RE: WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE ISERIES

There is a thing called co-op advertising.  Most of  those appliance and TV
ads are created by the manufacturers but the ads are paid for by the local
dealers.  The local dealers know where to spend their ad dollars for the
biggest value.  Also the local dealers get much better ad rates than the
national companies. Discounting can run as high as 85% for local merchants
in some markets. Most manufacturers agree to share the costs of the
advertising, and will often times pay as much as 1/2 of the national rate to
a local dealer.  (yes, thats right, the local dealer can make money on his
advertising budget, but remember, the national company is getting a heck of
a deal, too.)  

The requirement of course is that the local Business Partner has to place
the ads.  My experience in this regard is from a few years ago, but this is
what we did and the results flabbergasted us.  We were selling construction
machinery in competition with Caterpillar.  Construction machinery is not a
normal consumer item.  Our studies had shown us that our buying influences
did not read.  They did not read anything, not even a newspaper.  We
discovered this is typical of all decision makers, not just construction
folks. You can argue all you want but that was the fact then and I suspect
it is still valid.

Anyway, we talked one of our vendor-manufacturers into helping us with a TV
ad and we placed it with a TV station on the margin of our trade territory
as a spot on the early and late evening news.  The sales people in that
territory were run ragged but loved every minute of it.  They also loved
their paychecks.

The statistics were rewarding but in some curious stroke of irony our vendor
wouldn't read the results.  The experinment was dropped.  The vendor has
since failed. 
 
 
---------------------------------------------------------
Booth Martin   http://www.MartinVT.com
Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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-------Original Message-------
 
From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Date: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 08:23:21
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE ISERIES
 
There are at least two major target audiences. One is the current members of
IT, CIOs, and the like. The second one are the future members of those
groups.
So for the second group of people, TNT and USA make sense. Hey, even during
Sat
morning cartoons makes sense. Also lets hope that those people in the first
group are monitoring what their children are watching at least once in a
while.
 
 
Lets not forget about the child of the IBM exec that got asked where all the
iSeries 'stuff' was!
And it is not like we are asking IBM to spend all kinds of money on flashy
commercials. Just keep them simple and direct and then run them on every
channel as much as possible. ;-)
 
-- Scott J
 
>
> It seems to me that if IBM were to advertise the iSeries on TV, TNT,
> USA, etc. would not be the place to do it. Start with CNN, MSNBC, and
> the new channels, and concentrate on the financial reporting segments.
> Guage reaction from that and then widen the breadth if needed.
>
> If the target audience is made up of IT management, CIOs and the like,
> market it where they are most likely to be spending their time.