Speaking Your Customers Language

According to recent figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics almost 1 in 4 (24%) Australians were born overseas and of those born in Australia some 26% had at least one parent born overseas. Are you passing up the opportunity to market to this large section of the population?

There is little doubt that you will pick up many of these potential customers in your mainstream communications but Reach and Frequency aside, are you speaking to them with a cultural relevance that gets you noticed?

Products and People

Before you even consider promoting to this audience, make sure that your products are suited to them. I know of a Telecommunications carrier that heavily promoted its voicemail service to the Chinese community without first considering that the voice prompts for this service were in English only. Needless to say, take up wasn’t great

Likewise, is your company set up to provide customer service for non-English speakers? A bilingual customer service representative in your call centre is necessary if you are to have a telephone call to action on your ad, for example.

Lost In Translation

Like any segment, you need to understand the audience before you market to them. Simply translating your mainstream ads at best, may not get your message across and at worst, may not tell your customers what you really intended.

Some classic examples of this include Coca-Cola’s attempt to translate their then tagline “Coke adds life” for the Chinese market. The result “Coke will bring your ancestors back from the dead” proved something of an over promise.

Similarly, General Motors ran into problems launching their GM Nova into South America suggesting to the Spanish speaking audience that this was a car that won’t go (“no va” – literally in Spanish means “will not”).

Whilst not perfect, the best way to ensure that you are getting your message across is to have a different translator “back translate” your text into English. The wording is unlikely to exactly match the original English text but should give you a fair indication if your message is getting across.

Try to avoid puns or clever word-plays. They rarely translate so the joke is inevitably lost.

More than words

To effectively target a Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) audience, it is best to understand as much about this community, their experiences and background as you can.

Are there any specific demographic features that are relevant? For example Greek and Italian immigration to Australia was largely post Second World War so native speakers are likely to be elderly.

Are there any relevant cultural or religious events? Chinese New Year is a time of gifting sweets. Diwali may be an opportunity to sell candles to the Indian community. Festivals may also provide an opportune season for promoting long distance calling or phone cards.

Are there any superstitions to avoid? To the Japanese chopsticks pointing upright in a bowl of rice is symbolic of death (it is part of the funeral ritual) – images such as this should be avoided.

The Media Is The Message – Except When It’s Not

There are around a dozen Arabic language newspapers in Australia but don’t assume that they are all speaking to the same audience. A culturally relevant ad related to the Islamic festival Eid al-Fitr (the end of the month of Ramadan) whilst relevant to Gulf state Arabs, would not talk appropriately to Lebanese Christians.

Traditional language media (generally press and radio) are not the only ways to target these communities. Be creative – why not in language outdoor in areas with large NESB communities? Direct marketing? Sponsorship of community events?

Australia is a multi-cultural country and for many companies this may provide great opportunities to find relevant new markets. It takes a little extra effort but good Marketing doesn’t?

Leverage Every Touch Point

When business conditions become harder, Marketing budgets are often one of the first operating expense line items to feel the discomfort of the Finance department’s knife. Suddenly we are required to achieve more with less resulting in much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

Why is it that so many Marketers wait until this pressure is applied before trying to identify opportunities that were sitting right in front of them?


Where to Start?

Whilst the idea of an audit may send shivers down the spine of your colleagues in Finance, a simple audit identifying every touch point that your organisation has with its customers can provide a treasure trove of inexpensive and even no-cost marketing opportunities.

Every contact with a customer (trade or end consumer) is a brand experience at the very least and often provides an opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell. Even a customer complaint, handled in the right way, can create an advocate for your brand.

Below are just a few typical customer touch points and some thought starters on how you can leverage them. This list is by no means exhaustive and not all will apply to every type of organisation but hopefully you’ll find one or two gems here that will help you meet both KPI and CFO objectives.

Invoices, Statements, Order Confirmations, etc

How many non-marketing mail pieces does your organisation send each month? Postage isn’t likely increase with the inclusion of a small piece of marketing material so why not include a flyer promoting your other products or services?

The people that you are sending these communications to are your customers so you probably have enough information to be able to segment these mailing to tailor your message to maximise returns. Do it right and you may be surprised how often customers thank you for bringing this useful information to their attention.

What works best – a flyer, a letter, a post-it note, a catalogue? Experiment as you would with any other DM.


Emails

How many emails does your company send every day? Why not introduce a standard auto-signature inviting the recipient to trial a new product, experience a new part of your website, take advantage of a seasonal sale, etc?

Again, test different messages and presentation of these messages to see what is most effective and make sure to refresh the message regularly so they don’t become “visually stale” and invisible.

Customer Service / Retail Assistants

How many times have you heard the words “Would you like fries with that?”? How often did you respond in the affirmative? How many incremental sales have McDonalds made simply for training their staff to ask this question?

What are the complementary products in your organisation? Are your sales / customer service teams trained to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities? How often do they ask this sort of question and are they given any incentive to do so? (A couple of movie tickets or the like can often go a long way and never underestimate the power of a “Certificate of Appreciation”).

Whilst on the subject of customer facing staff, how empowered are your staff to resolve customer issues and complaints? When they escalate a query, how quickly do they get a response (if at all)? In any commercial organisation, it is not the boss that pays the wages, it is the customer and they should be treated as such. Even if you can’t give the answer that they want, just the fact that a real person gives them an answer can often be the difference between keeping and losing a customer (not to mention the flow on Word of Mouth effect).


Your Customers

When was the last time that you asked a customer to recommend your products? We all tend to know people with similar needs and interests as ourselves and if your customers are happy with what you provide for them, it stands to reason that their friends might be too.

