Posted on November 3rd, 2009 — in Brands
Although it is one of the most frequent and exciting activities, shopping can as well be tiresome particularly when the goods bought have defects. The buyer also has to experience a taxing and confrontational process of gaining warranty and money-back guarantees. However, with the Buyers Advantage program, the shopper is ensured that he or she is always right.
Trilegiant Corporation has effectively released among the most innovative and consumer-friendly services that have loosen the cap on almost all daily endeavors like appliance purchases, travel decisions, credit card tracking and reporting, car purchases, and dental assistance.
The company’s Buyers Advantage offers its registered members with Return Guarantee Protection, New Price Purchase Protection, Repair Cost Protection, and Warranty Extension Protection. It grants warranty security for up to five years with any goods bought via check, cash, or credit card. Any product that costs $5,000.00 and covered by the US warranty will immediately have warranty and a 60-month extension.
Major purchases too are under the Trilegiant Corp program’s Return Guarantee Protection, especially when a buyer avails of the return and files a claim in 90 days. The extent of the guarantee is $1,000 for each membership year and $500 for each claim. Repair costs are also refunded for up to 50%.
There is another shopping protection service that has an efficient comparison shopping and guarantee against price variability and potential price cutback with the New Price Purchase Protection.
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Posted on May 12th, 2008 — in Brands
We Are All Outspent
Most brands face daunting tasks in preparing marketing communications to steal
market share. If you have unlimited budgets and are capable of out-spending the
competitive set, your job is that much easier. For the rest of us, we have to learn
how to win without the largest ad budgets and without dominating share of voice
(SOV).
There are some rules that Stealing Share has discovered in our quest to be the
authority in stealing market share. In marketing, advertising, brand development,
and the rest of one’s life, focus and clarity always lead to better results. How do
you know when you have such focus? That is the subject of this short article.
More Than The Category
First, you must make sure that your brand was built, not just for clarity and
simplicity (both are vital) but also for persuasion. If your brand symbols and brand
equity markers are clear but static, you have some serious and immediate work to
do (take our Evaluate You Brand test (www.stealingshare.com/brand_quiz.asp).
When we ask companies to tell us what their brand means, more often then not we
hear a litany of category descriptors like convenient, effective and value. Even
Nordstrom could claim those brand values in the department store category. So
could TIDE detergent and Apple Computer. In order to persuade, your brand must
have, within its definition, the core “life” beliefs that propel your customer to choose
not just products and services, but life choices as well. They need to see your
brand as an important touchstone for people who define themselves as they do.
You want them to look at your brand and see it as such a powerful self-descriptor
that to choose a competitor would be akin to emotional suicide.
What Is Your Brand’s Permission?
In addition, brand is the permission that your advertising and marketing of your
product or service is built upon. If your brand does not foster that permission, if in
its woven fibers your customer does not find an illumination of their own self-
description and the language of personal importance, your advertising and
marketing is wasting most of its budget. A great adman once told me that the
enemy of great advertising is not bad advertising, anyone can spot bad advertising.
No, he told me, the enemy of great advertising is good advertising and he was
right! The same is true for brands and the underlying permission that forms their
foundation.
Customers Have Choices
All choices in this world are attempts to self-define, even B2B choices. The brand
mix, the “recipe,” for your brand definition and resulting permissions, consists of
both left-brain and right-brain elements. For the left-brain, your brand must
include the logic and reasoning that conveys importance. It must be built upon a
foundation of believable truths. But, oddly enough, truth is most often a right-brain
perception and PERMISSION comes from a belief in a truth. As a result, your brand
recipe must include the ingredients of motivation and esthetics, and they must all
be mixed together into something that “tastes” satisfying and substantial.
If your brand is build upon such a foundation and its permissions are persuasive,
then your marketing strategy needs to be altered. The media wisdom of the day
always talks in terms of reach and frequency, and these are both important… but
they are not science. They are based in part on the experience of ad agencies and
most of that experience is founded on mediocre brand definitions and forgettable
advertising executions. The goal, if you are being outspent, is to out-reach your
competition with less frequency. This means that you need to ignite the right and
left-brain responses of more people with fewer impressions.
A properly defined brand creates that space and it defines your executions in the
same way that your eye color was defined by an allele on chromosome 19. If your
brand is differentiated from the competitive set by customer precepts the core
“life” beliefs that propel your customer to choose then the resulting marketing
and advertising, if it is true to the brand, will be by definition different and better.
Choose Your Agency
All too often we see brands choose and ad agency because of personality and
reputation. They assume that bigger is always better and that you must “get along”
to be effective. If you are going to steal market share, one rule to remember is that
it is folly to copy the market leader. This includes looking for ad agencies that
“specialize” in your category or have experience in your category. If an agency has
had previous category experience but no longer has a client in your category, then it
is imperative to ask the agency why the previous client fired them. How they answer
will tell you a lot about the agency. Were they quick to blame the client? Was there
some mix-up? Do not rest asking this question until you are completely satisfied
with the answer. It is important the client/agency relationship begin on the right
foot.
Our clients come to Stealing Share® because they want to win it is as simple as
that. We counsel them to be more dispassionate when choosing an ad agency. We warn them to listen carefully, judge objectively, and be careful not to hear what they want to hear. How much you like an agency may have nothing to do with their
ability to be effective for you. Remember, with the exception of an “Effie”, winning
“Ad” awards have nothing to do with building great brands. They are self-serving
aggrandizements judged by other ad folks. Today, the advertising world is
crammed with delightfully entertaining ads that become the fodder of conversation
for everything other than the brand they are intended to propel upward.
How To Succeed
The moral of this story is that if you want to steal market share you need to think
outside of the current box. If just changing ad agencies was the best solution, most
brands would be successful every 2.5 years (the average ad agency tenure). If just
spending more money was the solution, then we would all know the price of
success. At Stealing Share®, we believe that building a brand infused with the DNA
of the target customer is the best solution for stealing market share. A great brand
can level the playing field, making you more relevant to your target market and help
you WIN.
Tom Dougherty
CEO, Senior Strategist at Stealing Share, Inc. Tom began his strategic marketing and
branding career in Saudi Arabia working for the internationally acclaimed Saatchi &
Saatchi. His brand manager at the time referred to Tom as a “marketing genius,”
and Tom demonstrated his talents to clients such as Ariel detergent, Pampers and
many other brands throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. After his time
overseas, Tom returned to the US where he worked for brand
agencies in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. He continued to prove
himself as a unique and strategic brand builder for global companies. Tom has led
efforts for brands such as Procter & Gamble, Kimberly Clark, Fairmont Hotels,
Coldwell Banker, Homewood Suites (of Hilton), Tetley Tea, Lexus, Sovereign Bank,
and McCormick to name a few.
Tom possesses an impressive list of elite clients, but more importantly, Tom
possesses a unique knowledge of human behavior. “When we buy product, we are
buying ourselves,” he explains. You can email Tom at tomd@stealingshare.com.
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