Mickey Lonchar

QMD

Mickey Lonchar has spent the better part of two decades creating award-winning advertising with agencies up and down the West Coast, Mickey currently holds the position of creative director with Quisenberry Marketing & Design, a full-service advertising and interactive shop with offices in Spokane and Seattle, Wash.

Why create a campaign when you can create a movement?

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Posted on 2012-04-19

Let’s say you run the credit card division at American Express. To build revenue (and profits) for your division, you need to do three things: 1) get more people to apply for and use your card, 2) get more merchants to accept your card, and most importantly 3) make your card the preferred method of payment by both consumers and retailers.

Now let’s talk about the barriers to entry. For consumers, it is the fact that the annual fees for your card far exceed those of the MasterCard and Visa cards they can get at their banks, and the fact that fewer merchants accept the card. And for merchants, the barriers are that the merchant fees are significantly higher than with MasterCard or Visa, and that fewer customers carry the card.

So how do you grow your business? With cards dealt the way they are, clearly it’s going to take more than a clever ad campaign to overcome those significant barriers.

In this case, American Express didn’t create a campaign; they created a...

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Fun Facts on Facebook Fans From Forrester.

2 comments 702 reads

Posted on 2012-04-11

Clever alliteration aside, are your Facebook fans more likely to purchase your products or services? Does their engagement level with you translate to higher likelihood of purchase? And how likely are they to recommend you to others?

These are a few of the questions Forrester Research attempt to quantify in their recently released “Facebook Factor” study.

For the purposes of this study, Forrester created a logistic regression model (stay with me now) that tracked four variables: being a Facebook fan of the brand, likelihood to purchase, amount of money spent in the past 12 months, and probability to recommend. While I’m a little rusty at statistical analyses, Forrester explains that a logistic model predicts the probability of the occurrence of an event, and shows the...

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The procrastinator’s guide to the (new) Facebook.

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Posted on 2012-03-29

Facebook pages have undergone quite a makeover in recent months, but the Granddaddy makeover of them all happens tomorrow, March 30, when Facebook automatically migrates all brand pages to its new “Timeline” format.

There are two notable changes page administrators will need to be aware of: the elimination of custom tabs in favor of a brand-created “Timeline,” and a new layout that allows you to place a page-wide “Cover” photo or image at the top of your page.

This post will give you a quick-and-dirty primer on the whole Cover concept. For insights into how to best take advantage of the Timeline itself, we’ll address that in a soon-to-come post.

While these changes may seem a bit off-putting to those of us who’ve grown accustomed to all pages looking and navigating pretty much the same, in many ways the new look offers a huge improvement to the user’s experience. First off, because pages can be more customized, there’s a huge opportunity to create a visually...

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What’s your Mona Lisa?

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Posted on 2012-03-23

The Musée du Louvre in Paris houses over 35,000 pieces of art from pre-history through the Medieval and Renaissance eras on through the works of the 19th century Impressionists. It is widely regarded as the most inclusive collection of drawings, sculptures, paintings, objets d’art and archaeological finds in the world.

Yet inevitably, when someone thinks of the Louvre, she is most likely to think of one particular piece: The Mona Lisa.

What is it that has made Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century portrait of the wife of his...

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The accidental inventor.

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Posted on 2012-03-13

The generally accepted wisdom about innovation goes something like this: an inventor begins with a particular problem in mind (for Edison, as an example, it might have been “I’m looking for a way to light up a room.”). Then, through trial and error, he tries a multitude of possible solutions that don’t yield much in the way of results. Then suddenly, a Eureka! moment—a flash that seemingly comes out of nowhere that provides the solution to the exact problem we were trying to solve.

The truth is, innovation rarely works like that. Jonah Lehrer, in his book Imagine describes how very often great inventors don’t really “invent” from scratch at all; often what the most successful inventors do is find surprising new applications for what’s already available to them. The “innovative” part is not to invent new technologies, but rather to find new uses for existing technologies.

That’s what Gutenberg did when he brought his wine press skills into book printing. What...

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The prescription for Komen’s headache: Tylenol.

0 comments 829 reads

Posted on 2012-02-15

The Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle of the past few weeks has been painful to watch. Forget the politics, the pushback and the apologies. What has been excruciating to witness has been Komen’s struggle to be transparent.

Not to unduly pick on Komen. The past couple of years, we’ve been witness to more than a few examples of companies who had their “oops” moment and muffed their chance to be totally forthcoming. The Toyota Prius and its acceleration issues, BP’s response to the Gulf oil spill and Netflix’s tough-to-swallow price increase also immediately come to mind.

What these marketers all failed to do was to honor the age –old and much-proven way to deal with a public relations crisis. Lay it all out there. Take your lumps. Move on.

In the event of a...

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Five resolutions to make in the New Year.

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Posted on 2011-12-20

Got room on your list for one more resolution for the upcoming year? If you’re a marketer, you won’t go wrong picking one of these:

1) Think mobile. Already, it is reported that more than 40% of smart phone owners have made a purchase by using their smart phone. In fact, about half of them made the purchase while in the store. The mobile phenomenon is just getting bigger. By 2014, it is predicted more people will access the Internet via smart phones and tablets than with all other computers combined. So if your web site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll miss a lot of web traffic.

Use 2012 to shore up your mobile interface. Optimize for the 4-inch screen. Make the experience rewarding for your visitors...

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Where Pepsi got it wrong, Coke got it right.

3 comments 1,882 reads

Posted on 2011-12-14

I’m talking about the soft drink marketers’ uses of Social Media here.

As you may recall, Pepsi was one of the first big-name marketers to aggressively go “all-in” in a Social Media sense, with its much talked-about “Pepsi Refresh Project.” This was a commitment from Pepsi to support worthwhile causes recommended and voted on by its customers and fans. Pepsi used Social Media (primarily Facebook) to elicit suggestions, to “crowd source” the causes (have fans and friends vote on them), and to report news developments.

What gathered a lot of media attention for Pepsi wasn’t so much the program itself, but the fact that Pepsi was pulling back in its traditional media spending in order to fund this program. As it turns out, the brand really didn’t need to cut back much, just the couple of spots it traditionally ran in the Super Bowl.

In the year following “Pepsi Refresh,” Pepsi’s flagship product slipped into third place in the soft drink category (behind Diet Coke...

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The pleasure of anticipation.

0 comments 536 reads

Posted on 2011-12-05

Think back to some purchase you’ve made that entailed a decent degree of planning, research and preparation. Maybe it was for a new house, a new appliance, a new car or a well-deserved vacation. Now ask yourself: did you derive more “pleasure” from the house, vacation or car itself? Or from the planning and anticipation that preceded the purchase?

If you’re like most people, it’s likely the planning period before the purchase provided the greater high. Social Psychologists have shown in study after study that we get enormous amounts of pleasure from looking forward to good things in the future. (One example is Bryant, 2003.) There’s something about the combination of “anticipation and uncertainty” that precede an event or purchase we’re looking forward to that boosts our feelings of well-being.

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The most bang for your Social Media buck

0 comments 1,210 reads

Posted on 2011-11-11

So which Social Media platforms are most worth your time?

That’s a question a lot of us in marketing have been asking for the past few years. There seems to be no shortage of ways for brands and marketers to get involved in Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogging, etc. Some require just a few minutes a day to keep up to speed. Others significantly more. But which platforms do users find most engaging, and which have the higher likelihood of leading to creating a new customer or sale?

We’re learning more and more about how people interact with Social Media all the time. And recently, the folks at Marketing Sherpa created a graph that took into consideration potential engagement versus the amount of time required to keep up.

...

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