The Tendo View

In this humble marketer’s opinion, overshadowing the “there’s an app for that” TV commercials, the white-corded iPod billboards, the ”I’m a Mac” print ads, and even the seminal 1984 George Orwell-inspired Super Bowl launch commercial is Apple’s biggest marketing triumph, which cost $0.00 to produce and consists of just four words:

“Sent from my iPhone”

Cribbed from the “Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device” message that was presumably designed to alert the recipient that typos and brevity were to be overlooked and forgiven, the “Sent from my iPhone” message doesn’t even need to identify the handheld by category—all it needs to do is name it.

And this brilliant bit of brand messaging, seen by (I assume) millions of eyeballs each day (especially when considering the “posted wirelessly” counterpart for message boards and blog posts) goes to an important lesson in marketing:

Go for the low-hanging fruit. Sometimes the most direct way to plant a branded message is the most effective and affordable.

I once worked in-house for a packaged goods company and we would spend countless hours poring over CPMs, CPCs, and pass-along rates to try to get a bead on getting our message in front of the right audience at the right time for the least amount of money.

Despite shipping tens of thousands of products globally each year, we had overlooked the power of a simple packaging insert that says to the excited new buyer, “Hey, we appreciate your purchase. Did you know we also offer X, Y and Z?”–with a corresponding coupon to sweeten the deal towards a subsequent purchase.

There wasn’t much that could touch our bang for the buck. We were seeding the message with a welcoming audience (someone who had already pledged some allegiance to the brand with an initial purchase), the timing was perfect (the message landed while the customer was still excited about the new acquisition), and we were talking to the right kind of buyer (someone already predisposed to liking what we had to offer). The coupon redemption was proof positive that the message either did, or didn’t, influence subsequent purchasing behavior.

Compare this to spending money on a TV commercial, a print ad, an online banner, or a glossy direct-mail piece and it becomes obvious that from a prospecting perspective, the cheap, old-school packaging insert was untouchable.

Another great example is the ”factory filled with Mobile One” message that’s printed on the oil filler caps of high-end performance cars like Porsches and Mitsubishi’s stonkingly fast Lancer Evo.

No doubt Mobile Oil pays for this placement in the form of free or subsidized oil to the manufacturer, licensing rights, or some combination thereof, but there is little doubt that in terms of placing a message in the right place, at the right time, to the right audience, a tiny branded message with a logo (generally the only one in the entire engine compartment) is the best bang for the buck in terms of influencing future purchasing behavior.

So when the sea of metrics and spreadsheets becomes a blur, remember to take a step back and think about this question for a moment: Is there something obvious you could be doing that you aren’t already doing to connect with your customers?