RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 50

by William Van Winkle

Cut and paste. What could be easier? Make a "BIG HOLIDAY SALE!" banner and just cut and paste it onto the top of your Sunday paper ad. Easy!

Yeah, easy and lame. Customers aren't stupid. They can see the difference between trying to capitalize on a seasonal event and offering something of real worth. And yet my Sunday paper from last weekend (it's just before Christmas as I write this) has plenty of examples of such lameness. What you want is real leverage. "Happy Holidays" has no substance. "Get Chilly This Season With The Best System Coolers Around" is better. "Come Pick A Free Present From Our Gift Tree!" is much better provided you put some solid discounts and free accessory items (with minimum purchase) under the tree. Still better yet is when you can get cross-promoted vendors to subsidize all of those festive goodies.

Let's take one last step. What if Manufacturer X, known for its gaming peripherals, had a big holiday season campaign splashed across all of the major media showing revelers gathered in the holiday-decorated living room playing on X-made devices. The ad slogan was "Start With Nog, Play With X". (Yes, now you see why I'm not in marketing.) Seemingly everywhere you go, there's that egg nog message. Even if you're not in X's channel program and have no co-op or MDF coming from the company—even if you don't sell or like X products—you can still piggy-back on X's campaign by putting an egg nog concept in your holiday ad. "Fruitcake. Egg nog. Now how about a holiday treat people will like?"

I was in a big retailer the other day, standing before a wall filled with external hard drives. Most of the consumers around me had no idea what they wanted to buy. A couple had come in to buy Seagate's 300GB pushbutton external unit because they'd seen an ad for the drive listing it at $149 after $50 mail-in rebate. I took away from this event the fact that people knew they had a problem—lack of storage space—but in a sea of product ignorance, no one was there to explain either other uses for these devices or why consumers should upgrade to a larger unit. "Need more space?" asks Seagate on its Web site's external drive page. Why, yes, everybody needs more space, and you need a way to reach people and let them know that they really need more than 300GB for their multimedia. In fact, if they're serving multimedia across the LAN, they need to kill two birds with one stone and get something like Maxtor's (now Seagate's) Shared Storage Plus drive, which functions as a UPnP media server.

If you try to go head-to-head against an 800-pound gorilla with the same deal, with the same show of strength, he's just going to crush you and toss your carcass into the bushes.

Companies like Seagate have massive advertising budgets. They are the 800-pound gorillas charging through the PC industry with deals like a $149 300GB external drive. If you try to go head-to-head against an 800-pound gorilla with the same deal, with the same show of strength, he's just going to crush you and toss your carcass into the bushes. But if you're nimble, you can sidestep the beast and hop on its back. Ride the gorilla. Use its strength to lift your own efforts higher. In tooling around the Web, I thought I'd look for some other examples of easy ways to ride a gorilla and better make the point.

1. Ready to rock? I'm not sure if this page will still exist by the time you read this, but check out www.intel.com/personal/desktop/viiv/games. This is a page Intel threw up to try and generate buzz for the coming Viiv campaign. The viewer gets to play a best-of-five game of Rock Paper Scissors against the computer. The idea is that the hand is all-powerful when it holds a remote control. I don't think this is the cleverest ad campaign Intel ever devised, but it's eye-catching. Leave it running on a PC in your showroom or email it to some of your consumer clients. Once you have them looking at it, then you can step in and explain the significance of remote control, multimedia, and the Viiv scene. You've now become an authoritative resource on Viiv in advance of the big media blitz. Total cost to you? Zero.

2. The give-away no one wants. I'm looking at a Amazon page with a big banner across the top advertising Linksys' 802.11b PC Card (WPC11) NICs for only $9.99. This card sells new for $40 to $50. What if you advertised it for $8.99? "Better Than Amazon's Loss Leader!" Think about it. When's the last time you saw a notebook that didn't have at least 802.11b already built in? Nobody buys these cards now. But it's a great upsell hook for 802.11g PC Cards or even 802.11a/b/g miniPCI cards for the legions of Centrino notebooks out there.

3. Nice face. Want a notebook? This particular contest ends on January 9th, but there will be others like it. MSI is running its Star Ready Contest. There are four categories: smart, savvy, stylish, and sporty. Contestants aged 18 to 35 attach two pictures of themselves along with a note explaining which category each picture should be considered for and why. One winner gets selected from each category to receive an S270 MSI notebook PC. So when you get a customer who looks unique and has an interest in mobile computing, help them to enter. Maybe even snap the shots of them in your showroom and email in the entry. It a great way to grab a loyal customer, promote a channel vendor, and offer something fun to your clients. Cost to you? Zero.

