You can drive yourself mad trying to determine channel preference for each of your target customers, especially in this age of integrated marketing and endless opportunities for consumption of your marketing message and promotional offerings. For most companies, obsessing about whether a target customer responds better to direct mail, email, text messaging, fax, etc. is healthy and will lead to increased ROI. Same holds true within a marketing channel – you might obsess about (or should obsess about) which creative package resonates best with each customer. Subtle? Highly-promotional?

Be careful not to allow either obsession to limit your marketing efforts. An oxymoronic “targeted-shotgun” approach often yields the best return. In my experience, the increase in response rate vastly outweighs the increased cost of the campaign. Rather than guessing whether a potential customer would prefer a subtle or highly-promotional direct mail piece, I sent them both at the same time. Response went through the roof. Tangibly reminding someone that they “hate promotional direct mail” causes the subtle letter in their hand to look more attractive. Conversely, “another boring letter” in the mailbox caused the oversized/glitzy piece to get a little more attention. Sending an email, direct mailer, and text message at the same time might ensure that you catch your intended target at the right time with your message reinforced (don’t we have to see/hear something several times before it really sinks-in?).

By expanding your thinking beyond a single channel and single creative package, you will foster another obsession – determining which combinations work best. Good luck!

It was a great day in Boise – high 70’s, sunny, not a cloud in the sky.  The magnificent weather made it very easy to lose sight of why we had the day off in the first place.

But, as the day winds down, I’m finding time on this Memorial Day to reflect on the many friends and family members who have served overseas this year and in years past – most of whom returned safely, some of whom unfortunately were not so lucky.

One of those service members who did return safely this year is our very own Dave Arnett.  I just wanted to take a moment to write about Dave, and let him know we all appreciate the sacrifice he made for his country.  Dave, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserves, was unexpectedly called to active duty early in 2008, and before spring was upon us in Boise, he was on the ground in Afghanistan.  He was thrust into a role typically reserved for an Army officer – talk about ambiguity and unfamiliarity – and did a stellar job leading actions with a multi-national, joint-service unit.  He returned to Boise right before the holidays, to a celebratory reception at the Boise airport held by family, friends, and many of us Balihoo’ers.

We also appreciate the sacrifice Dave’s family made – he left very unexpectedly with very short notice, and his wife and kids certainly missed him.

Dave serves as a role model for all of us – he’s incredibly smart and competent, adds a lot of fun and spirit to the office, and has an indomitable, selfless “can-do” attitude.  He’s passionate about a lot of things, but when it comes down to it, he is most passionate about his family and doing a great job no matter what the challenge – he certainly proved this in Afghanistan and proves it every day at Balihoo.

Dave, we’re glad to have you on our side – both for Balihoo and for our country!

Every May, the male employees of Balihoo rekindle a tradition that has endured nearly two years now of snickering, prickling, and general distaste. This month, this celebration that sits at the precipice of spring and summer, that ‘creeps out’ most and disgusts others, has come to be known as the Month of the Mustache.  That’s correct, a mustache: that ever-distinguishing strip of hair that adorns the space above a man’s upper lip.

With just the slightest nudge from Balihoo, the man’s mustache currently enjoys a renaissance of sorts in our post-millennial world.  Granted, this renaissance currently faces an overwhelming oppressive force spearheaded by the opposite sex, but with our ‘staches worn like a badge, we should, nay, will, overcome any obstacle that stands in our collective way.  I encourage you, reader, to frequent the offices of Balihoo during this time to offer your encouragement and support.  Without your well-wishes, the man’s ‘stache is dangerously close to being shaved from the face of this earth.

It is also my firm belief that Balihoo should not be the only purveyor of fine mustaches during this majestic month of May maturation.  I strongly promote participation across all sectors of business.  I call upon you, healthcare providers, and you, civil engineers, and you, carnival workers, to will the hair below your nose to blossom so we can demonstrate to the world the amazing ‘stachodiversity present in our limitless human gene pool.  I ask that you keep your head held high and your ‘stache even higher as we usher in a new era in human history: The Bristle Age.

