Point of View

Smart customers require the Smart Sell.

The Smart Sell begins with the belief that the people you need to reach are intelligent, discerning and skeptical. This is true whether they are consumers or corporate chieftains, customers or employees, investors or Wall Street analysts.

More people fit this description than most marketers would like to admit. They are the people who choose whether or not to buy your product, your service or your business proposition. They want to make smart decisions. That's why they need to be sold smart.

The Smart Sell matters most in a “considered purchase” decision, where the dollars are big, the competition strong, and the customer sets the buying criteria and timetable. The selling process involves cultivating relationships, being consultative, answering questions and gaining trust. The Smart Sell is about aligning messages and media to support that process.

Creativity + Relevance. Can't have one without the other.

The crux of the Smart Sell is “creative relevance and relevant creativity.” The relevance factor means getting to the heart of the question: why should anyone care about what you have to sell or say? The creative factor means delivering the answer in truly engaging, original and compelling ways. In ways that provoke thought, stir emotions and drive action.

Buying decisions, whether business or personal, are driven by a mix of emotion and reason. The Smart Sell is about striking the right balance and appealing to people's emotional intelligence.

Creativity isn't just about what you say and show, however. It's also about how, when and where the message is delivered. The Smart Sell means finding ways to reach prospects at every point in their decision cycle, with mutually reinforcing messages and images, in the media of their choosing.

That, to use an overused and somewhat suspect term, is the essence of integration.

Integration doesn't happen on an org chart.

Why does a concept so compelling and powerful as integration make many marketers' eyes glaze over? Perhaps because no other marketing idea has been so overpromised and underdelivered.

The typical integration model requires a client to orchestrate various specialized firms, each of whom is vying for a bigger share of the client’s budget. Thus, the ad agency competes with the PR firm, or the corporate identity designer with the direct marketing firm, to be the client's lead advisor.

Some holding companies thought the integration opportunity lay in buying up specialized firms and bringing them under one corporate umbrella. But because each unit has to look out for its own bottom line, it's still near impossible to generate cooperation at a level that really adds value for the marketer.

At best, the client gets “consistency” — everything looks alike. But the goal of integration is more than consistency. It’s everything working together to strengthen the bond between marketer and customer, and accelerate the sale.

For integration to succeed, it can't take place on an org chart. It has to happen upstairs, in the minds of the strategists and creative thinkers working on your business. They have to be able to see across the whole spectrum of communications media and understand how they work together. It takes long experience — and a mind that's open to possibilities it has not yet experienced.