Sounds that sell

 

Making sure that a product sounds as good as it works can set a brand apart.

“I just hate the grinding sound their instruments make,” said a teen after her recent visit to the dentist. Even if they work beautifully, machines can evoke negative emotions merely by the way they sound. It makes me wonder if the fear of going to the dentist can be alleviated simply by finding a way to muffle or substitute the harsh sounds that dental tools make.

Some machines make no or low sound. No sound isn’t always good. Electric cars or the hybrid cars that automatically switch over to electric mode are guilty of silently creeping up behind pedestrians and startling them, especially in parking garages. To compensate for their relative silence, such vehicles need brighter headlamps or fake sounds to alert unsuspecting passersby.

Sounds are a necessary and reassuring part of user-experience for some products. Just as grandma used to check on grandpa whenever he stopped snoring in the middle of the night to make sure his heart was still ticking, the complete silence of certain machines or products can make users wonder if they are actually working. We need the washing machine to hum, but only gently.

Sound, or its absence is a tool that can be used for branding in such a way that it does not annoy or scare users, unless it’s animatronics at a theme park whose sound is a feature.

It is common for realtors to play on a buyer’s sense of smell using baked cookies during open houses. Then there was the ‘For Sale By Owner’ property with the sound of piano playing on loop during showings. I do not think it was the main reason the home eventually sold, but it did create a pleasant and elegant ambience as prospective buyers walked in. The music also patched those spells of awkward silence between agents and buyers at showings. The music enhanced the brand image of his home.

We recognize the brand of electronic devices from their signature sounds when they are switched on. I suspect the idea was borrowed from the movies. Netflix and HBO (now Max) effectively use distinctive musical tones to build anticipation. Intel commissioned a composer for the tone which plays when an Intel-based computer starts up. How can one forget the iconic sound of a Nokia phone.

A starting sound is a great way for any product manufacturer to create a positive feeling about a product. Imagine your oven or vacuum cleaner playing a few musical notes when switched on. Retain the blinking lights for the hearing-impaired.

The one place where machines could avoid intimidating sounds, is in hospital rooms. Their ominous sounds certainly don’t help in healing patients. Whenever hospital machines make beeping sounds with a cadence, the sound of machines can be the sound of music. If it’s cost-effective, why not make your brand worthy of a jig?

[ Photo by Quang Tri Nguyen on Unsplash ]

Comicon as a Catalyst

 

Other than serendipity, there are few shortcuts to making a brand beloved, but there’s a catalyst.

There are too many characters in the world of comics, animation movies and anime to track, so observing the crowds outside a Comic Con (or Comicon) is usually a guessing game for me. My ignorance notwithstanding, the strong sense of belonging that a Comicon fosters among its attendees leaves me in wonderment. After all, it seems like a lot of effort (and pocket money) for teens to buy or make costumes, travel, stay at a hotel and spend two days in character.

The fervor at Comicon ought to be the envy of, and inspiration for, every business organization that aspires for longevity and timelessness of its brand.

I do not know if the pair in Ketchup and Mustard costume was paid by Heinz; perhaps Colonel Sanders wasn’t an attendee but just a walking ad for KFC. However, both were extremely popular.

To see attendees dressed up as their favorite comic characters or to see them don the persona of their favorite anime characters is fascinating from an industry perspective. The conference naturally begins to feel like a carnival even before one walks in. For the conference organizers, keeping attendees entertained is simply not an issue. Attendees aren’t camera shy. They instantly get into character and pose for other attendees to take pictures. The playfulness in every human interaction is infectious. The various vendors who have set up their exhibition booths also seem to have fun while also doing business. Nobody seems to notice or wince at the prices of the tee shirts and stickers, but I digress.

Comicon held a powerful lesson for marketers.

There is immense value in personification of a brand. A personified brand finds it easier to become a part of pop culture. There is value in making a brand’s perception as a playful and friendly one among the next generation. It is in their future (as consumers, employees, influencers, shareholders, or suppliers) that a brand must find a place.

Personification of a brand is easier when manifested as a mascot.

In any college football game, there is the official mascot that engages in goofy acts to get a cheer from the crowd. It gives the college’s brand a distorted but relatable human form. Commonly seen in tire industry commercials and in fast food brands, a mascot helps memory recall.

The holy grail for any brand is to be entrenched in the collective memories of families for generations. Seeing personified commercial brands parading around at Comicon is a clear signal that a brand has become a household name. That lowers various costs such as the cost of customer acquisition and the cost of hiring a workforce that embodies the brand’s values.

A mascot mingling at every Comicon might be the catalyst that a brand needs to start turning iconic. More importantly, mascots can be birthed by any company irrespective of its industry.

The Cinderella Customer

Resorts that use the fear of missing out to sell memberships must fear missing out on digital age customers.

The resort was a marvelous machine that hummed day and night. I had recently watched a documentary called ‘Secrets of the Mega Resort’, so I simply had to slip away from a family event to understand the sales and marketing at such a resort.

The booking desk for the ‘presentation’ promised me a 90-minute process. I had my timer ready, but they told me I had to go through two registration desks before I could start the timer. I tried to nudge them along, but they insisted on printing out the forms. It turns out that the back of the printouts become part of the working papers they use to explain complex pricing by masterfully writing numbers upside down when seated across. After being passed on from desk to desk, the fourth person I met was the 'tour guide'. She wanted to drag out the process by including a lunch hour, but my timer was on.

I took the liberty of rearranging their sales workflow.

