What Can Statues and Balloons Teach You about Your Marketing?

Does your marketing cover both types?

Do you employ a wide array of marketing vehicles? Do you struggle trying to understand if you're investing in the right ones?

I have a trick I use to help put marketing initiatives into perspective. It's a simple sort of lens, but it can give you the focus you seek when looking at the big picture regarding your marketing.

Think of any marketing device as either a statue or a helium balloon. Both have their strengths, and both can be extremely effective at delivering their message. But there are distinct differences.

Statues are stationary and essentially permanent. Once you learn a statue exists, it is easy to find it again whenever you wish, and you may visit it regularly if you derive a benefit. Helium balloons are obviously impermanent. When a helium balloon is released, it rises into the air, (usually) gets noticed by a number of people, and it quickly expires, often within a few minutes or maybe a few days. You cannot always be sure what path it will take, nor know exactly how long it will be visible.

Some statues are expensive to create, and most require regular maintenance, but they provide the bedrock of your marketing strategy. Helium balloons are relatively inexpensive, but you must be dedicated to launching new ones from multiple locations on a regular basis. Balloons are the worker bees of your marketing efforts. Let them swarm your target market. In some special cases, a helium balloon can even morph into a statue.

Let's break down a collection of marketing initiatives into these two categories.

Print Ad - helium balloon
Web Site - statue
Email blast - helium balloon
Blog post - helium balloon
Blog with RSS feed - statue
Directory Listing - statue
White Paper - statue
Tweet - helium balloon
Web ad - helium balloon
Podcast - statue
LinkedIn discussion - helium balloon
TV commercial - helium balloon
Web video - statue
Live webinar - helium balloon
Webinar archive - statue

Now that you have the concept, you can run all your marketing initiatives through this categorization. Do you have a good ratio, or are you too heavily weighted to one type while neglecting the other? Do your (temporary) balloons guide people to your (permanent) statues?

The next time you are in a marketing strategy meeting, discuss your current efforts as well as possible new initiatives in terms of statues and helium balloons. You will likely make better choices going forward.

How Do You Establish an Emotional Connection with Customers?

Watch this amazing commercial and then come back for the context.

We've all seen our share of pharmaceutical commercials. People skipping through fields, happy and healthy. Regulations prevent us from getting too specific about how the drug works, but we can't use that as an excuse for making mediocre commercials that waste air time and sometimes even alienate consumers. I feel we are not connecting enough with the consumer on an emotional level. We're leaving a gigantic opportunity on the table and our brands are suffering for it.

In most drug commercials you quickly know you are watching actors playing a role in front of the camera. The actors are just too perfect. They wear stylish clothes that are clean and pressed. They look like they just came from the salon. Their houses are immaculate. They are antiquing and canoeing and cooking and dancing and gardening. They are blissfully happy thanks to a breakthrough medication. Unfortunately, there's no emotional connection to the message. Therefore, the response is weaker than it should be and the company makes up for it by running more commercial spots. It's the brute force approach. Just get the branding out there and move product.

Consumers write off these commercials as fantasy. In the real world, we deal with pain and loss and uncertainty and hopelessness when we have a medical condition. And fear. I've never seen fear used seriously and effectively in a drug commercial, have you?

The problem is, most commercials only cover the end of the story. They don't cover the embarrassment and shame a couple may go through when they are having trouble physically in the boudoir. They don't show people suffering with COPD or diabetes, and reveal in real terms what it means to their lives. Sometimes they employ humor to avoid the real emotions associated with the condition.

Companies want to gloss over the problem, get right to the solution, and pitch you on how you can be happy again. But they miss the most crucial part of the story. People have to identify with the bad stuff before they can really get on board with the good stuff. Show you can relate to them before you offer them hope.

Take a look at this commercial if you haven't yet, and see a great example of how to tell the whole story. It's not a drug commercial, but I feel it appropriately demonstrates how emotion is a powerful force in reaching people. More powerful than money. More powerful than logic. So why is honest emotion so poorly executed in almost all of our commercials? That's the billion dollar question.

Yes, the example commercial is a bit long at 3 minutes. However, infomercials are 30 minutes long, and they run day and night, raking in billions for their companies. So length is not the problem, and budget is certainly not the problem. It's the fear of exposing the dark side of the condition, and all the anxiety and sadness that comes with it. That's why all we see is manufactured "Authenticity." It's a real miss by the advertising folks.

I think there is a place for story-heavy, long format commercials in the pharmaceutical industry. There's certainly a need for more authentic, emotional spots of any length. Do you agree?

This is a fairy tale