A man channeling Wild Bill Hickok charged into the bank as if he was chasing a party of renegade Apaches. He marched past the receptionist, by two other loan officers and sat down in the chair in front of my desk without being asked.

He had long gray hair tied back in a ponytail, a mustache and a little goatee that came to a point below his chin.

“Wanna’ get a loan,” he said and slid a brochure across the desk in my direction.

He wore a suede jacket with fringed leather dangling from the sleeves and granny glasses like John Lennon used to wear.

I picked up the brochure and opened it to the first page. It was one of those cattle deals that were the darlings of the investment world in the eighties.

They were disguised as investments in cattle ranching, but in reality were created for the tax credits that sprang from a loophole in the IRS code. CPAs and tax attorneys were cranking these things out by the truckload and taking a tasty piece of the action as the General Partners.

I’d read dozens of them. Some made financial sense; most did not.

“How much you want to invest?” I asked.

“Fifty thousand,” he said and spun a business card through the air as if he were dealing poker at Caesar’s Palace. It landed on the business plan.

“And how much of a tax credit are you going to get, Mister…” I picked up the card and read his name; “Blasedell?”

“Thirty grand.”

I looked up at him waiting for him to address the disparity.

He looked back.

My desk phone rang. I let my secretary pick it up.

“Seems like you’re going to come out on the short end of this deal,” I said.

“How do you figure?” He said.

I glanced across the lobby of the bank. It was a Friday afternoon and the line of customers waiting to see a teller was backed up all the way to the front door.

I looked back at Blasedell. “Well, if you invest fifty-thousand and are only going to get a thirty-thousand dollar tax credit, you’re twenty-thousand upside down on the deal.”

Wild Bill sprang forward in his chair like a horizontal jack-in-the-box. “It’s not my fifty-thousand Mister Bank Vice President, it’s yours.” He sat back in the chair with a devilish grin and patted his goatee with the index finger of his right hand.
I wasn’t sure if he was really missing this many brain cells, or was pulling my leg. “That’s true,” I said. “But you have to pay the loan back.”

He shot forward again. “You banker guys are supposed to be smarter than this.”

“Smarter than what, Mr. Blasedell?”

“Sebastian,” he said. “My friends call me SB.”

I nodded.

He sat back.

“Let’s say, my credit is A plus. And let’s say I’m willing to move a couple hundred thousand in deposits into your bank here. And let’s say you approve my loan.”

“Go on,” I said. The deposit balances had my interest.

“If it’s a line of credit, I would only have to make monthly interest payments, right?”

I nodded.

“Payments of around $300 a month, right?”

I ran a quick interest rate calculation in my head and nodded.

“Twelve payments of $300 is $3,600, but I would get a tax write off this year of $30,000!”

He couldn’t contain his smile and now tapped his goatee rapidly with his index finger as if it were coming unglued and he was making sure it stuck to his chin.

“But at the end of the twelve months the fifty-thousand would come due,” I said.

Then the penny dropped.

“Yes, but that’s next year and by then they will have sold the cattle and I’ll have the fifty-thousand to repay the loan.”

The actual business side of these cattle tax shelters were notoriously shabby.  Few of them returned anything to the investor but the tax credit, which was usually much larger than what Wild Bill was getting.

“Have you researched the track record of the General Partners?” I said. “Or how many of these cattle deals pay off?”

“Got it from my brother-in-law. Friend of his is a CPA.”

“Tell you what, Mister Blasedell, you do some homework on the people that put this shelter together. See if they have put other deals like this together, and if so, how well they paid out. And then do a little homework on these kinds of shelters in general. And if you still want the loan, come back and see me.”

The tapping of the goatee stopped. “You don’t trust me?” He said.

“I don’t know you, Mister Blasedell. But the last article I read on cattle-based tax shelters said that 76.2% of them did not generate any cash flow other than the tax credit itself.”

The goatee again. Tap, tap, tap. “Seventy-six percent,” he said.

“And two-tenth,” I said.

He stood and took the brochure off of my desk. “Much obliged,” he said, and walked out of the bank with a little less bounce in his step than when he’d come in, but twenty thousand to the upside not matter how you sliced it.

I confess to a little literary license in the dialogue, but not the perspective of the customer. As a banker in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in Beverly Hills, I reviewed countless loan requests, some for investment purposes but most of them were from customers who had an idea for a new product or service and wanted to borrow start up capital.