(NOTE: this era only lasts for the month of May of each year because let’s be honest: these mustaches we sport are super gross)

As a company dedicated to providing franchise organizations and national brands with the most effective and efficient local marketing automation solutions, we are unsurprisingly frequently asked questions about joining the franchise industry. We are often asked whether it is wise to join a franchise during the recession. The Idaho Stateman just published an exerpt from an article written by our CEO, Pete Gombert in which he addresses this question.

Read Pete’s full article here:

Starting up: If You Want to Own a Franchise, Here’s What You Should Know

Franchising tends to increase during a recession as many aspiring entrepreneurs, driven by layoffs or job changes, finally decide to make their leap. Before leaping, astute future franchisees invariably seek to understand the benefits and challenges they’ll face – fortunately, the benefits are well-documented and accurate, but the most fundamental challenge is too often misunderstood.

Many aspiring franchisees assume that their biggest challenge will be executing within the franchise system, but they quickly find that while running the system is important, the ultimate challenge is translating national strategy to address variables in a local market. Jason Bowman, owner of several Sport Clips franchises in Boise, puts it best: “Franchising is much more than just executing against a system, there are a ton of local challenges and constant adjustments franchisees make depending on the situation.”

Here are just a few of the local challenges franchisees face:

Location. Location can be “everything” and the most important early decision a franchisee makes is often selecting a location. Understanding such things as geography, community planning initiatives, and real estate trends are critical to success.

Competition. Competition varies greatly by region and consists of other franchises, national retailers, mom and pop shops, larger well-established local brands, or alternatives to your product or service.

Employment. Franchisees need to recruit and retain employees that can help build and advance the franchise’s reputation. Dwight Mogford, owner of the Mr. Handyman franchise in Boise, aptly explains, “The face and reputation of Mr. Handyman is largely determined by the people we hire. Though the franchisor can offer guidance, it is up to the franchisee to choose the right people to execute their vision.”

Marketing. Building a brand locally and generating local demand are two key responsibilities of a franchisee. Tactics for reaching an audience can vary greatly by region, often down to the neighborhood level, and understanding the creative elements that work best in combination with the shifting world of advertising media and public relations – such as online, newspapers, and social media like Twitter and Facebook – are all daunting challenges the franchisee must address.

Those are greatly disparate challenges – how can you best address all of them? The key is to look for franchisors that not only have a strong brand and proven system, but also provide solutions that help the franchisee solve local issues. This is where good franchisors separate themselves from the pack and aspiring franchisees should research diligently to determine whether the franchisor offers the following:

Information – franchisors can help share data, best practices, and lessons learned via technology and by connecting franchisees through networking, regular events, and training.

Expertise – many franchisors make experts readily available to franchisees, often for free or at subsidized rates. For example, some franchisors provide real estate consultants for store openings and some provide dedicated marketing professionals in each market.

Execution – franchisors can help eliminate time-consuming, non-core tasks to enable franchisees to best focus on managing their business. Examples of this include recruiting screening tools and marketing fulfillment services or technologies.

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how good these solutions are, the franchisee’s ultimate responsibility is to drive local strategy by making decisions across a spectrum of business challenges. This leads to perhaps the most important observation I’ve made in working with franchisees throughout the country – franchise success is most highly correlated to the people that run them, and not necessarily to the national brand or system.

The common traits shared by successful franchisees include demonstrated skill at solving a wide variety of challenges and an incredible passion for building a local brand. At the same time, successful franchisees acknowledge they can’t solve all problems themselves, and thus they are readily willing to rely upon the franchise for support. If you think you are this type of person, franchising may be for you – just remember to look for franchisors that set themselves apart with the tools and services they provide.

I think it’s safe to assume that most tourists who visit The Leaning Tower take that same silly picture, you know the one I’m talking about and if you don’t, here’s a few examples to help you along.

A new campaign by McDonald’s UK is playing on this very idea. It’s pretty clever. When else would the Golden Arches go home with thousands of tourists in their vacation photo album to be viewed by friends and family over and over again?

As media professionals, we are constantly trying to combat the fact that consumers are taking control of their media consumption, but the fast food giant is finding ways to embrace the shift in culture and encourage interaction with their brand. As a marketer that struggles with this every day, I think the execution is brilliant.

