That’s right. Anything and everything that makes people aware of your business, no matter how ridiculous or annoying, WILL get you clients and get you sales.

You know that chicken suit you’ve always wanted to wear, well you go put it on and grab a piece of cardboard and scribble out your business name and phone number and rush right out to the nearest strip mall, and you DANCE, dance with wild abandon. Get some flashing lights while you’re at it. It don’t matter if you’re a lawyer, a writer or an internet startup because that sh*t is gonna work!

I should point out though, that just because it works doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.

As with all marketing, you get exactly who you target, and though you may not know it, your Chicken-Suit Strategy IS targeting someone. But who? Who would be attracted to you just because you stole a moment of their attention? Especially these days when it takes just a few minutes to find relevant and credible information on just about anything we could imagine spending money on.

As I see it, Chicken-Suiting is highly effective at targeting the lazy and the desperate. And it’s also great at filtering out all the rest.

So if you love working with the lazy and/or desperate, then by all means, grab attention by any means necessary. Send out mail pieces just to remind people you’re there. Email them canned newsletters. Put your face on shopping carts. Think outside the box — spray paint your URL on the sidewalk.

You may end up spending far more (renting costumes or paying legal fees) than you’d ever get from your clients, but by-golly those lazy-desperate clients will stumble to you like zombies to brains (Thanks goes to copywriter Chris Haddad for the witty line.

So why does chicken-suiting appeal to the lazy-desperate? Because, due to their disposition, you are relevant. You are right there. Their search is over.

The fundamental principle here is this: Relevance attracts.

So if the lazy-desperate types are not your cup of tea, you might want to consider developing ways to be relevant to the kind of clients you do want. Start by defining the kind of people you want, then ask yourself what they would want from someone like you. Next, put it all together to give them the relevance they crave. The more relevant you become, the more they will want to hear from you, and the more they will spread the word about you.

Today I was talking with a client about the misguided marketing of a local lawyer who tries to get clients by  dressing up in a fedora and trench coat, as if he’s some kind of special agent attorney.
In response my client suggested that maybe the strategy was effective because at least I remembered it.

This, my friends, is wisdom straight out of the Old Marketing Play Book.  For many generations it was a fundamental truth that good marketing had to be memorable.  But now, that wisdom is almost entirely useless.

Memorability was important in an age when useful information was hard to come by.  It was a time when people actually made their spending decisions based on factors such as, “Hey, at least I recognize that one.” Or “That one’s ad looks like they spent the most on it.” Or “Damn it. I have to call SOMEONE and if their ad is on the side of a buss they can’t suck that much.”

Those days are gone.  Of course, memorability counts for something but by itself it counts for nothing.  No longer is it possible to succeed by grabbing attention and forcing your brand into millions of minds.  That kind of strategy will just make people acutely aware of how much they need to spend a couple of extra seconds to find your competition.

I spend a lot of time telling people how to build credibility but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how to destroy credibility. Fortunately, the National Association of Realtors created these ads (click on “Watch the TV Commercials”) to illustrate a quick and effective method for doing just that.

Whether deserved or not, Realtors often suffer from the perception that they are in the profession just to make a quick buck, that they have little actual expertise, and that even in the worst market they can be counted on to tell you, “Now is the perfect time to buy.”

So as the housing market shutters with uncertainty and teeters on the brink of collapse, what prudent advice does the nation’s largest body of real estate agents have for us?

“Now is the time to buy!” Says the NAR.

I love that one. Especially with the Commerce Department saying this could be the worst downturn we’ve seen in more than twenty years.

In short, rather than taking this opportunity to prove that Realtors can be a source for valuable information and insights, they chose to emphasize the self-serving nature of their trade.

Looks like they’re operating on the Dumb-Consumer Theory of Marketing. But being that almost nobody is THAT dumb, the NAR ad will simultaneously sway nobody while eroding what little credibility they had left.

The lesson in all of this? Credibility is not something you can fabricate out of nothing. It is something given by the consumer only after you’ve actually earned it.

If your marketing strategy is inspired by observations of Madison Avenue, I can pretty much guarantee you’re making this mistake. Most Mad Ave strategies seem to be based on the above simple (and idiotic) equation. And because trust in advertising is at historic lows, we’re seeing a comparable increase in ridiculously inflated claims.

