would think that with all those locations and gobs of money for advertising, all we had to do was wait for the checks to come rolling in. But the fundamentals of consumer awareness apply across the board. We used the Rule of Seven to drive messaging home and make sales.
Using the One-To-Many Approach… Seven Times!
When you are planning your next social media effort or ad campaign, there are a few principles to consider. You can use them when deciding how many ad exposures it will take to reach your audience effectively. It still takes seven repetitions to generate awareness of a brand, a book or service, but you can do it much more efficiently.
In our campaign to drive sales in those 20,000 retail locations, we focused on messaging that went from one-to-many. We carefully planned a series of messages reaching millions of “influencers,” called Early Adopters. The Early Adopters in this industry embraced new ideas and technologies earlier than most, and we knew they would evangelize our product for us.
The structure of the marketing campaign for this product was built around the Rule of Seven. Here is how the campaign was structured to reach the magic number of exposures:
1 Trial coupons in Free Standing Inserts (FSI’s) in leading newspapers
2 Direct mail campaign
3 Print flyers, delivered by a partner company
4 In-store advertising in grocery stores, where most people shop 2.3 times (on average) each week
5 Television commercials
6 On-kiosk advertising in major retail locations such as WalMart, Target, and Costco
7 Sponsorship at a series of sporting events
Each one of these venues invited multiple exposures and drove home the message to generate awareness, familiarity and ultimately, trial. This marketing philosophy can be applied and works for new product launches, and can even be effective for a book launch campaign.
As you plan your next marketing campaign, remember the Rule of Seven. How can you plan your book launch campaign to leverage the Rule of Seven used by professional marketing teams?
Here is a sample idea of how to create 7 repetitions of the message around your book that does not require the multimillion dollar budgets of professional marketers.
1 Plan a daily series of social media posts. If you can schedule 3-months of daily posts, you will earn top marks in your class!
2 Send regularly scheduled emails.
3 Schedule a series of speaking events.
4 Hand-out bookmarks promoting your book at live events.
5 Clearly establish the profile of your target readers, and reach them via an advertising campaign online (Google ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, etc.).
6 Schedule bookstore signing tour.
7 Ask the local media for a radio or TV appearance.
Your patience in generating seven repetitions will prove that 7 just might be your lucky number!
Where could your business, your speaking business or book sales go if you released all your limitations? With the right company brand or personal brand behind your business endeavors, you can break through untold barriers and realize your professional dreams.
What exactly is branding? Your branding is the way people perceive you and your mission—whether it’s your company, your personal career branding at work or even your private objectives. Branding distills your ideology into a series of elements that together create the look-and-feel of an ideal.
Branding is the practice of using your business name, logo, slogans, color choices and other assets in your marketing communications so that consumers can easily recognize you. In short, it’s your image.
Your brand communicates the qualities, ideas, emotions (if you’re good) and user experience that your products present to the marketplace. Using these assets in all of your business communications will reinforce your brand with every consumer touch.
The largest and most successful companies in the world all use these strategies to build their brand equity into billions of dollars. The industry giants of yesterday and today—Google, Apple, Tide, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Kodak, Nike, Ford, Disney, Kellogg’s, and many more—all successfully built their brand to household name recognition. Having worked professionally with 6 of these mega-brands personally, there are things we can learn from these best of class brands.
Consumers know these brands by heart and trust the products enough to purchase them without debate. The safety, quality and dependability of the product is assumed—even expected.
Of Rutted Roads and Grizzly Bears
My career began working for one of these mega-brands—Kodak—and it literally changed the way I perceive my place in the world. At the time, the Kodak brand was the 4th most valuable brand in the world, with a value on the balance sheet in the billions of dollars. This brand association also has had a deep and lasting effect on my career success. By associating with a major household name, my employers, clients and colleagues look at me a little differently. Some of the brand’s magic dust brushed off on me, and it influenced the success in my early business career.
Early in my career, I landed one of the largest Sales territories a young guy in Sales could hope for. It was also in one of the most remote areas on the planet. My job was to sell Kodak film throughout the State of Alaska. It may sound prestigious to have a territory that is a third of the land mass of the United States, but before you get overly impressed, I’d like to put this data point into perspective.
Alaska is not an easy place to promote a brand. First, there are more bears in Alaska than people. Second, half the state’s population lives in one city, Anchorage, and Alaska is the largest State in the USA—in fact, the State is one-third the size of what Alaskans call the “Lower 48.” You just can’t drive across it in a day. In fact, most parts of the state are undrivable. One of the most popular modes of transportation is the float plane. Even these hardy vehicles have trouble reaching vast expanses in the rugged wilderness, largely because there’s just nowhere to land.
Let me put it this way: As a Kodak man, I had a lot of muddy ground to cover in my shiny loafers, and my wide yellow tie was a little hard to miss among the fireweed on the tundra. Even the herds of caribou would roll their eyes when they saw me coming.
I’ll never forget the time when a sales call took me to a gold mine located some half a day’s drive from the big city where I lived. I thought someone at the home office had made a typo on my sales sheet—either that or they were playing a practical joke. I mean, who sells Kodak film in Hope, Alaska? I couldn’t image a gold mine wanting anything to do with my goods.
The road to the mine was a dirt track, now awash in runoff from the spring breakup. The farther away I got from the main highway, the more I was sure there’d been some kind of mistake as my Chevy Celebrity bounced through the potholes.
It was more than 15 rutted miles after I left the pavement before I saw another soul. You can imagine my relief when I turned a corner to find this replica of an old western town—a fly-in
