Kevin Allen spent two decades on the front lines of business development at the top of advertising giants McCann-WorldGroup, the Interpublic Group and Lowe Worldwide and is recognized as one of the advertising industry’s most accomplished growth professionals. I found it fun re-living some of the older terms
Related Podcast and Transcription: Hidden Agenda
Joe: It was interesting to me, because today we talk about all this inbound marketing and how social media’s changed everything, and the word “pitch” is not a good word anymore to most of us. It’s that old, mad man type thinking… Pitch is a bad thing to come out with, but you use it throughout this book. Is that going against modern trends, or is there still a place for it?
Kevin: Well, I’m glad you focused on it because I wrestled with the idea. At one point, in one of the manuscripts, I had taken the word pitch out altogether. Then, I went back through and I thought, “You know what? The notion pitch has got a little teeth in it,” but the reason I put it back is for this reason. If we look at what I call the supply economy ?? this was way back when, during the heydays of the mad men and all that business ?? where demand was assumed, and the job of businesses was to make sure that the products that were created simply found their way to the marketplace. If you did that successfully, products simply flew off the shelf.
Even when I was a kid coming up in the business, we used to focus on things like “out of stock” in this business. The tools that we used to use were “share of voice.” Imagine that. That’s he who could shout the loudest would win in the marketplace.
Well, in a demand economy, which is made up of communities of people, none of that stuff works anymore. But you still have to come across. You still have to figure out a way to reach these people and to connect with them. In fact, it’s even more important than ever to work hard to understand what is in the heart of the community that you are trying to reach.
In the digital age, figuring out who your audience is, developing an emotional definition of them and then connecting yourself to them is wildly important.
Joe: If you find your target audience, a pitch is effective, you connect, you know that right away. How do you find that target audience to pitch to?
Kevin: That’s a great question. I think that over the years, a number of ways that we would define our targets. Still today, I work with a number of companies who still look at functional and descriptive measures to describe the people they’re talking to, sort of women, 25 to 54, in certain counties with certain incomes and so on. But the fact is that community formation, now more than ever, not only, say, within the U.S. but around the world, community formation is on the basis of belief and value system. It pushes us further to try to figure out a way to develop a definition of our target audience that runs more deeply.
In a way, if you remember from the book, I take a page out of politics, whereby the notion of the conceptual target is a way by which you can develop a powerful emotional definition of your audience. Soccer mom, for example, was a great one.
In the pursuit of the Marriott business, no matter whether the person was staying at the JW, their topflight property, and spending several hundred dollars a night, or they were staying at Fairfield, the emotional composition of that audience were called road warriors, people who are out there selling for their companies.
It’s a terrific way because at the end of the day people come together because of what they believe and how they feel.
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