Tuesday, March 31, 2015

New report says engineers are top earning billionaires

According to an analysis of the Forbes 100 rich list 22 per cent of the world's richest people studied engineering as an undergraduate degree, which is almost twice as many as any other discipline.

Good news then if engineering was your first degree, but probably not so good if you are working as an engineer. The coverage of the analysis in CityA.M.  also claims engineering billionaires are richer than other billionaires.

In a long anticipated sequel to our book Technical Marketing Techniques due for publication this year, the new title Technical Marketing Ideas for Engineers whilst not promising an insight into how to become a billionaire offers a more modest path into marketing.
 
Engineers also work successfully in many other careers ... marketing is one of them. My own transition from engineering apprentice to a marketing role was informed by practical  experience of engineering on the shop floor and in the laboratory. My employers offered experience in the many departments that a major British electrical manufacturing company then operated, including manufacturing, research, even HR or Personnel as it was then known. It didn't take long to notice that the people who actually set the agenda were the bright young men from head office, the product managers. And they worked in the marketing department. On graduation I worked for just a few weeks more back in the research laboratories before being recruited as an assistant product manager located in the company's head office in London's West End. I exchanged my white lab coat for a suit, enrolled on marketing and management courses and learned the job of new product development under the guidance of experienced, senior product managers. In fact my move from engineering to marketing was similar to most of my colleagues who also had the same grounding in the methods, analysis and planning of engineering. 

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Infographics - do they work for you? Is a video review better?

Infographics is a term recently back in the marketing spotlight used to describe the visual presentation of information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way.

In fact infographics make me think of long gone parents evenings at my children's school where posters of historic events, geography, science etc displayed information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way. Hold on. Does this suggest that the target audiences need pictures to make them look at this stuff, so we have to treat them like children? Early reading books are mainly picture books with captions, but as they progress and grow up children move on to text only books. An interesting infographic on the subject of Content Marketing was so long it set me thinking that traditional bar charts might actually display the data more usefully.

Then what type of person needs the information made pretty anyway? Engineers have traditionally received data in tables or charts, dimensions marked on drawings and descriptions in specification terminology - all delivered in a data sheet. Where the operation benefits from illustration then video is in my mind much more effective.

An interesting observation here is that a class of apparently amateur reviewers has emerged to provide their opinion on the product - for example electronic gadgets for home and office. The manufacturers send them a 'review sample' which they unwrap, set up, test and offer an opinion as to value and effectiveness. In short a fairly independent assessment for minimal expense and probably saves a lot of calls to the support team too! 


Thursday, March 19, 2015

How many readers get beyond your headline?

In today's time scarce, content rich environment the headline can be crucial for readers deciding whether to go on and read the article, or skip to the next item.

People in all walks of life and professions have a need to keep themselves well informed and for b-2-b communications this will probably include prospective buyers of the company's product or services, specifiers, installers and stockists. The target audience in other words need to be well informed about the benefits of products and will be bombarded by messages from news feeds, email newsletters, advertising and articles. Often the headline is the filter - read or bin the news item?

Until recently PR managers wrote headlines to catch the eye of editors, who in turn wrote something else to attract the attention of their readers. But with the swing to self publication, the press office now needs to write headlines to attract the attention of their own target  audience. And this might be the headline for a news story published on their web site news office, the subject line of an email or a 140 character tweet on Twitter.

The headline will offer the promise of the value for the reader contained in the  content below the headline and rapidly establish relevance, but without giving it all away. It is reckoned only 1 in 5 get past the headline. And a survey of some 2 billion page views revealed 55% of visitors spent less than 15% on a page!

So what works? Numbers and personalization apparently. Headlines such as "10 ways to reduce heating bills" or "Ways you can pay less for heating". There are plenty of variations on the theme. The use of alliteration is memorable for example - "Heating bills: - ten top tips to save money." In fact there are already proven established headlines that can be re-purposed to suit.

Then of course there are the pun headlines beloved of the tabloid press - The Sun in particular.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Interactive outdoor - new tech billlboards

If you thought billboard advertising was 48 sheet posters, then take a look at interactive large digital advertising.

UKIP's spoof poster to Tory one
Traditionally in a general election campaign, political parties have favoured billboards, for advertising - the famous Saatchi brothers "Labour isn't working" is claimed to have won the General Election for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative party. Today the poster - and it is the poster, not posters - doesn't appear overnight as a nationwide campaign,  but on the back of a vehicle which serves as a backdrop for what in effect is a PR event. But this UK General Election is no longer a two horse race between Labour and Conservatives and this week the Conservatives duly unveiled a poster showing Labour leader Ed Milliband in the jacket pocket of former Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond in a reference to the possibility of a Labour/SNP coalition. To this the UK Independence Party re-purposed the concept to illustrate Conservative leader David Cameron in the pocket of Euro boss Jean Claude Junker. Of course, whether most British voters would recognise the President of the European Commission is doubtful.


Digital and interactive
Meanwhile billboard advertising has gone digital and not just digital - interactive. Ocean Outdoor has recently teamed up with a charity and is using facial recognition technology to inter act with the advertisement. Read the story here.

Interestingly where advertising in print media is somewhat on the back foot, outdoor advertising seems to be embracing new technology.

Thursday, March 05, 2015

Trying to unbundle package prices

Three things buyers are really interested in - does it do what I want, what is the price, and can I have it now? Product, Price and Place.

Known as the four P's of marketing - with the other being 'Promotion.' Recently I  have had cause to try to unravel the price of telephone calls which proved pretty challenging! Along with energy companies and banks, telecoms companies are pushing hard to dispense with paper bills and in fact charge for the service of providing them. OK so once the bill is retrieved from the Internet we find a typical quarterly bill runs to 7 or 8 pages of A4.

Payments are made monthly, charges for 'price packages' are monthly in advance and calls outside the   plan charged in arrears. Price increases involve refunding a portion of the advance charge, charging the new higher amount and allocating to the portion of the quarter to which the increase applies. So all straight forward so far. These are then totted up compared with your monthly payments, adjusted for any credit or debit brought forward and there is what you owe - or in credit if you are lucky. Now, try un-bundling the cost of calls from the packages so you can figure out how much it costs each time you call someone.

This price bundling gets even harder to work out for satellite TV  subscriptions. Deals of the discount type are reserved for new customers, whereas deals for existing customers are it seems opportunities to buy additional services, not to be rewarded for loyalty, by discounts. Banks similarly keep their loyal customers on the lowest interest rates for savings. Energy bills present similar challenges. It is also quite difficult to discuss price because the numbers you are given to call are for telesales people, anxious to upsell the package. A 30 minute call leads nowhere except back to the beginning when you are offered to be put through to the right department.

Perhaps it is this  pricing strategy that has created an opportunity for price comparison sites which seem to be running major marketing campaigns right now. Some of these TV  commercials can only be described as bizarre - from talking meerkats (compare the meerkat - get it?) to Sharon Osbourne holding a dog while a folically challenged man in suit jacket and lady's shorts and stiletos flounces past. Would you trust these guys to figure out a good price deal? Or is this really another sales ploy?