Table of Contents Print This Article Archives Buy This Issue Subscribe! PORTFOLIO “Drive thy business,” said Ben Franklin, “or it will drive thee.” That advice is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in the 18th. Today, many companies follow Franklin’s advice and travel to see their business-to-business customers via mobile-marketing campaigns. According to mobile-marketing consultant Larry Borden of the Conshohocken, PA,-based The Borden Agency LLC, the true value of road shows can be summed up in one word: control. “Road shows make a potent strategy because they’re controlled environments,” says Borden, who helped produce road shows for Jack Daniel’s, Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp., and Avon Products Inc. “You use your own rooms, you see only the people you invite, you focus on specific client needs, you suffer minimal distortions, and there are no competitors.” David Rogers, co-author with Bernd H. Schmitt and Karen Vrotsos of There’s No Business That’s Not Show Business: Marketing in an Experience Culture (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2003) points out that businesses are turning to mobile marketing for two reasons. “You can reach a highly targeted audience,” he says, “and reach in them in a prolonged, interactive situation. That’s simply not possible with traditional advertising.” The five companies featured here have each found innovative ways to reach their customers through mobile marketing. Kozinets suggests we think of them as Weinermobile heirs to the legacy left by their ancestor, Oscar Mayer. Since 1936, that road show has excited devotion and affection in customers’ hearts — and brand loyalty in their brains. “Like the Weinermobile,” says Kozinets, “the physical presence of road shows provide the opportunity to deepen your brand community.” An average electronics store may carry as many as 10,000 products. If a salesperson received a scant five minutes of training on each product, he would need slightly more than 104 eight-hour workdays to learn every gizmo in the store — and that’s assuming nothing new ever came in the door. Consumer-electronics manufacturer JVC Co. of America knew that if it wanted sale associates in electronics stores to evangelize for its new high-definition HD-ILA TV and Everio G hard-disk camcorder, it needed a training strategy that would cut through the rest of its retailers’ products. The Wayne, NJ,-based division of Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., had traditionally trained store personnel off site at local hotels. Now there was a glitch. With the retail environment speeding up like a DVD player stuck on fast forward, “fewer and fewer store managers allow their staff to leave for training,” says Karl Bearnarth, a vice president of marketing for JVC. “But ultimately our ROI revolves around educating those sales associates, because as they go, so go our products. We had to come up with something new.” JVC connected with ZAG Marketing Inc., a specialist in mobile marketing headquartered in Gillette, NJ. “We wanted a rolling college that came right to their door,” Bearnarth says. JVC took a mostly bottom-up approach for its tour. First, it asked dealers to opt-in to the program. Then, JVC product specialists met with ZAG for several hours over several weeks to educate them on the products and bookmark the key selling points the experts had gleaned from training those dealers and working sales conferences and trade shows. ZAG edited the hours of material down to a user-friendly 12 minutes per presentation, but could even pare the materials down to near elevator-speech brevity if the situation warranted it. MEET ME IN THE PARKING LOT The Perfect Experience Tour 2005 made 250 stops in the East and West Coasts. A support truck accompanied each bus with equipment for a consumer pavilion which set up next to the bus at each stop. JVC’s three-month road show, dubbed “The Perfect Experience Tour 2005,” started in July of 2005 and ended in September. JVC keyed in on 250 stops in the East and West, with one bus for each coast. A support truck accompanied each bus with equipment for a consumer pavilion, which set up next to the bus at each stop. On weekdays, the 45-foot-long bus (like the kind that carts rock stars around) arrived in the retailers’ parking lots around 10 a.m. for its first training of the day, stayed about 60 to 90 minutes, then headed to the next store location. The buses could go as late as 8 p.m. during the week, depending on store traffic. On weekends the hours expanded, opening at 9 a.m. for the training sessions before setting up at approximately 11 a.m. outside the trailer for the consumer experience. The team would then close the consumer experience around 6 p.m. The scheduling differences took into account the crowd flow at different times of the week, maximizing the number of consumers touched by the campaign. Store personnel entered the bus and sponged up the two 12-minute educational presentations in two areas outfitted with couches and plasma monitors running product demos. Because the company realized