My mortgage broker periodically asks me if I know anyone who is looking to refinance and, as he has always looked after me, I’m more than happy to. Moreover, on each occasion he has sent me a small gift to thank me for the referral. It is quite unexpected and quite unnecessary; however, we all like to be appreciated so it certainly has the effect of making me feel more positive about his brand. . . and perhaps even more inclined to recommend him again.


In summary, every interaction that your company has with its customers is an opportunity to improve your brand relationship and potentially up-sell or cross-sell you products or services. Identifying these “channels” and then experimenting with different ways of leveraging them can provide very cost effective ways to drive your business . . . and keep your CFO happy!

1. Marshall McLuhan Was Right – Leverage The Medium

In the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase - “The medium is the message” suggesting that the form of the media itself can influence the meaning of the content carried by it. When marketers consciously leverage this they can create powerful communications that cut through the clutter.

And clutter there is with consumers exposed to thousands of marketing messages each day they have become very adept and filtering them out. Even before the remote control enabled us to mute ads or flick channels with ease, television ad breaks provided a convenient time to go to the bathroom or grab a cuppa. The introduction of technologies such as TiVo will make ads even easier to avoid.

Of course, it its not just TV ads that are being screened and consumers have become so immune to marketing communications that they can filter out “irrelevant” messages without the support of technology.

Product Placement

In recent years there has been much growth in (and discussion of) the concept of “product placement” whereby a company pays to have its product appear “naturally” as part of a film, television show and the like. Whilst this isn’t a new concept – early radio shows were called “Soap Operas” as they were indeed underwritten by manufacturers of soap – these days it seems that there is hardly a major blockbuster film that doesn’t have at least one such deal associated.

Putting aside the ethical issues of blurring advertising with content (is it deceitful or reasonably expected by consumers?) this kind of promotion can suffer from either being too blatant – and therefore unbelievable – or so subtle that the consumer doesn’t get the message. Did you notice all the Sony products in the 2006 remake of Casino Royale? If you did, does the fact that a fictional character uses Sony make you more inclined to buy their products?

The other major issue with product placement is that it has limited application for brands that are not global or with mass appeal.

Topical Cut-Through

By extending the definition of “medium” to include context, savvy marketers are able to leverage a short term event, feeling or mood prevalent in a particular community to achieve topical cut through.

The most obvious and simple examples of this are the retailer who places a sign promoting “Cold Drinks” on a sweltering hot day or the umbrella vendors that appear on the pavements of many large cities at the first sign of rain. A hot thirsty consumer or harried office worker who didn’t see the weather forecast will see (and likely respond) to these promotions as they are immediately relevant to their current context.

Quick thinking in response to a news item or event that resonates with your audience can provide great tactical opportunities.

I recall an ad for a travel company that specialised in tours to Australia that appeared in UK newspapers the day after it was announced that Sydney had won the bid for the 2000 Olympics. It showed a line drawing of an Olympic cauldron (that was shaped a little like a Weber Bar-B-Q) with the line “Come on over, we’re having a Barbie”).

Another example was an ad for a boutique beer called Redback that ran just after the coup that attempted to overthrow then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The ads showed an image of Gorbachev (with his prominent birthmark replaced by the beer company’s trademark splash of red paint logo) and the line “It’s good to have a Red back”.
Whilst the longevity of such tactical ads is, by their very nature, short. If they can create a resonance with the audience they will be talked about creating a larger reach than the media that carries them.

Right Time, Right Place

Waiting for the right weather condition or a suitable world event, whilst potentially tactically effective, clearly cannot form the basis of a sustained communications strategy. Nevertheless, by thinking about where and when a consumer will receive your message, smart marketers can avoid the consumers’ filters.

Ironically, this is achieved by taking a contrarian view to the traditional advertising model. That is, don’t disrupt the consumer but rather, integrate your message to the context in which they are receiving it. Unlike product placement, this approach is transparent as to the fact that you are delivering a marketing message (so shouldn’t be too subtle) and enables you to deliver a specific on strategy message. Execute it well and in an entertaining fashion and the audience will not only choose not to filter your message, they may well acknowledge the cleverness and – in the case of really clever campaigns – actually actively seek out other executions.

A good example of this was a Foxtel campaign not long after pay-TV launched in Australia. The proposition was “more choice”. Foxtel placed billboards at suburban train stations within a certain radius of the city (eg Turramurra) with the headline “More stations than from Turramurra to Central”. The concept only worked because of the location of the media and the local reference made it contextually relevant to railway commuters from Turramurra.

Another more recent and sustained campaign that does this well is the brand campaign for The Australian Financial Review. [Author’s declaration: I have been directly involved in the development and evolution of this campaign for some years].

This long running campaign is focussed around the brand essence of “Success”. The Financial Review headlines have included “Business Upgrade” and “Arrive Ahead of Schedule” in airport concourses; “Going Up?” and “Make Sure The Doors Open For You” in elevators; “Stimulate Your Career” and “Morning Wake Up Call” on coffee cups to name a few. In each case the ad does not clash with but rather complements the environment providing an little bit of entertainment in a relevant context and in so doing reinforces the consistent brand message.

In summary, if marketers treat the media that they use as more than simply a vehicle for message delivery but as an integral part of the message the potential for cut through and relevance is increased. Consider other environmental factors and you may discover even more opportunities for meaningful engagement.

Just make sure that the “clever” use of context enhances rather than detracts from your core message. There’s no point getting cut-through of a message that isn’t on strategy and isn’t immediately associated with your brand.

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