Advertising Fail

There are many types of advertising fail – confusion about what the product is or does, not knowing or addressing the target audience, offending potential customers, etc, but the topic today addresses a different type: assuming that your audience either doesn’t have a brain or at some point won’t engage it.

The first example is actually kind of funny; it’s for a Toyota dealership in Northern California. Here’s the tagline – “we’re moving around the corner and we’d rather sell them than move them.” Well, that makes sense – wait, these are cars, right? Mattresses, washing machines, dining room sets – sure, but cars? How hard can it be to move cars? Around the corner no less?

Although it isn’t done in jest, it’s just so stupid that it’s funny.

The next one bugs me a bit more, probably because it straight out insults your intelligence. I’m sure you’ve heard this one or one similar – “if we can’t beat their price, we’ll give you the ____”. The particular ad I’m talking about now is for mattresses but I’ve heard a similar ad for cars. “So let me see, I can either beat my competitor’s price by a dollar or I can give away a $500 mattress. Hmm, which one will I choose?”

Now, I get the point that this place will ensure that they have the best price and I guess the normal tack of “we’ll beat any competitor’s price by 5%” probably wasn’t good enough, so they came up with this.

Maybe, I’m too sensitive (maybe?) but hearing this ad makes me think so much less of this store that I’m not at all inclined to shop there and would instead opt for one of their competitors. As mentioned – advertising fail.

Fire the Coach?

It happens all the time in sports - at the end of a losing season, the manager or head coach gets fired. Obviously, that's easier than getting rid of all the players and, more importantly. it deflects responsibility for the team's failure away from management.

This same type of thing happens in the corporate world and for the same reasons. If sales are down, more likely than not sales management will take the heat and/or get fired rather than the sales reps and rather than senior management looking looking introspectively.

A case in point, from an anonymous correspondent;
"I work for a well-known East Coast based financial services firm and 2006 was a horrible sales year for our division. In December it was announced that our Sales Manager would be leaving and that our department would be rolled into a division that sells products complementary to ours. While none of this seems bad or unreasonable to the outside world, one key element was missing - any kind of real investigation as to why sales were down. The real problems were out-of-date products and horrendous service, problems upper management refused to fix, and therefore a terribly unmotivated sales force. The new management went into the change oblivious to what the issues were and treated us as if all we needed was a lesson in sales, some new laptops and a bigger quota. We don't want to be seen as crybabies or not as "team players", but until some of the underlying problems are addressed we still won't be selling and whose fault is that? I believe it's upper management's fault."

Now, I'm not sure the "management refused to fix" part is 100% accurate as it's likely as not that they were either unaware as to the extent of the problems or were unable (for one reason or another) to remedy them, but still. Even when the ball team's manager gets fired, usually management makes other changes to ensure that the new manager and the team is successful, or at least, more successful. Marching on as if the only change required is a change in middle-management is hardly ever the right approach.

If things are bad enough that team, or executive, management feels the need to fire the manager, you can be certain that other, more serious, problems are afoot and need to be attended to.

We sell - What?

Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld's "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want"? Please remember that saying when you're hiring sales reps. My point - don't hire sales reps for things you want to sell, hire reps for things you actually do sell. More than once, I've been interviewed for sales positions and been told that the company wants to go after "Fortune 500" size clients and we have this and that product and/or capability. However, after doing a little DD, it became apparent that there was no way either of these companies had the capabilities required for those size clients.

The two firms had different reasons for their actions and so in the interest of clarity, I'll explain them.

The first was a recently-acquired subsidiary of a huge corporation and, naturally, the bug was placed in someone's ear that cross-selling was a good thing and ought to be pursued. As it turns out, the subsidiary that was going to hire me was once a company that specialized in small business, but had been bought by a larger firm and in turn the two of them were both swallowed by a huge multi-national. Since the mother ship had always dealt with firms it's own size, they just naturally assumed that it's new acquisitions would be able to do the same. Unfortunately all the employees of this subsidiary, their training, mindset, and more importantly their systems were all geared for small clients. It's not that they were never going to get there but they needed to do a lot of infrastructure work and employee training in order to do it. They did, in fact, do some elephant-hunting in conjunction with their larger brethren for a while and failed miserably. Cross-selling has been tabled for now.

The second firm was moving into a different facet of it's business with a different client base and didn't do enough research to find out product differences that were industry standard among it's new prospects. When you are a new player in an industry and show that you don't really know what every one else is doing, or why, or how the client is affected, it makes the whole sales process a horrible sight. Worse, they didn't know what they didn't know and so the new reps were led to believe that the company had it's act together. When the skin was peeled back on procedures and processes, it was "WTF?",

Now maybe you're just saying that these are isolated instances. I don't think so; there is much anecdotal information about firms entering markets and failing miserably because they were unprepared to handle the needs of that market.

Hiring a rep to sell to clients you have no business going after does a disservice to the rep, damage to their reputation and to the credibility to your firm. Yes, there are always new markets we would like to get into but before you hire someone to crack them, make sure you do your homework to make sure you have the systems and deliverables to make your foray a success. If you do hire a rep that's knowledgeable in a market you want to get into and want them to help you do it, make sure to adjust their sales quota until you are ready to deliver the goods.