that each store would be slightly different in some way, JVC and ZAG trained its staff to think on their feet and change the presentation by elaborating on some parts while shortening others to fit the sales associates’ needs. Once the two five-member teams of ZAG staffers finished the presentations, the retailers’ sales associates, now implanted with the JVC meme, went to work in the 20-by-40-foot pavilion JVC set up outside. There, in a bright red loft-like environment, they imparted their new information to consumers and demonstrated the equipment in the Everio Camcorder Studio and the HD-ILA Home Theater Room. For example, they could now knowledgeably show consumers how to both capture footage and then edit it on the Everio G camcorder. While its goals for consumers were soft ones — essentially they wanted to get the word out about the HD-ILA TV and the camcorder — JVC had harder ones for its main targets. The company hoped to train at least 2,000 sales associates during the tour. The tour finished in Orlando at a sales training conference for Best Buy personnel where JVC snagged 1,200 sales associates in one shot, which meant that by tour’s end it had trained almost 3,000 — nearly 50 percent more than its goal. By any measure, that’s a Perfect Experience. THE CONSUMER EXPERIENCE In addition to educating sales associates, JVC’s mobile-marketing campaign allowed customers to interact with the products while the newly-educated associates put their product knowledge to the test in a controlled sales environment. For years the Batesville Casket Co. of Batesville, IN, buried its competition with innovations in the death-care industry. In 1948, the coffin maker developed the first vacuum-testing system for its products. In 1958, its Cathodic Protection shielded the entire surface of a metal casket from corrosion. In 1963, Batesville became the first manufacturer to offer an insured warranty on all of its caskets. But even those groundbreaking innovations can’t guarantee Batesville will leave rivals in the dirt — especially in a time when everyone from Costco Wholesale Corp. to the rock group KISS is marketing their own lines of afterlife abodes. The real challenge for the company is introducing its new products and technologies to current and potential customers, funeral directors who can’t leave their businesses for a trip to Batesville. Founded in 1884, the company typically invited its clients to travel to the Indiana headquarters to unearth the latest developments in the casket industry. Usually about 1,200 visitors made the trip each year. But 89 percent of funeral homes in the United States are individual- or family-owned, and the average member of the National Funeral Directors Association has just three full-time and three part-time employees. That time-suck is fatal to most attempts to leave work for the several days the trip would take. THE HONOR SYSTEM Batesville Casket Co.’s mobile-marketing campaign consisted of two 53-foot tractor-trailers called the “Honoring Lives Tour Centers.” Each trailer opened up into a 1,000-square-foot exhibit, showcasing a number of the company’s caskets and cremation products. That’s why Batesville decided to hit the road in January 2005, with an undertaking it called the “Honoring Lives Tour Centers.” The first of two 53-foot tractor-trailers started in Manchester, TN, and continued south, then west, stopping at Batesville Casket warehouses or hotels to demonstrate Batesville products and programs. The second trailer commenced in March in North Carolina and headed up the East Coast. Before the tour hit each town, Batesville prepped its customers to maximize turnout. First it sent out an oversize postcard (which featured a silhouette of the tractor-trailer) six weeks before the tour arrived. Then, Batesville’s sales representatives followed up the mailer with a sales call. Last, drivers who deliver Batesville caskets to funeral homes left small reminder cards about the tour. The company also invited students from any nearby mortuary schools. Once in town, each trailer opened up into a 1,000-square-foot exhibit. Local sales reps and videos from the company’s CEO and president welcomed visitors when they arrived and thanked them when they departed. Inside the exhibit, Batesville staff used wall-mounted partial-casket displays, and rotating stand-up displays to show off its latest services and features: embroidered tribute panels that allow a casket’s inside lid to reflect different cultures and beliefs, interchangeable hardware to personalize casket corners, and a new line — cremation products and resources, which capitalize on the hot and growing trend that’s seen cremation rates nearly double since 1985. By this December, the two tour centers will have visited almost 100 cities and almost 40 states, including several provinces in Canada. Hoping to exceed the 1,200 visitors to its Batesville headquarters, the company surpassed that figure by almost 32 percent, reaching 1,589 customers before it even reached the halfway point. This is one strategy Batesville won’t be sending to its eternal rest anytime soon.     