It is a testament to the imagination of the human mind that people can dream up the some of the most creative solutions to market opportunities imaginable. Some dazzling in their brilliance, others… eh, not so much.

But a common mis-step in such requests was a lack initial market research. How big is the market? Who are the competitors? Is there a 900 pound gorilla in the field? If so, who is it? Why are they the leader?

How does the competition market itself? What “buttons” do they push in their advertising? Do they have a position in the market and if so, do they utilize it in their marketing? Is there a niche in this market you can grab? What is it?

And key…what makes your product different – really different, unique.

This kind of research is a key element in On Target’s services because without it, the client is marketing blind – they may be saying the same thing as the
competition, without mentioning anything that distinguishes them.

They may be trying to take a position that is already taken, which results in wasted advertising dollars.

A client came to us a few years back with an idea for a technology product that would revolutionize an entire industry.

The client was, you know…this is a, “Move over Steve Jobs,” moment in Internet history.

He wanted surveys done for buttons and positioning.

I suggested that we do some market research to see if there were any competitors and if so, what kind of market share they already had.

“No need,” he said. “There are no other players.”

For some reason, I decided to do some research on my own.  It took a while but I not only found a competing product that had just hit the market, but found that their product was better and faster than our client’s. 

It was a little painful at first, but really wasn’t a sad tale. The client was resourceful and bounced back with a new twist to the product. 

My point here is a simple one: one should fully understand the market into which they are advertising. If you are promoting the same benefits for your product as the guy down the street, why should someone buy from you?

The answer to that comes from surveys, but before that you have to understand your market and your competitors  if you want to get the best results from your advertising.

Understand the competition and you have the first leg up on positioning your product to dominate theirs.

There is another benefit: Properly done market and competitor research will help you raise investor capital if that is something you are intending to do.

We recently completed market research studies for two companies: one a technology start-up and the other was in the area of children’s furniture. In both cases, the results of this research helped our clients attract investors.

Below is a copy of a letter we recently received from a client. Our client was a company managing the process of bringing a new invention to market. We were retained to conduct the market research for them for their client.

The research was extensive, but two key findings emerged: the market was much bigger than had been understood; and the launch of the inventor’s product would be able to ride the crest of a growing public relations movement within the industry. Properly exploited, the movement would benefit the product immensely.

The truth is, the client hadn’t asked us for the PR research, we stumbled on it when investigating the overall market. Nevertheless, these findings opened the door to an extremely powerful presentation to investors.

At On Target Research we conduct world-class market research, we execute surveys that drive sales, and we create brand positions that sail into the minds of the public and rule the category.

Best Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Bruce@brucewiseman.net
1-818-397-1401

When my father was a young man, he stowed away on a tramp steamer to Hawaii.

He was a tough little guy who had boxed in his youth and had the nose to prove it. But he also had the gift of the pitch. And once in the land of many Alohas, he traveled door-to-door selling the hot, new vacuum-tube Philco radios to the islanders. It was the beginning of broadcasting’s Golden Age, and he did well.

When he returned stateside he opened an appliance store in Berkeley and the rest, as they say….

Well…perhaps not quite history, but the store in Berkeley was the first of what became an extremely successful chain of home furnishing stores throughout the San Francisco East Bay Area in the 40s, 50s,and 60s.

The key to his success was advertising – lots of it.

No pay-per-click budgets to monitor, no social media to maintain, no websites to optimize. "Traffic" was driven into the store by traditional media where you could engage the prospects in conversation and sell them.

In the early days, he used print exclusively; later, he added radio and a bit of television.

He was a master at negotiating great pricing from the manufacturers, which he passed along to his customers, but if there was a single key to his success, it was heavy promotion.

He was the Cal Worthington of the Bay Area Home Furnishing world. It may not have been the most sophisticated position, but it worked.

My dad and the WISEMAN’S brand are long gone. So imagine my surprise when my youngest daughter, in a self-motivated journey into our family’s genealogy, stumbled across her grandfather’s earliest ads promoting the opening of his first store, and sent them to me.

Here is an historically interesting look at one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s more successful merchandisers (he was Northern California’s most successful Frigidiaredealer in the mid t.wentieth century.)