McDonald’s Piccadilly Circus

It’s national bike to work week. Despite the frigid temps a couple of mornings this week, many brave Balihoo’ers biked to work anyway.  In fact, several of our employees voluntarily forfeit their parking passes year round for the love of reducing their carbon footprint and staying in shape.  We have bike racks in the office for security (and aesthetics- we have some pretty cool bikes!); just one of the many perks of working at Balihoo!

A while ago I blogged about advertising in Yankee Stadium (see here).   I didn’t talk about demographics, but I did talk about the mechanics of doing it.  Well, watching a baseball game tonight made me want to blog about the importance of choosing the right media for your demographic and also made me think back to a lesson I learned a long time ago in advertising - don’t let ego, your own personal interests, or emotion dictate where you advertise; selecting media should be a scientific process.

The reason I thought this is I was watching a baseball game and noticed that a well-known home flooring company was prominently advertising throughout the game - both in the stadium and on commercials.  This was a big-market team’s broadcast (not the Yankees, but a reviled rival), which means this advertiser was spending big-market dollars for the ad space.

It’s a well-known and well-documented fact that women make the large majority of home furnishing decisions.  Smart home furnishing stores cater their ads to women because it’s been proven that whether single or married, spanning a wide range of ages and other demographics, it’s women, not men, who make the home purchasing decision.

The advertiser, in this case, shall remain nameless, but at Balihoo some of our clients are flooring and home furnishing stores - these include Carpet One and Flooring America, and both of these companies wisely build their creative and select media vehicles with the woman home purchaser in mind.  Thus, you’d never see them advertising during a baseball game.  Why?  Because baseball audiences are skewed as high as 70% men viewers.  I did some very quick analysis of Nielsen data and looking across the 2008 season, saw that baseball game audiences average roughly 33% women in the broad 25-49 yr old demographic (i.e. home flooring purchasers).

This flooring chain has to know this, yet it is advertising in a relatively expensive venue with a majority male audience.  A bad double whammy!  Why in the world would a flooring chain focus its ad dollars in a baseball stadium?  I’ll hazard some guesses - the male-dominated marketing department likes baseball?  The CEO is a baseball fan (probably of this team)?  They have just done it that way for years and *think* it works?

The lesson to businesses of all sizes is to focus your ad dollars where your target audience is most concentrated.  Don’t let personal interests get in the way of good advertising decisions.  There is so much data and information available today that your media decisions should be data-driven.  Doing anything else is simply wasting ad dollars on viewers who don’t matter to you.

Earlier this year I signed up for a free conference headed by Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) and Mike Masnick (President/CEO of Floor64 and Founder of Tech Dirt).  The name of the conference was ‘The Free Summit’ and it was of course free to attend.  I would have to pay for the travel of course, and take a couple days of vacation time from work, but the chance to hear Chris speak about his new book concept and hear and talk with others trying to figure out this paradigm was enticing. 

To many this concept is possibly intriguing, but more likely unknown or misunderstood.  To many others it is scary and potentially life threatening to their current business.  As with any new shift however the more you understand it, the less scary it becomes and the more control you have over the future success of your own business.  There will be no recommendations on how the concept of free can be used to make your business more successful.  Chris actually gave two presentations during the day and I thought I would share some of my notes from these.  I hope that you find them interesting and minimally thought provoking to explore more on the concept.  Don’t be caught wondering what happened after the fact.

The term ‘Free’ 

First, one of the biggest issues with this term in the English language is that it is a single word that has two meanings.  One is the concept of freedom, and the other is the concept of getting something at no cost.  Most languages have two terms for these.  This creates an issue in that the term free has both good connotations as well as bad.

Atoms to Bits 

The 20th century was an "Atoms Economy", where things get more expensive due to scarcity, and free is achieved through a direct subsidy.  The 21st century is a ‘Bits Economy’, where things get cheaper due to abundance, and free can be achieved through indirect subsidy.

