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TRY IT AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME
Nothing tastes better than your own bread and butter

The Kellogg folks dusted off their old corn flakes campaign—the one that ran years ago. "Try it again for the first time". the ad says, implying that if you haven't tasted Kellogg's Corn Flakes for a while, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

It's a smart slogan. And Kellogg is a smart company. They know the value of promoting their bread-and-butter products.

But everybody knows what I make!

Everybody knows that Kellogg makes corn flakes too. That doesn't stop Kellogg from advertising it. What does the Kellogg Company know that we can learn?

Promote your standard product or service. Push the products that earn the bread. The ones that produce the highest profits. These may not be you sexiest products or your newest. In fact, they usually won't be. But people need to be reminded, even when they are aware, however dimly, that your product or service exists.

Maybe it helps to use a fancy advertising term, so call it reinforcement. Reinforcement is why those nagging little advertising jingles work. The ones that run through your mind for a whole day like a gerbil in a wheel. The advertiser wants his name and his product to run through your mind.

So when Kellogg urges you to try corn flakes again for the first time, they are suggesting more than that an old standard product is new and improved. They're issuing a subtle—and effective—challenge to try it.

Help yourself to a serving from Kellogg's: try it to promote your standard product or service. Nothing tastes better than your own bread and butter.

HOW TO INTERPRET ONLINE TRAFFIC STATISTICS
Top Mistakes Made By Online Publishers

Everyone who publishes material on the web needs to measure his progress. Traffic numbers provide a means to do this, however most publishers do not understand the definitions of the online vocabulary. Here is a short guide to better understanding of traffic measurement.

HITS
This is a worthless statistic. A "hit" is a request to a web server for a file. A single web page can include dozens of files: the page itself, plus every style sheet, external script, graphic and image displayed on the page. By doubling the number of graphics on a page a web master can double the number of "hits."

PAGE VIEWS
This statistic is only slightly better than "hits." "Page Views" measures all traffic to the site, including automated agents such as search engine spiders and spammer robots. Unless these automated agents are filtered out you are grossly over estimating traffic to the site from real people.

UNIQUE VISITS
This is a better statistic for measuring traffic to a web server. Even if there are automated agents, such as search engine spiders, included in the number it is only counted as a single visit. Filters can be used to remove automated visitors. Even if this is not done, this is the best way to measure traffic to your server.

Courtesy of Photonics Group Marketing Newsletter, August 2007

HEADLINE POWER
it's What You Say And How You say It

THE CROOKED BRICK
Don't Base Your Marketing Campaign on Assumptions

Did you ever hear of Gablinger's Beer? Well, no wonder. It was a low calorie beer that The Rheingold Company dreamed up and this is a story that Jerry Della Famina tells about the Gablinger debacle. Among other truths, the story illustrates the importance of research in product introductions.

When they invented Gablinger's, Rheingold thought they had a winner. They'd sell the stuff to beer drinkers who wanted to lose weight. That's what they thought.

There was one problem. Somebody in marketing based the whole campaign—the entire thing—on the mistaken idea that guys who drink beer want to lose weight. Turned out not to be true. (At least not true in the pre-lite-beer days of the Gablinger's introduction.) But Rheingold went ahead anyway and launched a big marketing campaign based on this wobbly foundation of an incorrect assumption and the effort fell like a... well... like a ton of bricks.

"Campaigns," Jerry Della Famina reminds us, "will only work if the initial premise is true. Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, if the first brick is crooked, every thing starts going sideways."