelve peers who were competing with me for the Executive Creative Director’s attention.
 
Initially I developed a terrible habit of discarding ideas that I felt weren’t impressive or eye-opening. But, when the work load increased, I couldn’t afford to discard ideas otherwise I simply wouldn’t have enough work to present. This taught me a valuable lesson. You don’t need to be afraid of bad ideas, instead you just need to focus on turning them into great ideas.
 
When I recently freelanced at Partisan Advertising this lesson became the law. Each week I would sit down with Greg Kramer for a few hours at a time and together we would create three piles of options. A pile of good ideas, a pile of potentially good ideas and a pile of ideas that need to be turned into good ideas. The process is incredibly satisfying, not only because it is exciting but because there really isn’t any other time when problems are resolved in such a matter-of-fact way. It is like going through a mediation process; only you simply must arrive at a positive outcome in a relatively short period of time because at the end of the day there is a client to please. Working in my first official Art Director role at Partisan Advertising I realise that I really am quite fortunate to be in this industry. Being employed to produce campaign concepts is an occupation that many naysayers believe is a myth.  There are times when the work does feel too good to be true. Aside from being paid to be creative, you also get to enjoy the satisfaction of watching your ideas be professionally executed and sometimes you get to bask in the client’s contentment with the results. A Senior Art Director warned me that eventually the novelty does wear off, but for the time being the challenges are absolutely worth embracing.
 

Grudge purchases - a 2015 perspective

Buying something you don’t actually want is never easy, which is why grudge purchases are the hardest things to advertise and sell.

Don’t misunderstand me here – all the stuff that we don’t want, but have to have, will always sell. But when it comes to grudge purchases, no one gives a damn about the brand, the supplier or anything else except the lowest price, the most convenient access, and the best warranty where applicable.

Think about it, we all need petrol, tyres and shock absorbers for the car, or insurance for our health, houses and lives but we don’t really want them. When your tyres get bald and your car fails its WOF, you get new tyres or you walk. But that doesn’t mean you like shelling out eight hundred dollars to keep your car moving. When you need tyres, you probably do exactly what I do – identify the type of tyre you need and then call around to find the best deal. I do the same with insurance and electricity.

If there was a site that gave me the prices of tyres around Auckland, I’d be there in a second.

When I bought travel insurance for my current overseas trip, I looked on Squaremouth. I was presented with exactly what I wanted from a wide range of insurers, most of which I’d never heard of. At this point, brand was the least important thing on my mind – what I wanted was the best deal for the amount of cover I needed, and I wanted peace of mind i.e. good customer reviews, of which there were plenty (this is a great example of where keeping your customers happy pays off in the long run).

So I think it’s safe to say that grudge purchases are the worst kind of product to have to sell, and they’re just as tough to advertise. Here’s an example of how deeply people resent grudge purchases – my partner is a health practitioner. She specialises in helping adults and kids sort out symptoms involving speech, breathing, appearance and other oral-related concerns, and she does it all online.

It’s easy to see how much some patients resent having to go through the treatment. Yes, it has the potential to change their lives or the lives of their children, but it’s just another thing they didn’t want to have to spend over $2,000 on, let alone to have to work intensively with her for months on end. So they show up late, miss appointments or occasionally, they just drop out entirely. Some don’t even sign up in the first place even though they need the treatment and a dentist or orthodontist has referred them. Cutting off their noses to spite their faces you might say.

On the other hand, my partner also teaches other practitioners how to do what she does. These clients are fired up with the idea of starting a new career, earning more money, and even perhaps moving to a new phase in their lives. They’re always there, always on time, and they’re totally involved in the process. They know that they both needed and wanted this purchase. That’s the holy grail of sales and marketing, and it’s nice to have that kind of product or service if you can get it.
But what do you do when you can’t? When you’ve got something that’s not just a parity product but also a grudge purchase? It’s tempting to advise you to just close the doors and go fishing but there’s an enormous amount of money to be made in that space – this stuff always sells remember? You just have to sell more of it than everyone else.

The answer is that you have to stand out. Not by being the official tyre of Formula One, or the approved deodorant of the All Blacks but by being better than everyone else in some way that’s both tangible to your existing customers and can be marketed to your potential customers.

This brings us back to the aforementioned good reviews. In an environment where all the products are much of a muchness, you need to have positive customer feedback and proactive engagement. You have to find a way to shine. If you offer a service, then do something, anything to offer extra value. And at this point, let me clarify that I don’t mean giving something away. Instead, could you set up the best call centre in the country, with the lowest waiting times for example?
If you’re selling products, then what could you do that your competition simply can’t or won’t? More useful information on your website perhaps? Product demonstrations? There has to be some way to actually engage with your customers.
And once you’ve done all that, you still need to look at your marketing with a fresh pair of eyes. If everyone in the game is doing one thing, you might want to do something different. A prime example of this type of thinking can be found in this case study.

How does one launch a product into a market with a strongly entrenched competitor, especially a product that no one really cares about because it’s just something used by farmers to treat cows?

Well, you do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. Then you get results like these:

• It sold 406% above forecast in less than two months.

• The product sold out in two months and all advertising had to be temporarily halted so that production could catch up to demand.

• After just one year in the market, it’s the third biggest product of its kind in New Zealand.

They said it couldn’t be done. It can if you’re brave enough. And yes the campaign was planned and executed by my brother but 406% is 406%. End of story.