Author Archives: Lois Geller

About Lois Geller

Lois Geller is President and Owner of Lois Geller Marketing Group and headed agencies in New York and Toronto. Lois taught Direct Marketing at NYU. She’s the author of five marketing books, including Response: The Complete Guide to Profitable Direct Marketing. Follow @loisgeller on Twitter.
Jan25

Marketing: part of an artist’s life.

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Marketing: part of an artist’s life.

My hand sewn picture "The Circus". Note the frame

Chris Roberts-Antieau is an artist I discovered by accident. I came across her “The Circus” and bought it immediately (wrote about it in a previous post). It’s hanging in the hallway just inside the front door of my apartment. Every time I walk by it, I pause, chuckle, and marvel at it.

I’ve always liked “primitive works”, and in New York I spend a lot of time at the American Folk Art Museum.

I love her naïve style, and her sense of humor in the characters she sews onto the fabric.
She has a new gallery in New Orleans (although her studio is in Michigan) and a terrific website here: http://www.chrisroberts-antieau.com/ Chris describes her complicated work simply: she cuts out pieces of textile and sews them to fabric.

I drove downtown when I heard she was exhibiting at this year’s Art Basel in Miami and was delighted to meet her son, Noah, who was kind enough to spend quite a bit of time chatting about his mother’s “fiber art”. That meeting inspired me to call her the other day to ask if I could interview her for my “Joy” blog. I was curious about her marketing challenges which strike me as daunting.

Noah and I

She needs to sell one piece of art to one person who loves it.

When I heard her voice, I was delighted. She’s warm, easy to talk to … not a hint of artistic temperament … and as whimsically funny as her art.

Most artists think it’s “crass commercialism” to market
their works.

When I asked how she markets her art now, she told me that the biggest boon to her business has been her website. She sells her original pieces online along with signed limited edition prints, posters and notecards. Having that site has made all the difference to her business.

And then she told me her story….

Chris started drawing when she was 4 years old and just loved it. She never excelled in school and somehow flunked out at grade 9, so there wasn’t any college for her.

Chris Roberts-Antieau

She married young and had Noah, now 7 feet tall. Chris is 6 feet tall (a woman after my own heart). After her divorce, she struggled. She started making little figures for Noah and other Moms asked to buy them. She particularly remembers a piece that took her about 24 hours straight to make and sew. She sold it for $18.00 and was delighted. She started making more fiber art pieces and taking them to art fairs.

Her sense of humor comes through in her work, and she loves the mediocrity of Pop Culture so she pokes fun at it, herself, her pets.

At a show at the Smithsonian Institution, someone from the George W. Bush Administration bought a piece for the White House. Soon over 100 Galleries wanted her work. Now she has her own studio in Michigan and her own Gallery in New Orleans.

And she’s started working in acrylics.

So for all of us who make a living in marketing, Chris’s encouraging words:

  1. Antieau Gallery in New Orleans

    Price your product right. If she really loves a piece, she prices it high or hides it in the back of her studio. She also prices her pieces higher when she sees there is a demand for them.

  2. She said “the essence of art is communication with the viewer”. It’s the same in our business which is why we find it amazing when we see ads that are nothing more than companies talking to themselves.
  3. Don’t give up. If you can do it long enough, it will work out. I agree. Over my career, I‘ve seen dozens of marketers just give up when they’re on the brink of success (and that’s another story).

Whenever people visit my apartment for the first time, they comment on the Chris Roberts-Antieau piece hanging just inside the door and they ask about the artist. Well, she’s a lot more than an artist. She’s a wonderful human being and an inspiration.
It’s a long story! Please tell me yours, here (in a comment):

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Jan9

Sweepstakes, Giveaways, Contests: Fun, Involvement and Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

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Sweepstakes, Giveaways, Contests: Fun, Involvement and Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Back in the days when the Publisher’s Clearing House oversized envelope landed in my parents’ mailbox, my dad would open it and immediately get confused about all the stamps, cards, stickers and bucks slips that flew out of it.

