I Got The Promotion

Noted Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, author Marshall McLuhan once posed a question during a seminar I attended which I will share with you. What is the definition of “read”? After a cornucopia of interesting but wrong answers he gave a hint. “Don’t explain read by using read and don’t tell me about the action of the word, tell me its meaning.
After 10 more minutes of suspense he gave the most unusual definition. He said the definition of the word “read” means “to guess”. How else can you explain how three people can read a sentence, for instance like “I got the promotion” and come up with three different interpretations. So based on your background, language, perceptions and experiences about what you know you “guess” at what the author is trying to convey.
Which leads me back to “I got the promotion”; some who will “read” this sentence envisioned job advancement or a contest idea. If so, bad “guess” since that perception missed the point I was trying to convey. Here’s why, last week while on my daily shopping trip to Whole Foods Market, a local Subaru dealer was test driving cars in front of the store. As I was about to pass and decline their offer, the lovely sales representative said “Take a test drive and we’ll give you a twenty (20) dollar Whole Foods gift card that you could use right now”.
Well that got me to drive one and as I watched for the next hour, 85 percent of those they approached made the same choice. I later found out that the Whole Foods and Subaru partnered in this effort. According to the salesperson because both companies core customer base was earth friendly and health conscious. So they took the product to where their core customers are. Interesting!?! When I shared the experience with another friend he asked “how many cars do you think they sold”? He’s a bean counter so the bottom line was his focus however he missed the wisdom of the promotion. After all if you had 100 people commit to the test drive and 3 question survey afterwards (now you’re in their database). The cost would be two (2000) thousand dollars worth of Whole Food gift cards for this promotion. If you didn’t sell a car was it worth it?
I can’t tell if they made a single sale but Subaru wasn’t among the top 10 cars I would have chosen before the test drive and it is now! McLuhan was right, the message is the medium. The Subaru mindset must have been don’t add discounts or drop the price, it might hurt the perception of their product when the car market finally rebounds and someday it will. This promotion made new customer in-roads and probably grew their market share. By the way, the profit from one car sale would’ve paid for this promotion. The perception of (car) quality remained high because you believe you’re getting more than your money’s worth. I don’t believe the twenty dollars alone would not have created this high (85%) test drive percentage but with the value added Whole Foods gift card it was instant gratification. Thus planting seeds of a new top of the mind awareness with potential customers and generating positive word of mouth advertising.
You may have noticed more of corporate America’s dollars you trying new creative ways to grow their customer base. Target teamed up with Facebook and Twitter to setup a fan page. Their fans the week before “black Friday” had an opportunity to get the first crack on sell merchandise at drastic discounts. The local ABC television affiliate profiled one mother who got a seventy (75%) percent fan discount on her Christmas gifts from Target. Starbucks fans can send their Facebook friends a free drink. One small mom and pop food stop Quesa-d-ya’s used a Facebook promotion to celebrate their first year in business. For one day they sold their small Quesada valued at 7 bucks for one dollar. One of my Facebook friends talked me into checking this one out and I’m glad I did. I bought two they we’re the size of a very large pizza for two bucks. To be honest I expected the McDonald dollar meal size but I was pleasantly surprised. The owner told me about 300 people stopped in because of his Facebook promotion. He continued that” the profit margin was low with such a large turnout”. Next year, he’ll sell them for 2 dollars and if he gets the same result would clean up. So I had to ask if he ever tried using radio. He ran a small commercial schedule with a free lunch promotion with the top rated radio outlet in the market and got nothing. Why?
Once again to refer to McLuhan the medium is the message. Radio in not known for instant gratification and the Internet is! In this world of shorter attention spans and microwave meals, how fast can I get, my prize, my request, my discount and my satisfaction?
Many 18 to 34 listeners have chosen Internet radio as their first choice for music. Web radio outlets like Pandora, is like having your own personal radio station. This music website inputs your vitals on a music database. Then the taste test software plays your request and immediately suggests new songs that fit your profile. Pandora can really offer more for less ad time at only a fraction of the cost on digital streams of regular radio stations. And they can command higher prices for their product according to Media Spot Inc. Here’s a shocker Media Spot Inc did research for a client who wanted to target the Los Angeles listeners of Pandora. They got the return of investment response they wanted and paid twenty (20%) percent more than buying regular terrestrial LA radio. Pandora for the first three months of this year could barely eke out a profit. However CFO Tim Westergren expects they will close out the year with revenue of about forty (40) million dollars on the bottom line.
More than 42 million each week listen to radio online, that’s more than double the rate from five years ago according to Edison Research and Arbitron Inc. Borrell Associates research says radio gets an estimated 2.4% of its revenue online while TV gets 3.4% and newspapers 7%. Radio has got to improve in this area before the window closes. The good news is that terrestrial radio is still the revenue king. Buyers still say their clients don’t attach much value to the additional information available from Internet streams although that’s changing.
One more promotion comparison, this week McDonald with its hip hop marketing strategy announced a dramatic drop in revenue, even after introducing the dollar meal and the seemingly on-going “Monopoly game”. While on the other side of the counter, family oriented Chick-fil-a with its on-going cows for chicken campaign posted profits that hit the 3 billion dollar mark for the first time in the company’s history in a bad economy. What makes Chick-fil-a plan work? Huge community involvement! They are at every parade giving away free drinks whether you purchase or not. They’re active in the church community providing meals for seminars and workshops. During the beginning of this year they gave away free language programs for Spanish, French and Chinese, no purchase necessary and they're closed on Sunday. Now who of the two, do you think created the best customer word of mouth?

In closing, if word of mouth is still the best form of publicity (and it is), what kind of words are your customers using about your station? Having said all of that “did you get it”?