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Friday, March 5, 2010

Quick Marketing Tip--Don't Throw Out What's Great

Everyone would like to know which promotion they're doing works and which doesn't. That rarely happens. Sometimes we think we know and we don't. Recently Pepsi redid its logo. Dan Neil, LA Times marketing expert, laments what they did. He says "It looks like some strange foreign knockoff of Pepsi--Pipse, maybe."

Here's the thing. People are inflexible. You train them to like you, like what you do, like what they see. They can even get attached. When you change things you have to be very careful that 1. what you are discarding truly is no longer working and 2. that what you replace it with doesn't alienate their sensiblities. I mean, poor Dan Neil had his nostalgia button flattened and for no good reason.

He quoted Scott Montgomery as saying "People are running around saying, "Oh my gosh, we've got to do something'...There are all these pressures. Sometimes it's a good thing, if you can make sure you're not throwing away something important. "

Trust me, if a marketing powerhouse like Pepsi (or Coke--remember their Classic Coke fiasco?) can booboo, so can an independent retailer on a small budget.  Often the most frugal approach is to do nothing. Your next consideration is do something, but take it easy. Put your little toesies in the water and see what happens. That's market research if you do it formally. If not, it's just playing it smart the easy way.


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Carolyn Howard-Johnson's FRUGAL book for retailers is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques launched at the National Stationery Show at Javits Center. Because she is the author of the multi award-winning how-to books for writers,The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success, retailers will also find essentials of writing for blogs, Web sites, and newsletters on this blog. She is the author of an award-winning novel, This Is the Place; and other fiction and poetry. She blogs on better writing at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog. Find her tweeting for retailers at @frugalretailing . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use this little green widget to let them know about it:

1 comment:

  1. Interesting post and thanks for sharing. Some things in here I have not thought about before.
    Regards,
    Brand Consultant
    Neeti Biz

    ReplyDelete

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