Archive for November, 2010
Study Reinforces Importance of "People Behind the Product"
Posted by: | CommentsCompanies that invest in people development activities to drive their customer service, including sales training and employee recognition and rewards, may perform better than firms who focus solely on brand development, marketing and advertising. A new study by the Forum for People Performance Management and Management suggests this.
The study predicts a return to more direct customer contact and less reliance on mass media advertising.
According to the Northwestern University study, brands will always remain important. Nonetheless, as technology enables greater addressability of communications and interactivity becomes mainstreamed, we may experience a return to a pre-modern business world where personal relationships matter more than brand names.
While personal relationships are more common to service businesses including health care, financial services and education than mass market retailing, for example, the study showed a dramtic link between sales representative performance and retention and new business.
A series of surverys conducted for the study showed that customers consistently rated the sales representative higher than the company itself. The survey concluded that “the person is more important than the brand.”
Cemetery ad stokes controversy
Posted by: | CommentsWhen my client first showed me the copy for an ad addressing the fact that Jews could consider Cremation as an alternative to tradition burial, I was both surprised and confused. After all, to my knowledge, cremation was not permitted by Jewish law. But, after seeing my reaction , my client, David Gordon, Executive Director of Roosevelt Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery in Trevose, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, went on to explain that the ad was not an endorsement, but a source of information. 
The headline, “Did You Know..Jewish People are Being Cremated?” did indeed stir up quite an adverse reaction from Rabbis and other readers of the Jewish Exponent. After making a slight revision to the final paragraph which was a quote–”ashes should be interred in a Jewish Cemetery”, it was our intention to run the ad again. My sales rep called to tell me that he strongly advised that we not run the ad again because of the controversy it had engendered in the community. Honestly, this is the first time in my over 35 year career in advertising, that anyone ever suggested that we not run an ad due to it’s controversial nature.
A week after the ad ran, there were editorials signed by a group of local Rabbis in addition to a letter from the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Two weeks later the Exponent ran a front page story along with a letter written by David Gordon explaining in thoughtful and humble terms that the ad was never meant to be hurtful or stir up horrible memories of Nazi brutality.
Thus ended a controversy which will remain as an exclamation point in the experience of Kaufman Advertising. Print Advertising, after all, remains a very powerful medium.