Advanced Micro Devices Inc. wanted to reach the smaller customers who make computer systems using its microprocessors — which it defines as those who build and sell 25 to 1,000 systems a year — but it didn’t have an Intel-size wallet to do it. The Sunnyvale, CA,-manufacturer of computer chips decided to reach out to its clientele about its ultra-fast, dual-core, 64-bit chip in a more direct way than TV ads ever could — because it didn’t have a choice. “We just don’t have the resources to do the same kind of marketing that Intel does,” says John Honning, AMD’s manager for North American channel events. “We decided to try a mobile tour to go to the clients and give them the face-to-face we think they need.” Starting in 2001, that’s what AMD and MC2 Inc., the Lithia Springs, GA,-based, brand-experience company, did, using the standard 53-foot tractor-trailer. Its latest circuit started in April 2005 and closed in July 2005, after stopping in large venues like Houston, and smaller locales such as Austin, TX. RAISE THE SPEED LIMIT The latest circuit of AMD’s mobile-marketing campaign visited 13 cities. Attendance at the tours exceeded the company’s expectations. In Toronto, for example, AMD anticipated 400 attendees; 1,300 came. The tours set up in hotels and convention centers with 7,000 to 12,000 square feet of available space. Six weeks before the tour arrives in each city, AMD sends e-mails to local customers. For example, it e-mailed 4,000 customers in the Houston area. Then it sends reminders two weeks, one week, and then one day before the show comes to town. Of that 4,000, AMD hopes about 10 to 12 percent (400 to 500 people) will ultimately show. In the first years of the tour, AMD offered what was essentially a hands-on Tool Time, showing the customers how to install the processors. But just as the AMD microchip increased quickly in sophistication over the last few years, so did its clients — and the tour’s strategy. AMD packaged its tour in a theme that stresses the speed of its 64-bit chip. It wrapped its trailer in a graphic that said “Raise the Speed Limit;” built one section of the floor to look like a racing pit; and placed Trek bicycles in another area — bikes on which Lance Armstrong rode to his sixth consecutive Tour de France victory, which were designed using AMD technology. Each tour session takes place from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. to avoid taking customers away from their businesses at peak hours. A buffet dinner follows registration, and then educational presentations from AMD and its sponsors begin. AMD uses 20 to 25 co-sponsors to defray the tour’s cost. Later, AMD lets its chips duke it out with demos of a slower AMD processor running Cinebench, a standard software benchmarking program that all the customers recognize and have confidence in. Then AMD dramatically yanks out the you-are-the-weakest-link chip and replaces it with its dual-core 64-bit processor, which is like giving the program a six-pack of Red Bull that runs it 70 percent faster. To entice customers to stay until the end of the event, AMD holds drawings for prizes supplied by its co-sponsors. In the latest 13-city iteration of the tour, attendance doubled AMD’s expectations. In Dallas, it expected 250 to attend; 700 did. In Toronto, it thought 400 would show; 1,300 came. AMD also sold package deals, where the chip was bundled with a motherboard and software at a 50-percent discount, and hoped that half the attendees would purchase the bundles. Exactly 50 percent of them did. With results like these, it’s not hard to compute AMD’s success.     The American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) faced a problem that was harder than herding cats in a straight line: a study by the 72-year-old nonprofit organization revealed that millions of pets were not receiving the best care available. AAHA wanted to increase the awareness of best practices in veterinary medicine — along with its accreditation program — among the more than 65,000 veterinarians spread over 50 states, as well as thousands of additional care providers who work in pet clinics and hospitals. E-mail, snail mail, and other mass-media campaigns would seem like an obvious answer. But those kinds of one-way-street marketing can’t convey the kind of useful information its target market needs to satisfy its own customers — pet owners who, in a 1999 survey by KPMG LLP, an economic-consulting service in Dallas, said they wanted a veterinarian who was informed, had a reputation for high-quality care, and offered a wide range of services — exactly the kind of information the AAHA wanted to convey. But vets work like dogs — an average of 50 hours or more a week — which means they don’t have much free time to travel to learn what they need to know. The Lakewood, CO,-based group collared the challenge by developing a mobile tour with event-marketing company Nth Degree Inc. of Stone Mountain, GA. The tour, named AAHA! Driving Excellence in Veterinary Practice, featured a 53-foot trailer with the latest technology in pet care and targeted 50 sites and events, such