Harry Beckwith - Marketing Breakthroughs

 
Harry Beckwith is the founder of Beckwith Advertising and Marketing and has worked with 4 of America's best 100 service companies, 9 Fortune 500 companies. A Phi Beta Kappa Graduate of Stanford, he is the winner of the American Marketing Association's Effie.

He has authored four worldwide best sellers on sales and marketing; he specializes in branding, naming and marketing strategy.

Excerpts from his programme in Bangalore:

Everybody and every Company is trying to sell something to make a living. The success or otherwise of a company depends on how well they are able to sell their stuff and how well they attract customers and employees alike. According to him "Whatever you sell EVERY person in your organisation is a sales person. " This is very important because even the impression that your receptionist - who is the first point of contact when a client or customer visits your office - makes will make or break a deal.

Harry advocates that a PLAN is essential for the success of any marketing campaign. He suggests 4 specific practices for better planning:

1.    Have a Facilitator

2.    Powerful people in the room speak last

3.    Speak to the middle, avoid immediate critisism of new ideas

4.    Encourage lateral thinking

For the actual PLANNING process Harry has these 11 very radical but sensible points that marketeers must remember. They are based on scientific studies and the fact that basically Human beings are falliable and do not always react to a said situation as expected. So here they  are:

1. Ignore Best Practices : The so called best practice is old by the time it becomes known as a best practice. Also usually it will be a copy of something that has been tried. So the solution would be to try to imagine what people would like and offer something new.

2. Stop Listening: Harry says that through his years of experience he has found that written surveys rarely convey the right meaning because words can mean different things to different people. For example in a written survey they found that people wanted low fat pizzas but when introduced in Pizza Hut it did not sell. That's because people wanted to eat a healthy diet but did not put it in action. So Harry says ‘Watch instead of lIsten- Trust only action'. A fascinating example was how many studios refused to produce the movie Star Wars just by listening to the story.

3. Resist Autohority: The most experience does not mean the best ideas would come from that person.

4. Mistrust Expertise: An expert is not always the best judge. The best example which everyone will relate to is the weather forecast by the weatherman. You might hear him say " there is a 40% chance of rain, when in fact it is raining outside." So all he or for that matter you had to do was look out of the window. ( Again an emphasis on sight and action rather than listening and words.)

5. Mistrust Research: Similarly any reasearch is unreliable because people change their minds in an instant.

6. Mistrust your experience : Here Harry is talking about how people make judgements based on past experiences in their lives and how it might affect their jugement and give you the wrong figures in a survey.

7. Mistrust your confidence: Basically this is not to be overconfident and to study the market well and make descisions with the right data.

8. Resist Perfection: Lets wait for all the data is not a clever strategy because you will never get all the data necesssary, there will always be something wanting.

9.  Waiting for the perfect time: There is no better time like now. We plan only to learn.

10. Identify  the ‘white hot centre' : There is always an authority in every industry for a particular subject. The white hot centre is that person who is usually more reliable on that particular topic than any survey that you might do with your customers.

11. Don't think outside the box : The human brain is incable of thinking outside itself. What is necessary and can be done by everybody is to train oneself to increase the size of the box. Basically lateral thinking. Do something that nobody has thought of before. An example would be the creation of the Disney world. This was the unusual combination of fairy tales with the amusement park rides. The fairy tale characters gave the rides an extra special quality.

Next Harry gave his 13 tips to attract customers to sell whatever. These are basically based on his study and observations of Human tendencies towards buying. They are

1. Customers are Risk averse:  Most customer desicions are not an expression of  their preferences but a way of minimizing risk. They prefer the familiar rather than take a chance.

2. Disbelief: Customers do not believe everything that they read in your ad campaign. The minute you exagerate, people have the tendency to stop listening to everything that you say. So just don't say things, prove it. Look at your ads and websites, remove all the adjectives. Just stick to the nouns and better still the verbs which will indicate what you can do.

3. How do people think? They choose the familiar, Something that they see or hear often stays. The strength of the stimulus (ad) x the frequency of the stimulus = Familiarity.

4. Communicate faster, 2 minutes is all it takes: People form impressions and decide within the first 2 minutes. Then they think. All that they are doing later with all the thinking is justifying their initial reactions.

5.  Appeal to the heart : Not just the head. There should be an emotional resonance in your ad which will trigger a positive thought and response.

6. People notice the new: We are basically animals whose primary drive is survival. So anything out of the ordinary triggers an alert. We constantly look out for signs of change because at a primeaval level it signifies danger. It makes us look out. An example is how the Macy's department store got rid of it's extra stock of towels by calling them ‘blotters', which is what towels are called in France. With the new branding, suddenly people got alert and attracted to the same ordinary towel.

7. Trust your eyes : Surprisingly people hear what they see. They think with their eyes. An elaborate ad with lots of images and words would actually confuse and mislead. There is even a Hearsay Law in the US which states that an eye witness must give testimony from the stand where the jury can look into his eyes while he gives his evidence in court. The logo of Apple computers is a great example. The Apple with the bite combines simplicity while showing the personality of the people behind the product. It shows their innovative as well as playful nature. Steve jobs refuses to wear a suit while addressing any of his product launches as it is part of this playful and creative image.

8. Anchoring: The story : A secretary has a brilliant idea but the company does not listen because they are anchored to the fact that she is just a secretary. She goes on to leave the said company, put her idea to work and wins an award and a multi million dollar contract to boot!

9. Steroetyping: Harry has a personal experience here. Before he came to advertising, he was a lawyer and one of his first campaigns was rejected by the client even after he saw the campaign. " How can a lawyer be creative?" was his answer. Something similar to anchoring where a stereotype rejects an idea blindly due to past predujices.

10. Starved for time: In this rat race everybody is in a hurry to make desicions, they do not have the time to spare. Desicions typically happen in the first 20 seconds, believe it! So look at everything you have and cut it in half. Eliminate noise and allow the signal to come through. A best selling author when asked the secret of his success has said " I leave out the parts that people skip anyway..."

11.Visual and sensory Vividness : Use of the unusual which will make a mark. Vivid and bright colours in the brand name and Logo. Examples are Red pepper, Blue Martini. Though only 16% of Indian movies are made in Bollywood, they make it appear as if 100% of movies are made by them. That is the power of good advertising.  FedEx started the ‘RELAX' campaign. For once they are talking about how YOU feel when you use their product and that you will not forget.

12. Power of Stories: One of the very interesting observations that Harry made was that the 3rd 2 syllable word that a child learns after mama and dada was ‘story'. P ublicity by writing articles about yourself and your business is extremely good for the reason that every time you write, you tell a story. There is an instant connection. It ceases being a product and becomes a memory.

13.The cocktail Party Phenomenon: From his studies of the human nature Beckwith says that out of a grocery list ,we will end up remembering the least wanted item and not necessarily the important one. From this we must learn that it is important to be brief and to the point in our communications. People have limited attention spans and wont always pick up the main issue. So keep it simple and focussed.

The task of a communicator is not so much that he should be understood but that he is NOT misunderstood!

This program was organized by Knowledge Capital- Inspiring Business Intellect

Arathi P Balaji 

Issue BG79 Oct07