The ads themselves aren’t particularly unique, but note the financing terms! Even in 1940, $.75 a week had to attract interest. Selling "terms" was another of his successful actions.

But put a bib on before scrolling much further so you when you drool at the prices, it doesn’t get on your shirt or blouse.

There is more about one of the most successful new marketing actions below the pictures, but take a scroll through the advertising of 70 years ago and then pick up the narrative below.

Some things have changed.

Yes, merchants still advertise in newspapers, but traditional advertising revenue has been falling like the President’s poll numbers. Ad revenue has fallen 48% since 2006. Some of the country’s most preeminent newspapers have gone under, while even the venerable New York Times recently announced staff reductions due to "a deteriorating advertising climate".

Meanwhile, online advertising continues to soar because that is where the public shops today. E-commerce is projected to have reached $680 billion in 2011, an increase of 18.9% over 2010. No surprise then that Internet advertising amounted to $26.04 billion in 2010 making it the second largest advertising channel behind television at $28 billion, but surpassing newspapers at $22 billion.

If you’re in business, if you sell a product or service, you had better have a website.

But, of course, a website isn’t enough. You have to get the shoppers to your site. You can promote your website address, of course, and should. But consider the following information from www.slumdogmarketer.com:

97 % of American Internet users use the Internet to shop (NPD Group).

And, 63% of consumers turn to the Internet first for information about local companies.

But here is the critical fact: according to a study by Webvisible.com and Nielson Online, 82% use search engines to find what they are looking for (Google has 64% of the search engine traffic, Yahoo has 18% and Microsoft’s Bing has 12%).

Which raises the question: are your ad dollars properly allocated?

The Webvisible/Nielson study also found that the top sources for local information by shoppers were:

Search Engines = 82%
Yellow Pages = 57%
Local Newspapers = 53%
Internet Yellow Pages = 49%
Television = 49%
Direct Mail = 38%
White Pages = 32%

All of which has given rise to the creation of an entire new niche in the world of marketing. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Likely you’ve heard of it. And likely you’ve been solicited by SEO companies from the four corners of the globe, promising high search engine placement.

The competition for SEO business is so intense that I even received an unsolicited call from an SEO company, in Mubai the other day.

These companies specialize in increasing the search engine ranking of your website.

Why?

The story is told in some detail by an inadvertent leak of a massive amount of keyword search data by AOL (AOL uses Google search). The leak involved 20 million key-words searched by 650,000 users over a period of three months. The leak was in 2006, but remains revealing.

If you want to know how important the ranking of your website is on a search engine page take a look:

If your are in the #1 position on the page you get 42.1% of the clicks.

#2 position, 11.9% of the clicks — 3.5x less than #1

#3 position, 8.5% of the clicks — 4.9x less than #1

#4 position, 6.1% of the clicks — 6.9x less than #1

#5 position, 4.9% of the clicks — 8.5x less than #1

#6 position, 4.1% of the clicks — 10.4x less than #1

#7 position, 3.4% of the clicks — 12.3x less than #1

#8 position, 3% of the clicks — 14x less than #1

#9 position, 2.85% of the clicks — 14.8x less than #1

(The leaked data is widely available on the Internet. This math courtesy of Netmark.com.)

So, simple basics:

1- To survive in today’s business world, you must have a website.

2- The website must be responsive to search engine queries about the product or service you sell.

3- The higher you are ranked on the search engine, the better your chance of attracting business. Too far into the bowels of the search engine, you are out of communication with your public.

As you can see, your search engine ranking is critical to your marketing.

Which in turn leads me to share a success with you that will blow you mind.

A friend of mine in New York named Tom Jacoby, does search engine optimization. But he has developed a unique methodology that drives your website up the search engine pages like a heat- seeking missile.

I know, this sounds like a commercial, but bear with me, this is startling.

He ties your product or service to a location:

Sandals, Honolulu

Pawn Shop, Las Vegas

Vegan Market, Berkeley

Tires, Daytona

Organic Dog Food, Santa Monica

Cosmetic Surgery, Beverly Hills

You get seven zip codes or cities and seven key words. So, for example, a beauty saloon in Burbank could have

Beauty Saloon Burbank

Hair Coloring Burbank

Hair and Make-Up Burbank

Pedicure Burbank

Hair Extentions Burbank

Highlights and Coloring Burbank

Hair Pieces and Wigs Burbank

Then, in addition, they would get these same seven key-words in six other jurisdictions, say, for example: Toluca Lake, Universal City, Sunland, Glendale, Hollywood, North Hollywood. Seven cities, seven key-words.