4 Types of Free

• Marketing Trick (eg - get a free sandwich today only!)
• Ad Supported (eg - a magazine that is free or near free from advertising subsidy)
• Freemium based on giving something away to a large population where a smaller subset of that population pays for a premium version thus subsidizing the entire group.  (eg. Ning Social Networking Software)
• Gift Economy where people give things away typically for attention or reputation (eg - blogs, wikipedia)

Economics

A french economist (Joseph Bertrand) in the 1800’s theorized that in a perfectly competitive market the price of an object will fall to its marginal cost.  People could not wrap their head around this concept but we can today because the Internet represents a perfectly competitive marketplace.

Waste is Good

Well not all waste maybe, but in a market where there is abundance, waste is a good thing because it allows the market to evolve.  Personal computers were essentially born out of a waste of transistors.  In the age of scarcity, mainframes and processing power were tightly controlled by the IT department.  When the marginal cost of transistors went to almost nothing, the personal computer and was born along with its computationally expensive interfaces.  However when the cost is almost nothing waste has produced a product that can be used by everyone, and look where that has taken us.

In addition to transistors, we are now able to waste storage.  We have moved from a mode of conservation to exploitation.  You tube is a perfect example of waste in storage, but for all the waste there is an evolution happening in video production and niche content.  Unfortunately many have not made the shift.  The perfect example raised that most can related to is when the corporate IT department asks that people take the time to clear off the share drive because it is getting full.  When you can buy a 1 Terabyte drive now for about 100 dollars there is a mix up in priorities.  The time cost of cleaning up the share is more costly than a new drive.  The scarce resource is no longer storage - its peoples time.

The third item that we are now able to ‘waste’ is bandwidth.  This ‘waste’ is now producing innovations such as movie streaming from Netflix at a cost of approx. 6 cents.  (It will drop to 4 cents over the next 18 months).  This type of waste is revolutionizing an entire industry and the legacy distribution system that currently exists.  This waste of abundance will actually allow us to save all the waste and cost with scarce resources (eg. -fuel)

Waste is allowing us to explore the future….

The New Scarcity

The only way to make money is through scarcity.  What is scarce now?  Attention and Reputation.

Lessons from the Gaming Industry

Chris explored 5 lessons from the gaming industry that help us understand better how the concept of free can be used to evolve an industry.

• People will pay to save time
• People will pay to lower risk
• People will pay for more of what they love
• People will pay for status
• People will pay if you make them pay (likely only once)

This of course is just a few notes from Chris Anderson’s talks and doesn’t touch upon any of the amazing panel discussions and other speakers during the event.  At the end of the day, there were likely more questions than answers, however as with any new idea, this is normal.  Let the conversation and evolution continue!

For more information:

• Conference Web Site & recap of summit on Tech Dirt
• Tweets from the conference: Search Twitter: #free09
• Chris Anderson’s Blog and his upcoming book - Free: The Future of Radical Price
• A great blog by Peter Froberg that I follow on Freemium

We made it to the cover of the Sunday NY Times as a featured part of an article about the economy. You can read the story here

We are thrilled to be highlighted as a bright spot not only in the local news, but by a newspaper as prominent as the NY Times.

Stay tuned as more good news about Balihoo will be coming in the next couple of weeks.

An interesting post by Seth Godin caught my attention today.  Can the friction of a medium actually help?  He argues that because email is free, over the long term it can and is already hurting the medium.  He continues that other ‘free’ mediums could suffer the same fate.  And yet when you add something as simple as a stamp into the mix, it adds to the legitimacy of the medium.  As he states ‘Friction rewards intent and scarcity’.  For those that consider email to be the evolution over direct mail, this should cause you at least one reason to reconsider. 

Although both have pros and cons, there does seem to be a definite swing back to the power of traditional direct mail over its newer electronic cousin.  One of the keys, however is to make the direct mail personalized.  It cannot be just a mass marketed mail campaign.  Tools like those included in the Balihoo suite allow marketers to create highly customized direction mail pieces to suite different geographic and demographic segments making this a very powerful tool to your marketing quiver.   Combined with other supporting messaging in your media mix, this can be an excellent opportunity to intelligently delivery your message to your market.