My favorite example ever of such Claim Inflation is the tagline “Reveal the Goddess Within” for Venus leg-shaving razors. Gag me with a spoon. What. Is the razor so sharp that it’s going to scrape away your sins?

The huge, HUGE problem with this approach is, 1) it’s annoying and 2) it doesn’t work. Hell, you could say that you are “the worlds best, ultimate streamlined orgasmic world-rocking life solution,” and it wouldn’t even cause a twitch on the credibility meter.

Why?

Because credibility cannot be asserted. It can only be proven.

How do you prove credibility? There are two ways. Credibility can be proven either by one’s own direct experience or through the experience of someone they trust.

Think about it. If some blogger you trust said simply, “they are really good,” that would cause a huge swing in the credibility meter. Right?

This is one of the reasons word-of-mouth is so incredibly powerful. It inherently comes with a higher credibility value than perhaps any other form of marketing communication.

In the consumer’s mind, credibility is one of the truly essential elements. No Credibility = No Sale. Therefore, if your marketing is not in some incremental way proving credibility, it is not worth doing.

Ever since marketing great Jack Trout wrote Differentiate or Die, businesses have fallen over themselves to adopt the religion of differentiation. They want to look different, sound different, act different, and generally push the creative envelope to chart new territories in search of difference.

The problem is, difference, in and of itself, counts for nothing.

“Yeah right,” you might be saying. “Nobody ever won the marketing game by being the same.”

How very true, but here’s where the thinking goes all screwey. Most people seem to think of it this way:

“Better things are different, therefore different things are better.”

As you can see, that’s just plain loopy.

It’s true that without differentiation you will die, but you’ll also die if you just differentiate willy-nilly without strategy and purpose.

The New York Times recently had a great article on the role of WOM in political campaigns.

Here’s the article: Loose Lips Win Elections
And here are some highlights:

“Public trust in all kinds of communication is eroding, with a notable exception: word of mouth. A Roper poll found the number of people who said they get good ideas and information from television ads declined from 1977 to 2003, while the number who said the same about word of mouth increased by 25 percentage points.”

“Whether by chance or design…citizen advocates created the explosive growth in support for Mike Huckabee and sustained John Edwards, even as both were vastly outspent by their opponents.“

And here’s my commentary:

By now it’s abundantly clear that word of mouth is displacing and replacing the old one-sided mass communication model. What’s most fascinating though, is why? Why word of mouth and why now?

As I see it, it all comes down to Relevance. Mass Communication is really good at simply putting a message in front of the masses. But it’s terrible at delivering relevant messages. On the other hand, people, real live people, are excellent at collecting and distributing relevant messages. And today, with email and all this Web 2.0 online social networking, relevant messages can spread farther and faster than any paid message. As the barriers to relevance crumble like the Berlin Wall, who is going to bother to give mass media a second thought?

For the 2008 presidential election, the relevance issue will doubtlessly be decisive. The candidates who spend their resources monologuing through paid media and PR events will render themselves as obsolete as the Yellow Pages. But the candidates who manages to engage in real dialog with real communities will find themselves thrust to the front.

Some of you may recall a post I wrote a while back on this very same subject. Well, here’s more evidence that the marketer’s dream of mind control is alive and twitching.

Introducing the mutant love-child of Neuroscience and Marketing: Neuromarketing. (bet you didn’t see that coming).

Evidently the whole Creativity thing didn’t pan out as a way to undermine free will so it’s on to neurons we go. These pioneers believe they can find the secret levers that bypass your conscious mind to make you buy just by scanning your brain while you look at ads.

A brilliant yet dastardly plan indeed, and it would have worked if it wasn’t entirely detached from reality.

First of all, brains don’t work that way. There’s no “Buy” center in the brain. Granted, certain areas do light up when you like something, but those exact same centers light up when you see something new or interesting. And, let’s say you’re testing your latest cheap beer ad comprised of, as always, of beer bottles and beer babes. The subject’s “arousal” will have nothing to do with your lame beer and everything to do with their heterosexuality.

Anyways, technical idiocy aside, the biggest failure of Neuromarketing is its premise. Even if it did work it would be nothing more than an elaborate strategy to trick people into buying a product. And in a time when word of mouth about good products spreads like a California wildfire, your product would have to be shamefully inadequate to need it. So inadequate, in fact, that tricking people into trying it would ensure a quick death through negative word of mouth.