And boy does it work.

An On Target client, to whom we referred Tom earlier in the year, has had a handsome affluence running for months, attributable in part to this service.

But let me get personal. One might think that this would only work for a local business. Not so. I engaged the service for On Target Research some months ago. We aren’t local; our clients are all over the United States. So I picked 7 key cities and 7 key words and turned Tom loose.

One of the survey services that large corporate clients often seek is Customer Loyalty Surveys. This was one of the key words I used in seven major cities across the country.

The result?

If you put "Customer Loyalty Surveys Los Angeles" into Google, you will see that we are number one on the list. We are also number one for "Customer Loyalty Surveys New York". Number two on the list for Chicago.

Did this help our sales? On Target has just had its best year in over a decade.

Tom’s SEO works, and is embarrassingly affordable.

His company is www.numberoneonthelist.com. You can reach him at tom@numberoneonthelist.com or 917-338-9586.

Tell him I sent you. He gives a discount and an added key word to my clients and friends.

I hope this helps you to have an outrageously prosperous 2012!

And let me know when you need to have surveys done.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research

I got an iPad last Christmas.

It is some kind of twenty-first century alchemy that I can touch an image on the screen of an electronic tablet and have the front page of the Wall Street Journal delivered to me by some unseen digital wizard.

Apple sold 7 million iPads last Christmas alone (7,000,000 X $500 =  $3.5 billion), which is part of the reason they have more money in the bank than the U.S. Treasury – Apple, $76 billion; Uncle Sam, $75 billion. But then Tim Geithner and company are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

The screen is bright and vibrant and I turn the pages with a whisk of my index finger. The New York Times is also available with the dash of a digit, and I can load whole libraries of books and magazines into the device.

Amazon now sells more digital books than paper, and airplanes these days are packed with self-absorbed travelers peering into their electronic tablets as if looking for the meaning of life.

All of which makes my anachronistic love of paper books an oddity to the iGeneration.

I like the feel of physical books. I like turning a paper page and the sense of seeing my books packed into the shelves of my personal library, which is jammed to overflowing with dog-eared copies of novels and non-fiction of every genre imaginable. It’s a little 19th century, but I like it that way.

I suppose all of these things would fit into a digital corner of my iPad library. But where is the sense of proprietorship in that?

It won’t be long, I’m sure, before Steve Jobs delivers a life-sized hologram of Julia Childs actually Mastering the Art of French Cooking right in your kitchen.

But, as a touch of marketing eccentricity, I take great pleasure in perusing full-sized, paper copies of The Wall Street Journal in what is often a futile search for advertisements that communicate a message in such a way that it creates a desire for the product.

Occasionally, I come across a great ad. But many are shamefully off the mark. The mind searches in vain for some understanding of how agency creative directors and corporate marketing VPs sign off on ads that omit the most basic elements of communication.

Case in point: MIZUHO.

They have a four-color ad in the Journal featuring a picture of a rather enigmatic man walking away but looking back over his shoulder.

In the foreground is a picture of the screen of a digital tablet with a picture of a guy on a cell phone and a bunch of numbers running across the bottom. They appear to be market quotes of some kind.

The message?

“MIZUHO

“Towards a better world. Our Unchanging Values can make it a reality.”

Eh…, I must have missed something, what “unchanging values” were those?

And what’s a MIZUHO?

In the smallest type in the ad, tucked in the lowest corner of the piece, we find out, if we are wearing microscope-quality reading glasses, that MIZUHO is a “global financial institution.” Maybe they think that everyone that reads the Wall Street Journal knows this.

But I’m a former banker and have been a registered financial adviser and I wouldn’t know MIZUHO from Miso (fermented soybean paste), which was the first association I thought of when I saw the word.

Besides the branding problem, they have a message problem: their “Unchanging Values” will help make a better world.

Really? Not only do they not tell us what those values are, but the line makes one wonder if they are a bank or an environmental organization.

They are a bank that specializes in Forex (foreign currency trading).

Why don’t they deliver that message in their headline?

