Maine Creative Services – Page 7 – Affordable web design and SEO copywriting for small business

Deciphering auto dealers' promises

Ever wonder how your local car dealers can afford to make promises like these?

“Zero-percent financing! Drive it away for just $189 a month! We’ll give you $4000 for your old car, even if you have to tow it in! And (my personal favorite) below-invoice prices!”

Can dealers really afford to make such extravagant promises? Of course not. None of those come-ons are quite what they pretend to be. “Below-invoice” prices, for example, are “not necessarily what the dealer paid for it. He may be getting a rebate, and he is definitely getting a dealer holdback fee from the manufacturer,” explains Bank Rate Monitor.

Zero-percent financing? Check the fine print for something like ‘With approved credit,” meaning a FICO credit score of 700 or above.

We’ll pay off your old car no matter how much you owe: “Let’s say you owe $8,000 on your present car and it’s worth only $3,000. When the dealer boasts it will pay off your old car, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get $8,000 deducted for your trade: it means the dealer is just going to add the $8,000 to the cost of your new car. It gets even worse: Because the new lender is fully aware that the amount being financed exceeds the value of the new car, your loan will be treated as an unsecured loan and will carry a significantly higher interest rate.” Ouch!

For a fascinating “translation” of what those hype-filled promises really mean, check out the Bankrate article here.

Ford Verve: First design the customer, then the car

Successful marketing starts with defining your ideal customer. Who are you trying to appeal to? A product, service or sales message aimed at, say, Wall Street investment bankers (boo hiss) would obviously be very different from one targeted at teenage girls.

Ford had the same idea in mind when it was designing its latest model, the Verve. (Aside: The Verve is another example of “product reincarnation.” It’s really just a Ford Fiesta, brought back to life for a new generation.)

Ford’s Verve was custom designed especially for “Antonella,” an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties.

She is also completely imaginary. Antonella is an avatar, a fictional character that is the embodiment of Ford’s Ideal Customer, as the NY Times put it.

“Antonella was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta. A character invented by Ford designers to help them imagine cars better tailored to their intended customers, she embodies a philosophy that guides the company’s design studios these days: to design the car, first design the driver.”

Have you “designed” your ideal customer yet? It’s the perfect place to start your marketing, or to reinvent / repackage your tired product or service. Who would you like to have as a customer? Age? Sex? Income? Attitudes?

Soggy summer still spurs smiles

It’s been a very, very, VERY wet spring and summer in New England. Far more rain and less sun than usual. Depressing? Naw, we’re hardy stock. But it reminded a friend/colleague of a joke which she sent out in her newsletter today. It goes:

A curious fellow died one day and found himself waiting in the long line of judgment. As he stood there he noticed that some souls were allowed to march right through the pearly gates into Heaven. Others, though, were led over to Satan who threw them into the burning pit.

But every so often, instead of hurling a poor soul into the fire, Satan would toss a soul off to one side into a small pile. After watching Satan do this several times, the fellow’s curiosity got the best of him.

So he strolled over and asked Satan what he was doing.

“Excuse me, Mr. Prince of Darkness,” he said. “I’m waiting in line for judgment, but I couldn’t help wondering, why are you tossing those people aside instead of flinging them into the Fires of Hell with the others?”

“Ah, those,” Satan said with a groan. “They’re all from New England…
They’re still too wet to burn.”

Thanks, Shelly!

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Got a few friends who still send emails IN ALL CAPS?

Maybe they’ll get the hint after you send them the BILLY MAYS SCREAMING CAPS LOCK KEY!

Thanks, Lifehacker! (4th item)

Welcome, "Gaping Void"

Look, over to the right. No, down a little. That’s it.

Yes, campers, every day or so, a warm, fresh Gaping Void will appear in that spot in the sidebar. For those unfamiliar, Gaping Void is the business-card-size philosophical treatise/cartoon by Hugh MacLeod.

Hugh is probably best known for his wonderful treatise, “Ignore Everybody” — a bracing dip into the waters of self-expression and self-confidence. It begins:

“The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you… You don’t know if your idea is any good (until) the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is… Feelings scare us.”

That’s also why market research is so often short-sighted and futile. It misses a lot of great opportunities simply because the people they survey have never encountered an idea like yours before, and simply don’t know what to make of it.

So the moral of the story is… If your idea feels right, go for it!

When marketers act like pushy strangers

Imagine a complete stranger walking up and demanding your name, phone number or other contact info. Whether it’s on the sidewalk or at a party, that degree of pushiness, especially by a complete stranger, would be totally unwelcome. And yet marketers do it all the time.

I’m talking about those pop-up windows that ask for your email address in exchange for some information that might be worth your time and might interest you. Then again, it might not. After all, they don’t know you, or anything about you — except that somehow you landed on their website. You probably know little or nothing about them too.

Entry “pop-up sign-ups” are the most annoying. These appear almost immediately after you land on a page — before you’ve had a chance to look around and see what the site is all about. Another appears every time you click anything. If you’re anything like me, you quickly tire of the nonsense and exit the site.

Supposedly, they’re a proven way to increase sign-ups. Maybe. But I wonder how many frustrated visitors (like me) enter a phony or never-checked email address just so they’ll be left alone. If that’s the case, the quantity of sign-ups may increase, but the quality suffers.

Marketing brainstorm #316

Question: Why don’t toilet paper and paper towel manufacturers put their brand/logo on the tube INSIDE the roll? As it is now, when the roll is empty, you can’t find out what brand it was. It’s frustrating if you want to be sure to buy (or NOT buy) that brand again.

photo credit: powerbooktrance