It then became mom’s job to figure things out and mail our entry before the deadline. They were always hopeful that we’d win millions of dollars or maybe a new car.

Since I worked in direct marketing, in publishing, I’d found out for sure that Mom and Dad’s chances of winning a big prize were exactly the same whether they bought a magazine or not. (Fran Lebowitz once said about lotteries that she has the same chance of winning whether she buys a ticket or not.) I didn’t have the heart to tell my parents, though, and they usually subscribed to three or four magazines every year.

Why?

The PCH envelope was exciting and fun!

The envelope is gone but the sweepstakes is still fun, especially in this economy. Now PCH TV commercials urge you to enter online for a chance at “$1 million a year for life”. But, according to a recent article in Direct Marketing News, magazine subscriptions are no longer the #1 item at PCH. Merchandise, with 7,200 SKUs, is tops now.

Marla Altberg

When I was in New York recently I made an appointment at Ventura Associates. They’re the geniuses of sweepstakes. I met with CEO Marla Altberg and her team and they told me that direct response sweepstakes:

- Enhance your message and increase readership
– Encourage your prospect to respond now
– Increase sales or donations
– And on the internet they’re huge traffic (and brand) builders.

Marla showed some of her great case studies, including:

- 170% growth in Facebook fans for one client
– 800,000 new site registrations for another
– 12% call-in responses for a third!

I learned so much about sweepstakes and contests that I was eager to get back to my office in Florida to present some ideas to two of our clients. The best part of testing programs with Ventura Associates is that they help with the creative development, and take care of all that challenging:

- Legal compliance
– Winner selection
– Prize fulfillment
– Program analytics
– Cost splitting: you can share the program with other companies so it is relatively inexpensive to test. So why not?

Also, have some fun and see how creative Ventura Associates’ promotion really are: Demo Site

Let us know your thoughts, when you get a moment. Have you tested contests? Sweepstakes? How’d it work out for you?

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Dec20

How to write a marketing plan

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How to write a marketing plan

“A one-page marketing plan from 1955
envisioned a future for Jack Daniel’s
based on its heritage as a whiskey
made by real people in Lynchburg, Tenn.”

From a book review in Fortune magazine 12/26/11

There are two versions of every plan, the big picture version and the detail version. Assuming the big picture version is realistic and carefully thought out, the detail version should come together nicely.

Try as I might, I can almost never get through a presentation of the big picture without someone interrupting to ask about a detail. Our creative director, Mike, who isn’t known for beating around the bush, says this is like asking a construction foreman about the color of the bathroom wallpaper in a house that doesn’t have a foundation yet.

People like details. They’re as important in advertising and direct marketing as they are in selling a house. They’re just not all that important to the people who are building the house. If the foundation, structure and utilities are right, you can have any color wallpaper you want.

So let the builders work.

We’ve gone through some of this in previous posts, but, just in case you missed them, here’s a summary.

All plans begin with Background. There are different terms for this but they all mean Background. Somewhere in the Background, there’s a simple rationale for why you’re involved in this effort in the first place.

Backgrounds are deceptively easy in that anyone intelligent and knowledgeable can write them. But they’re hard work. Think of spilling a 5 pound bag of sugar on the kitchen floor. Anyone can clean it up, but it’s hard work. Backgrounds are deceptive in another way, too, because, although they’re part of the big picture, they’re full of relevant detail.

Out of the Background comes the Objective, ONE Objective. Then comes the hard part: Strategy.

The next hardest part is simply a matter of discipline on fourcounts : staying on budget, staying real – guided by the Background, staying on target according to the Objective, linking every element of the execution to the Strategy. Finally, comes the hardest part of all: handing the big picture version of the plan, your baby, over to the detail people (even if you’re your own detail team).

Some details will be irrelevant to the plan and that’s fine as long as they don’t conflict with the already existing brand strategy. Other details will deviate from the core components of the big picture. Squash them.

Test, fine tune, roll out. Get and keep customers. Make money.

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Dec14

We all talk about Strategy. What is it?