as the Long Island Pet Expo, America’s Family Pet Expo, the Super Pet Expo, and its own annual meeting in Phoenix in March 2003. Inside the trailer, attendees experienced a replica of a state-of-the-art practice, which fit into the AAHA’s goals of showing its audience how the latest technology and the best practices could improve their business. Professional presenters delivered 20-minute presentations every half-hour on how to implement the latest medical and diagnostic technologies. Staff also directed visitors through mock-ups of reception, exam, consultation, inpatient, and lab rooms outfitted with new-wave technology. As the vets exited, the staff handed them a compliance-awareness tool and book on CD, which measured how much their practices’ compliance levels matched national averages researched by the AAHA. Lasting from March 2003 to March 2005, the tour fetched 13,000 vets and care providers, hitting the AAHA’s goal on the snout.   GOING TO THE DOGS The American Animal Hospital Association’s tour, named AAHA! Driving Excellence in Veterinary Practice, targeted 50 sites and events, such as the Long Island Pet Expo, America’s Family Pet Expo, the Super Pet Expo, and it’s own annual meeting in Phoenix. In 1855, after winning over the judges at the World’s Fair in Paris and grabbing first prize with its sewing machine, I. M. Singer & Co. introduced its Hire-Purchase Plan, a rent-to-buy strategy that was the non-traditional marketing buzz word of its day. It allowed thousands to take the machine home for just $5 down. Singer was reportedly the first company in the United States to try such an innovative approach. One hundred and fifty years later, another sewing machine maker, Pfaff USA, developed a 21st-century version of Singer’s strategy for its own customers — 456 independent retailers who sell the Westlake, OH,-based company’s sewing, quilting, and embroidering machines. “Our customers aren’t the Wal-Marts, the Kmarts, or the Targets,” says Scott Fox, Pfaff’s vice president. “They’re smaller and don’t have the time to travel off site to trade shows or events.” Lack of time was one problem. The fact that sewing machines aren’t like TVs or stereos or other electronic impulse buys was another. They’re more like cars, which potential clients need to see and feel before they buy — especially the higher-end quilting machines that can run as high as $6,500. Previously the company had tried a patchwork of other marketing game plans, such as sponsoring Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) players, because a high proportion of the audience that follows LPGA golf also sews. “But we needed an event with results we could measure,” Fox says. A STITCH IN TIME Pfaff USA realized that its clients didn’t have the time to travel to off-site events, so it outfitted a 53-foot trailer with its most popular products and sent it on a 108-stop tour from April to December 2005. Pfaff stitched together a plan with Mobility Resource Associates Inc., of St. Clair Shores, MI, to take the machines to the retailers. They outfitted a 53-foot trailer with the most popular sewing and embroidery machines and sent it on a 108-stop tour from April to December 2005. “None of our competitors had ever taken this approach for sewing machines,” Fox says. Calling it the Pfaff Creative Experience Truck, the trailer set up in customers’ parking lots across the country. Inside, Pfaff personnel trained retailers on how to use the machines for elaborate quilting, home decorating, and more in five demonstration areas. Flat-screen monitors on the truck’s walls ran recordings of fashion shows from annual dealer conventions and the Arts of Fashion Foundation, while quilts made by sewing superstars Marti Michell, Sara Moe, and Jenny Haskins hung like the Bayeaux Tapestry. Then, to benefit its retailers, Pfaff allowed them to bring in their own customers during their open hours — offering giveaways to the first 50 consumers who showed up and holding a drawing for prizes such as a quilting machine. Pfaff also set aside an area in the back of the truck for sales, for which the retailers received their usual percentage no matter who did the selling. This prevented the tightly staffed retailers from sacrificing their daily incomes and allowed them to see the benefits of the tour — and the products — immediately. To make sure it would never be caught short, Pfaff sent along a supply truck loaded with product. With the tour just wrapping up now, about 17 dealers have done 12 to 30 percent of their annual business in the one four-to-six hour event. Pfaff exceeded the $3 million it hoped to generate by about 27 percent, averaging $30,000 per stop and making it Pfaff’s most successful marketing tool. “I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with different programs,” Fox says. “We partnered with our dealers and we took out half-page ads in a dozen major papers in cities like Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC. And for what is spent on that, relative to what I spent on this, it’s not even close.” In other words, Pfaff has its market all sewed up.