Play Video
read the transcript [RTF]

As the world’s largest all-volunteer army, the U.S. Army must constantly look for fresh ways to engage the young men and women it seeks to recruit. This means broadcasting its messages across a wide range of media aimed at a diverse pool of candidates. Of course, there have been challenges to these efforts, especially during wartime. Here, Army spokesmen explain why the military branch saw the need to freshen its recruitment campaign and retool its messaging, and what obstacles it had to overcome to succeed.

Solution: A Show of Strength

Play Video
read the transcript [RTF]

The U.S. Army didn’t just re-craft its messages to its recruits, but also extended its new “Army Strong” campaign to recruits’ networks of family and influential friends. And in doing so, the military branch highlighted a range of themes — country, honor, opportunity — designed to motivate recruits from across a variety of backgrounds. Likewise, the Army relied on multiple media channels, including direct mail, to reach its audiences, in many cases driving respondents to its goarmy.com Web site. This installment explains how the Army decided to use mail and other elements of the multimedia mix to expand its appeal to highly segmented targets.

Results: Mission Accomplished

Play Video
read the transcript [RTF]

For the Army, measuring the success of its campaigns is easy in some respects: If recruiting numbers are up, the effort is generally thought to be successful. And indeed, buoyed by its multimedia “Army Strong” campaign, the branch is once again reaching its recruitment goals. In this segment, Army officials explain how blending the precision of direct mail with other media has allowed the branch to fill its ranks and remain strong at a time critical to American national security.

By: Frank S. Washington

It’s no secret that big companies often don’t do well when making overtures to small businesses. In many instances, their outreach efforts fail not because big businesses don’t have anything worthwhile to offer but because major marketers aren’t very good at holding the attention of small entrepreneurs.

But a recent, award-winning campaign by Verizon did indeed capture the fancy of many small businesses — and earned some notice from the big boys, too, for both its effectiveness and its simplicity.

In fall 2006, the telecom giant began sending out a test mailing of direct mail pieces that bore a striking resemblance to an all-too-familiar office-supply staple — the interoffice envelope. Verizon targeted 11,851 small businesses with the envelopes, which featured the words “INTERNET NOTICE” stripped across the top and the crossed-out names of fictitious previous recipients. A final “name” — “Cable User” — was unobscured, a cue for business owners to “cross out” their cable provider and switch to a high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) provided by Verizon.

The envelope was accompanied by a cover letter — with the heading “For Speed, For Features, For Price … Verizon Business DSL” — that was signed by Verizon small business marketing director Marquita Carter.

In an interview, Carter explains that Verizon officials settled on the three-month “Interoffice Envelope” campaign after tests suggested its simple familiarity stood a strong chance of cutting through the promotional clutter that confronts many small businesses.

“The iconic look of an interoffice envelope — who’s going to just toss that out?” asks Carter rhetorically. “We tested this approach and got some really strong results. It bettered our control number by 30 percent.”

Carter says a test is part of every direct mail campaign at Verizon. The company sends out two or more different pieces of direct mail and measures which one generates the most calls and conversions to sales. The responses are benchmarked against the control campaign, which is the best campaign from the last direct mail cycle.

“How do we continue to work on sustainability from the heart?”— Greg Owsley

“Nobody’s hired us saying, ‘You’re the green designer, that’s why we want you.’”— Edith Graves

By Elaine Appleton Grant

In the months since Deliver® published its first green issue, companies have turbocharged their attempts to become more environmentally responsible. But their efforts to create and promote eco-friendly products have become increasingly fraught with dilemmas.

Deliver checked in with four marketers concerned about sustainability to see how the marketing environment has changed since last August.

Our panelists were Edith Graves, marketing director of Eason Associates, a Washington, D.C., design firm whose clients include Clark Construction Group, which just completed the first LEED Silver Certified baseball park in the nation, and Greg Owsley, chief branding officer of New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins, Colo. Last year, Owsley had just kicked off a campaign called “Follow Your Folly” that encouraged consumers to save local rivers from pollution and to commute by bicycle.

We also talked with Ian Yolles, vice president of brand communications at Nau Inc., an eco-friendly apparel maker headquartered in Portland, Ore., and David Zucker, a corporate social responsibility expert and partner with New York PR firm Porter Novelli.

Deliver: Give me an update on your green marketing efforts.

Owsley: We just measured “Follow Your Folly.” We had a 30-percent increase in people’s awareness that we’re a company that strives to be more sustainable. When we started, less than 10 percent of consumers knew this.

The attendance at Tour de Fat, our bicycling event, doubled in most towns. The messaging last year was so strong that the bike could be the vehicle that leads us out of global warming! In each of the 11 towns, we had one person turn over their car keys and title and give up their car for life. We’re doing a documentary on that.

Graves: We’re on the speaker circuit, talking to designers, printers and end users about [greening their printed materials]. A lot of our clients have sustainable philosophies, but they haven’t thought about the paper they’re using.

We always offer the client three eco-friendly paper selections. Once our clients understand these papers’ properties, they want them. They may or may not cost more, but it sends a powerful message to their audience.

We’re booming right now and we feel fortunate in the current economy. I have to attribute it to something — maybe the sense of goodwill from our yearlong green campaign? Nobody’s hired us saying “You’re the green designer, that’s why we want you.” But it certainly hasn’t hurt our business.

Deliver: David Zucker, are you seeing any major changes in how clients are approaching the eco-friendly story?

Zucker: It’s a time of reckoning: People are confronting the complexity of the communication challenge. They are struggling with how to tell consumer audiences a clear story about the environmental responsibility of any given product.

On the one hand, consumers are motivated to purchase more environmentally friendly products. The dilemma is how to know whether any given product is truly environmentally friendly? The information is so complex that to tell an accurate story becomes very challenging.