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We all talk about Strategy. What is it?

For 10 years I happily taught the lead direct marketing course at New York University. Every year one of the three hardest things to get across was the concept of Strategy.

Also, a lot of our clients never did grasp the concept. One of them, which shall remain nameless – my lips are sealed – created an odd hybrid they called “Strategic Objective”.

Strategy Is The Big Deal.

Strategy is part of a plan, part three of a typical marketing plan. The first two parts are Background and Objective. Only when those two are in place can you begin to develop the Strategy.

A gigantic barrier to developing a strategy is that there’s a part four, Tactics. People confuse Strategy and Tactics; their subconscious does it to them because Tactics are easy. Since strategy is hard, most people run to tactical and subtactical issues like budget, creative, color, font, slogan.

Look up “Strategy” in Merriam-Webster.

If you look strategy up in the dictionary, you’ll find something like this: the science or art of planning and conducting a war or a military campaign; a carefully devised plan of action to achieve a goal, or the art of developing or carrying out such a plan.

At NYU we started with a simpler approach: Generals do strategy; everyone else does tactics, based on the Generals’ strategy. And there’s a trickledown effect: your boss’s strategy becomes your objective and so on down the line. In an organization, the whole Strategy and Tactics thing is like a pyramid scheme. Strategy starts at the top among a few experts (in theory). People who execute the strategy develop their own mini-strategies.

It starts with understanding the objective. What, exactly, do we want to achieve? Exactly means numbers, dollars, timelines:

“Sell 250,000 widgets at an average price of $29.99 in 2012.”
“Recover 25% (500) of lapsed customers (2,000) by Q3, 2012.”
“Increase average order size 10% by Q2, 2012.”
“Move 50% of business to our website by the end of 2013.”

The objective has to be realistic. If you sold only 2,500 widgets last year with a marketing budget of $50,000, you’re not going to sell 250,000 in 2012 without a serious increase in budget.

You can have dozens of objectives – it keeps people happy – but there Is always only one real objective and one corresponding strategic statement.

At NYU we used the example of the Trojan Horse. To make a long story short, the horse was a tactic. The objective was to capture the city of Troy. The strategy was to get someone inside to open the city’s gates without the Trojans knowing about it. The Greeks undoubtedly considered a dozen or more tactics and eventually settled on the horse. After that, all the tactics fell into place.

In other words, strategy is the legendary Big Idea. And it is usually an obvious idea – once someone says it.

In marketing, especially direct marketing, there are a great many sub-strategies: testing, target audience, creative, list, offer, databasing, upsells, etc.

When we ran Ford of Canada’s first-ever direct marketing program, we spent a lot of time gathering information (Background) and we developed an Objective based on unit sales of mid-range vehicles. Then what?

We quickly realized that we’d have to build a database of car owners (provincial registrations were – and still are – unavailable in Canada). And that was our strategy: Build the proprietary database then stroke it. The ensuing program sold an awful lot of cars, generating bottom line revenue the company would not otherwise have earned of 14 times the marketing cost. It won a lot of Gold RSVP Awards from the Canadian Marketing Association.

We’d have had no hope without the core strategy, which was obvious once we came up with it.

What is your strategy for 2012?

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Dec9

The Power of “Word of Mouth” Marketing

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The Power of “Word of Mouth” Marketing

It can change … everything

A few months ago, my friend Jeri told me that her brother was selling tons of art he’d collected over the years. Somehow his collection had gotten out of control and taken over his whole house. Finally he decided that he wanted it all gone, sold, so there’d be room to walk around.

Jeri invited me to get some friends together and go over to play “Let’s Make A Deal” with her brother.

Off we went, and we found sculptures, paintings, artifacts, funky furniture, mosaics, vases, knickknacks, Chinese fountains. Clutter! It was great fun, sort of like getting into Sotheby’s warehouse.

The Circus by Chris Roberts-Antieau

But nothing appealed to me, not even the framed fabric picture almost hidden on the second floor landing. It was charmingly weird and I usually like charmingly weird but it was a picture of a circus and I haven’t liked circuses since I was a little kid. The clowns’ exploding car in Madison Square Garden scared the pants off me when I was about four.