4. Still ready to rock? Everybody knows that flash media is an extremely hot item right now because it's needed by an endless variety of consumer electronics devices from cell phones to digital cameras to portable media players. Unfortunately, the channel and CE devices still tend not to get along so well, so flash media tends not to be a big channel seller. But... With the holidays gone and millions of people now walking around with flash card-enabled devices, why not capitalize on the portable digital music craze? SanDisk now has a special Rolling Stones Grüvi Card SKU, a miniSD or SD card pre-loaded with the Stones' "A Bigger Bang" album. If consumers knew to go to SanDisk's site, they could order it direct. Chances are, though, that they won't, and you'll be the first to offer them this great deal. If they bite, you now have an open door to upsell with a flash card reader and other flash-based devices. Play the album in the background of your storefront. Again, it's a free media tie-in with a behemoth rock band, and you've got nothing to lose.

5. OCZ gettin' chilly. OCZ tends to run seasonal promotions every quarter and sprinkle these around high visibility areas. I noticed one of these just yesterday. It was an orange banner across the top of the site showing snow falling. Across the banner trots a reindeer pulling an XTC memory module followed by a flag reading "available at Newegg." The banner was actually the impetus for my "get chilly" idea back at the start of this column. You may not possess the purchasing power to have OCZ or its ilk plant your name on its banner ads, but you can at least pick up the company's idea—winter, chilly, PC cooling—and build off of it in your own marketing. OCZ might make a modified form of its banner available to you for use on your own site, and you can then pair this with other cooling-friendly products to fit the theme. This way you have the appearance of being part of a larger campaign.

I spoke with OCZ vice president of marketing Alex Mei, who indicated that OCZ tends to be very liberal on cross-marketing deals such as this provided that the ad features both the OCZ and product brand names. What I didn't know was the extent to which OCZ was prepared to help resellers take such modest marketing moves and build on them. One such vehicle is LAN parties.

"We don't have enough partners involved in things like LAN parties," says Mei. "We'd get a lot more ROI if we tied these in with somebody, like if people could buy it at the party rather than us just promoting the brand name at the events. Someone could leverage the investment we're already putting in."

In other words, OCZ is already willing to help subsidize LAN parties simply to have its banners and product there. But if a reseller were to run the party, OCZ would likely be willing to help even more since participants could then buy the product they enjoyed so much, even going so far as to coordinate a mail-in rebate the reseller can offer and promote the reseller's party in strategic places on OCZ's dime.

Not every company will take such an active, hands-on role in helping you with cross-marketing, though. Often, the best you can hope for is a good piggy-backing opportunity. Returning to Seagate, if you're in the right places in California right now, you'll see an advance peek at the company's forthcoming national campaign on radio, newspaper, and other media. One of my favorite ads shows the Seagate Pushbutton External Hard Drive and reads: "Has your PC runneth over?" Hey, and harkening back to the SanDisk Rolling Stones idea above, the bottom of the External ad reads: "Buy any Seagate External Hard Drive or Upgrade Kit and get free downloads from RealPlayer Music Store or Gamespot.com or free photo prints from Shutterfly." How cool would it be to take a defective External drive and convert it into a water fountain for your showroom to tie into the ad? You could also spread around printed photos of your fountain with Shutterfly's logo in the corner as a visual accentuation when you inform customers about the product and its promotion.

Seagate will take this campaign and launch it nationally during CES, even including a major city mobile tour. People will be able to visit the truck on its way through town and get their hands on all of Seagate's products. This is another step in Seagate's push to establish itself as the de facto storage brand for consumers.

"A system builder can take that brand recognition of Seagate's name and leverage that into his application sales with whatever he's trying to do," says Jennifer Bradfield, director, Americas channel marketing at Seagate. "For example, if a customer wants to build a home media PC and Seagate's already associated with photos, on the go, places where you're going to be taking movies, and so on, Seagate will be the best established, most well-known solution for this kind of application. Choosing a Seagate drive will lend credibility and quality assurance to the system.

The object of the game is to let the gorillas do most of the work. Your goal is simply to go along for the ride and associate yourself with those spendy campaigns either directly or indirectly through the most effective, inventive ways you can devise. Think hard, and good luck piggy-backing!