For instance, the assumption about food miles early on was simplistic: The message said “local is better.” But that’s not always the case. In Europe, consumers would assume that buying locally grown roses rather than imported ones would be better from a carbon standpoint. In fact, researchers found that roses grown in Kenya had less of a footprint because of the difference in growing processes.

But are consumers going to take the time to sift through that level of information to make purchase decisions, or will they be frustrated and ignore some of this information and go back to old habits?

Deliver: Ian and Greg, are you struggling with this complexity?

Yolles: We are. In trying to think in an iterative, thoughtful way about sustainability, every day we’ve been faced with a multitude of decisions. So we introduced a new section to our Web site, “Grey Matters,” to bring full transparency to the complexity of the decisions we’ve made.

Owsley: For every sustainable move you make, it’s only slightly more pro than it is con.

For us, company growth means more jobs, more of our sustainable practices in our territory, but it also means more fossil fuels under our beer.

We try not to use the term “green marketing.” If green means lessening your impact, well, marketing means increasing your sales. Those are at odds. It’s also a classically American response to a crisis: We’ll shop our way out of global warming. We’re not quite sure that’s the complete answer. How do we continue to work on sustainability from the heart?

Graves: All of these paper companies are promoting green design and printing, and I know it is from the heart. These are 200-year-old companies with deep respect for the woods. The more they work to preserve them, the better for their companies. Paper companies now can provide documentation and certification of their eco-friendly practices. And printers and clients need to know to ask for it. The demand creates the supply. Eventually, this will be the norm.

Owsley: To me, the disclaimers are what’s so key to any long-term green messaging. You have to admit to the failings while you also tout the successes. We’re doing that on our aluminum-can 12-pack. [We’re saying that] cans are only a little better than bottles; this won’t make us green, this will make us only slightly greener.

Yolles: There’s an enormous amount of greenwashing going on. I have some faith that over time people will be able to separate authenticity from marketing spin. We’re in the digital age. Everyone is a filmmaker, everyone has a blog, so they’re instantaneously publishers and journalists. So in this world, there is a level of transparency and also the ability for stories to be transmitted very broadly, very rapidly, and that’s completely unprecedented. In the digital world, there’s a persistence of memory, and so the notion of what you do and how you do it is more important than ever before.

Deliver: The Direct Marketing Association recently strengthened its ethics guidelines to require that its members notify customers of their ability to opt out of mailings in every commercial solicitation. Will this Commitment to Consumer Choice measure hurt or help your efforts to promote eco-friendly activities?
Owsley: We don’t deploy direct marketing. Yet if these guidelines could alleviate a lot of the ecological burden — as well as the marketing clutter — of junk mail, it might become a medium we’d consider.

Deliver: Interesting! So you’d see it as a more ecologically friendly alternative and one potentially worth pursuing?

Owsley: Only if direct mail were truly cleaned up of the clutter that makes going to the mailbox a chore and allowed us to deliver nice surprises to consumers who would most appreciate them. I still think the tactile experience mail brings is special, but largely the consumer perception these days is “turn off the faucet.” If that changes? Yeah, we’d be interested. We’d probably send something like our postcards, which we call “post-coasters,” that could have a life after being a mail piece.

By: Steve Cuno

We recently ran across this gem on a bank’s Web site: “To us, [our city] is not a ‘market’ … While some banks are looking to make a profit, we want to make a difference, one person at a time.”

Perhaps, somewhere, someone was moved by this copy. All we were compelled to do, though, was ask how anyone could write such palpably self-serving drivel. Of course, we also already knew the answer: palpably self-serving drivel is beguiling. It charms and distracts while it infests copy. The bankers who approved that copy probably believed it. They had no clue that customers stumbling upon the line would either ignore it or, worse, roll their eyes and say, “Oh, come on.”

That reaction is no small matter. It signals that you’ve wasted your budget on words that accomplish nothing, insulted your target market’s intelligence and stripped credibility from your message. When that happens, you’re no longer marketing. You’re publishing noise that is easily tuned out.

To protect against the beguilement of self-serving drivel, we highly recommend applying what one shop calls the “Oh, Come On!” Test, a do-it-yourself diagnostic procedure designed to help keep your marketing free from cynicism-inspiring contaminants.

It consists of three quick steps: 1. Slip into your market’s shoes. 2. See if your copy strikes a chord — or makes you say, “Oh, come on.” 3. Be honest with yourself about your reaction.

That third step is the hardest. Many advertisers truly believe their product is the “world’s best” and expect you to believe it, too. This makes us think of a scene from a movie we really like, in which the lead female character describes her male counterpart as the planet’s rudest person. He responds by calling her accusation silly, mainly because she couldn’t possibly know everyone on the planet. True, of course — and the national advertiser’s claim that it makes “the world’s most excellent pickle” is equally as silly.

Some advertisers try to foist on us claims that, while technically true, are still far-fetched. If you’re a national mortgage company sending out direct mail that is “introducing a new way to save,” don’t expect recipients to bother looking for a unique savings plan. At this point, most consumers know it’s just another offer with a zero percent intro rate and that they “save” by transferring balances from interest-accruing cards to the “new” card. Their response: “Oh, come on.”

Then there are advertisers who forget to back up their claims. They’ll say, “We put customers first,” without bothering to shop their own stores, step up training or better screen employees.

Generous application of the “Oh, Come On” Test early and often can help rid your marketing of such embarrassments — leaving room for substantive copy points in their place. Best of all, the test is a simple, effective reminder that, no matter how much a marketer may believe a claim, the bottom line is whether consumers buy it.

Steve Cuno is the chairman of RESPONSE Prospecting & Loyalty Strategies and author of The Fallible Gut: A Marketer’s Guide To Surviving Intuition.