MIZUHO: A Global Bank for Foreign Exchange.

Simple. Clean. Tells the story. (No charge, MIZUHO).

What has buying and selling Swiss Francs and Deutsche Marks got to do with a Better World?  Maybe there is an answer to that question, but we’ll never know from this ad.

A final comment on the MIZUHO ad: can we replace the guy who looks like he’s a fugitive from Interpol?

Same paper, same day, there is an ad that talks.

Positioning, as those of you that read these articles know, ties a product or a brand to something that is already in the mind.

Brands that can afford it, often use a celebrity as they already have a place in the mind. The public knows the celebrity, presumably likes the celebrity, and associates the product with the celebrity. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Great ones:

John Houseman for Smith Barney: ”We make money the old fashioned way … we earn it.”

Michael Jordan, for Nike, holding an Air Jordan. No words needed.

Orson Wells for Paul Mason wines: “We will sell no wine before its time.

Robert Di Niro, Kate Winslet and Beyonce for American Express: “Don’t leave home without it.

The right spokesperson for the right product.

The point? Done right, positioning a product with a celebrity can make a stunning impression and drive sales. And here’s one where the image sends the communication without the need of a single word.

The brand is tucked in the lower right hand corner.

Copy below the image on the lower left reads:

‘There are journeys that turn into legends. Bahamas islands. 10:07′.

And a website address in micro-type.

But they could have skipped the tag line, in my opinion. Why divert any attention from something this good? What a coup: bagging the greatest James Bond of all time to front for their luggage.

If you want to see how the great Annie Liebovitz shot it, take a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBWvhPkBg9A

I’ll make a confession here: I don’t have Sean Connery under contract. Di Niro either. But we have been creating great positioning campaigns for clients for a quarter of a century.

So if you would like an analysis of your current advertising and marketing materials or need to improve their response rate, we are as close as your cell phone or the click of a mouse.

Best,

Bruce

We had come around a corner on our morning walk when he spotted Elmo, a neighborhood cat who played Roadrunner to Sensei’s Willy Coyote.

Akitas originated in Japan and are used as police dogs and fighting dogs. They are also used to hunt bear.

Elmo would be a cocktail appetizer if Sensei ever caught him without humans around. Señor feline had known this from the day the two had met, and he bolted under a fence and out of sight. The leash went slack.

We carried on up the block, Sensei staking claim to every tree, light pole and fire hydrant on the street.

At the corner a teenage kid rode by on a bicycle. He was going about 7 miles an hour and was wearing a crash helmet.

A crash helmet. It’s the law.

When I was a kid, we used to race down hills and small mountains on our bikes at 40, 50 miles per hour. My brother fell off his bike coming down one of those hills one time. Scraped skin: iodine, bandages and on we rode.

It’s fine if someone wants to wear a helmet to protect themselves while riding a bike. But it should be their choice, not ordered by Big Nanny.

Kids used to fall of off horses as a rite of passage learning to ride in a bygone era. If riders from those years had been told there was a law mandating that they wear a helmet when they rode in order to protect themselves, they’d have strung the politicos up.

I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just saying…

Once in office, politicians seem to become obsessed with the delusion that they must protect us from ourselves and that they have the moral authority to mandate our behavior. This, of course, is the same fraternity that has bankrupted the greatest nation on earth and turned politics into a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidi Fleiss, Inc.

Take seat belts. Please.

Do seat belts save lives? They do. But if I want to drive without a seat belt – which I do – then why should Big Nanny force me to do otherwise?

I am not interested in their statistics or their mandates of my behavior.

The only reason I get into my car and buckle up is to avoid paying a $327 fine – the amount I had to pay for the ticket I got for not wearing one.

All of which brings us to the point of this article: A great commercial.

By way of introduction, if my attitude about seat belts isn’t clear, you’ve got to quit smoking that stuff.

Attitude or no, check this out, it is a terrific bit of advocacy. It’s worth the minute, twenty-nine seconds. Even if you’ve seen it before, look at it from a marketing perspective.

The message communicates powerfully; the positioning is superb.
Here’s the other side of the coin (31 secs):

It carries the wrong emotional tone, as well as a failed attempt at humor.

The point? It not only makes a difference what you say in your advertising, but how you say it. The marketing intelligence for both should come from surveys of your customers and prospects.