I asked to first see their best room, then talk to a customer, followed by pricing. I was driven in their ‘Cinderella carriage’ (a better golf cart) to a faraway section of the resort to see a luxury suite with a stunning view of the ocean, chef included. On my way out, I stopped a passerby who turned out to be a ‘member’ who loved his scheduled vacations and in there was a compelling testimonial from one workaholic to another. For pricing it was another building. We crossed a massive hall buzzing with salespeople pitching prospective customers. I was soon handed off to another impressive salesperson who didn’t care for my compliments about their sales machinery but was focused on assessing my purchasing power, inclination and impulse to buy. I was upfront that I do not make impulse purchases. Then another handler appeared and advised me curtly that I will never be returning and won’t get their special deal again. He pointed me to the final handler symbolically positioned near the toilet for my dismissal.

Resorts can do better with their marketing:

• Wallpapers in other rooms showing the best views from member suites to encourage inbound inquiries.
• Account managers, not handlers. Train all staffers to subtly weave sales pitches within conversations.
• Use the time with a prospect to open up a lead pipeline to their contacts.
• Compress the tour and complement with direct email marketing.
• Make prospects your brand evangelists even if they don’t buy immediately.
• Celebrate your members, publicly, with their permission.
• Build a community of your members.
• Bundle products like event services, insurance, air-tickets and ride-share.
• Straightforward pricing like Costco to prevent buyers’ remorse.

My time was up. I was their Cinderella customer. My carriage disappeared as my timer chimed. I was left to find my way back from the far end of the resort but left wiser.

Defining what (and how) we do.

It is hard for me not to think about or not to talk about virtual tradeshows. I actually spent some time this afternoon to see how Oprah Winfrey did her virtual classroom with a combination of compelling content (by Ekhart Tolle), existing technologies and a global audience that cared to stay up even late in the night to video-skype into the live event. It is really a nice feeling to know that the phrase 'virtual event' has now become so mainstream and is touching so many lives. So here are some Sunday thoughts on iTradeFair.com's virtual tradeshows.

At iTradeFair.com we have worked hard at defining an effective virtual tradeshow. In 1999, we made sales calls which soon turned into educational sessions because not many had heard of virtual tradeshows. We had to define what we meant by virtual tradeshows. We ran demos after demos, explained benefits, answered questions, and found several early adopters. My founding partner, Professor Ramesh Sharda is a visionary. Anticipating the need to shorten the learning curve, he incorporated into the design the metaphor of a real-world trade show. We published some white papers that have been downloaded by thousands of marketing and trade show professionals. We even had an article published in the Marketing News, which I later learned is considered a noteworthy publication among marketers and academicians.

Our early challenges in messaging came not just from the fact that often the word 'virtual' creates images of 'virtual reality' in the minds of listeners, but also from a trade show organizer's web-master creating a listing of exhibitors and calling it a virtual tradeshow. No definition was wrong. Lately even web-conferences, or webinars are labeled as virtual tradeshows if they offer some downloadable content from sponsors. I have even heard of one that had a virtual break-room complete with virtual toilets on which you could click to hear them flushing (could that be the sound of money going down the drain, or is it a sign that my sense of humor is overdue for a tune-up?)

We have come a long way in terms of creating awareness about what virtual tradeshows can do. The market has changed as well. Inquiries that keep coming our way lately come with preconceived notions of what their virtual tradeshow should look like. They sometimes want a panoramic view of the exhibit hall, even if it is not the best for navigation, even if it imposes upon them the limits of a 2-D environment, even if it is not the best for large trade shows. They sometimes want the noise of a real-world trade show floor even though online attendees sitting in offices don't like to disturb their neighboring cubicles.

However, I don't believe we have found the precise term for defining what iTradeFair.com's virtual tradeshows do for its customers. There seems to be no phrase for the sheer simplicity and utility of what we offer as a virtual trade show or virtual event. Virtual tradeshows now come with simulated 3-D visuals, which I think undermine the intelligence of users, because at the end of the day they simply provide a combination of instant communication capabilities camouflaged in a wrap. They mean nothing to the user of a virtual trade show beyond the initial sense of awe. In my experience, if a virtual tradeshow does not pave the way for meaningful human interaction among properly qualified people then it is a waste of precious time, and often of money. If you get a call from a telemarketer for a cheaper long-distance telephone service at 8 p.m., would it make a difference that you took the call on your grandfather's telephone or your grandson's iPhone? It is wasted time trying to pay attention to an irrelevant message regardless of the medium through which the message was delivered. In the world of business virtual fairs - be it for procurement, marketing or recruitment, for the business professionals, for the students and for other job seekers who take the time and the effort to show up online the decision-making power of the online participant or the virtual exhibitor is all that matters. Finding them online at the promised hour with the click of the mouse is the only thing that matters.

That brings us back to the unanswered question - what do we call our brand of virtual tradeshows and fairs? Lately when we have been receiving calls from businesses, they often ask us, "when is your next itradefair?". We also hear positive feedback from business users who refer to certain clients' (name withheld due to the inevitable corporate non-disclosures that bind us) virtual tradeshows as, the XYZ itradefair. Perhaps therein lies the answer. Maybe we should just call it an itradefair. Would that dilute our brand over time? I do not know. If it helps separate us from the crowd and identifies us as a sensible company that delivers effective yet simple and sensible online trade fairs or other specialty fairs such as job fairs etc., then it may not be so bad after all.

Then again figuratively and philosophically speaking, rather than try to define our service or product, perhaps we should let what (and how) we do define us.