So I moved on to look at giant statues, plush but uncomfortable furniture, massive mirrors, tiny mirrors and more knickknacks than you’d see in the Daytona Beach flea market.

I had to pass the circus picture to get back downstairs. Look at those tiny stitches, I thought, and all the little details. Amazing. And what an imagination. A big white horse with both eyes on the same side of its face, a fire-eater, an elephant, a human cannonball peeping out of his cannon at a tall woman peeping into it.

I noticed the artist’s name, Chris Roberts-Antieau and then it leaped off the wall and into my arms. I bought the darned thing, hung it just inside my front door, and every day I find something new in it. I love it.

My favorite artist's son, Noah

What I didn’t know is that Chris Roberts-Antieau is a pretty important artist. Her work is hanging in the White House and has been featured in a lot of magazines, including Oprah.

I’m as fascinated with the child-like quality of her work and her terrific sense of humor as I am with her astonishing skill, especially sewing everything so perfectly.

So Word of Mouth worked for Jeri’s brother. A lot of people, including me, showed up to take all that onerous art off his hands.

But Word of Mouth started a chain of events.
It brought me to my circus image and all of Chris Roberts-Antieau’s wonderful work. I even made a point of meeting her son, Noah, at Miami’s Art Basel exhibition.

And seeing her work was the final persuader in getting me to try my hand at mixed media. I signed up for a course at the Ft. Lauderdale Art Museum.

My own version of Chris's Work, Black Clothes White Cat

I decided to copy one of Chris’s works, not sewing it finely as she does, but gluing it crudely. Pepper and I went to the Salvation Army to find something furry to use for the cat in the picture.

And, now I’m trying other kinds of mediums and enjoying my new artistic outlet, thanks to my friend’s Word of Mouth Marketing that, at first, just brought me in to her brother’s home to look at his art clutter.

Bless her.

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Dec2

CRM: Customer Relationship Marketing, We can learn from Non-Profits

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CRM: Customer Relationship Marketing, We can learn from Non-Profits

In a 2002 article for Enterprise APPS Today, Arthur O’Connor, head of the CRM Integration Practice at Reuters Consulting, wrote:

The CRM fad is now officially dead. May it rest in peace. Contrary to the writings of some industry pundits, the demise of CRM is not greatly exaggerated. It’s real. The party’s over. The fat lady sang. It’s DOA.

Companies have become disillusioned; projects have been stalled; budgets have been cut; and enterprise rollouts of CRM pilot projects have either been postponed or cancelled. As a result, many software vendors, technology integrators, and consulting firms are limping along, and some don’t look like they’ll be around for much longer.

Apparently the main reason CRM crashed is that it was expensive and time consuming to keep track of all those pesky customers. And why bother when the Internet would be a limitless source of new customers forever? It sounded, at the time, like a new kind of thinking for a brave new world.

It was really the same old thinking so many marketing executives had spouted over the years: “Customer Acquisition!”

Increasing revenue from existing customers (and bringing back lapsed ones) is not the glamour end of the business. Acquisition is where the excitement always lives. It has always been so and every client has a budget for it, and little left for retention.

Companies that spend little or no time coddling best customers, getting referrals from and generating word of mouth from all customers and selling other things to them all are ignoring a huge potential source of revenue.

Charities don’t do that.

They’re great at working their donor files. Even if you’re as tight as Scrooge McDuck, try sending money to a half dozen or so charities like Smile Train or Boys Town and watch what happens. It’ll be a very inexpensive lesson in CRM, not to mention brilliant direct mail creative. It’ll look weird at first what with fonts and layouts making everything easy to read and the copy in a perfect one-to-one personal mode.

You’ll get special updates on all the good your money is doing. You’ll see the kids you’re helping. You’ll be asked for more money but you will also feel like a valued and important member of a wonderful group. It will never occur to you that you’re being CRMed.

And, you’ll give money again.

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