As a frequent traveler myself, I was partially glad to hear the news, but the marketer/customer service evangelist side of me saw things differently. Essentially what the new law has done is create an adversarial relationship between the airlines and the customers it serves. And, as expected, the airlines have suggested that compliance with the law will cause more trouble for travelers.

Important note: This is not a post in defense of the airlines. Far from it. In fact, I personally believe that the airlines ought to be ashamed that they couldn’t solve this problem themselves. That a government entity needs to step in and regulate common courtesy, humane conditions, and treating PAYING customers with a modicum of respect is downright ridiculous.

That said, however, what this will do is create a reasonable excuse for the airlines to treat customers worse – instead of better. “I’m sorry that we can’t get you to your destination until 48 hours from now, but YOU wanted to get off….”

It has been said that the best thing that ever happened to the cigarette industry was the forced inclusion of the “Surgeon General’s Warning”. This essentially absolved the industry of any wrongdoing for years, “Hey – you knew what you were getting into…” I feel as if this new “Passenger Bill of Rights” will do the same thing.

When treating customers right is the business of the government instead of the companies that profit from travelers, something is wrong.

The results are more impressive than I thought. Once Google indexed the new domain, it ranked #1 and this site went up two places:

Wichita Marketing Consulting SEO

This will be interesting to keep track of over time. I wonder if the lack of content on the wichitamarketingconsulting domain will eventually penalize this site. Google is supposedly making significant algorithm changes over the holiday so I’ll revisit this experiment in the new year.

My article is totally unscientific, but the findings about Wichita’s brand image are pretty enlightening. Some of the data not included in the original article is revealed in this post. I left most of this out simply because it’s interesting, but not totally relevant to the point I was driving at.

The most frequent words respondents used to describe their own cities were:
- Young: 4 mentions
- Vibrant: 4 mentions
- Unique: 3 mentions

These broke down as follows:
- Young: 3 for Austin, TX + 1 for Boston, MA
- Vibrant: 2 for Austin, 1 for New York, NY, and 1 for Portland, OR
- Unique: All from Austin

I asked the respondents how other people reacted when they traveled away from their home city and told people where they lived. Almost unanimously, the respondents said that others reacted positively. Interestingly, only two respondents said that others reacted “neutrally” or “sometimes negatively”. These two respondents were the only ones to include any form of negative word in the description of their own cities. This finding suggests an interesting juxtaposition between brand perception and management.

I’ve decided to try something else initially. I’ve cashed in a free credit with Go Daddy so that I’ve got advertising supported hosting. I uploaded a home page that uses “Wichita Marketing Consulting” as anchor text but has no other content.

I will keep an eye on the rankings over the next few days and report findings here.

How do you charge?
Notice that this question doesn’t say, “what do you charge”. How the consultant charges, and the flexibility they offer in that rate structure is quite telling. Is the marketing consultant willing to enter a project under a “not to exceed” figure? Do they always charge by the hour, no matter what?

In what way do you prefer to communicate?
The preferable answer to this query is, “in whatever way you’d like to communicate with me.” Consultants that avoid phone conversations should raise suspicion. It’s not that you’ll necessarily need to speak with them everyday, but on occasion, speaking is the most efficient method.

What happens at the end if I don’t like the work product you’ve produced?
As tough as this question is, a good marketing consultant should know that satisfied customers are the most important thing. It’s sacrosanct. The only acceptable answer to this one is quite simply that if the client isn’t satisfied, then you can’t take their money.

Not being foolish enough to think we could make a dent with uber-words like “advergame” or, even, “advergaming”, we did get a foothold with a couple desirable longer tail terms. “Advergame Mistakes” for which we quickly ranked #1, only has ~52,000 results, but who knows what the future holds. Look at “website design mistakes.” It has over 13 million results today.

Perhaps our greatest win was “Advergame Research” which has half a million results and for which we ranked 3rd.

Results Page: advergame research

It should be noted that the Sneaky Games domain didn’t rank that high but rather, a press release we distributed about an advergame research project we conducted got picked up by a very well read site. This speaks to the importance of distributing releases over some kind of wire service. In this case, we used PRWeb.

Wichita Marketing - When TM is Too Much

In the 21 words of the headline and subhead text, there are 5 instances where some kind of symbol is used. I don’t know whether to read this ad or connect the dots. Here’s what I would have recommended to clean up this design yet still attempt to protect the Benadryl(R) assets.

1. Remove the TM from the headline. While it’s true that parts of this terminology are utilized in other parts of Benadryl’s marketing campaign, the statement isn’t used completely. (At least not in their TV ads or the print ads I’ve been able to find). The statement is matter of fact and, quite frankly, not really worth protecting.

2. Remove the circle-Rs from both Benadryl and KapSeals and, instead, add text to the bottom of the ad that explicitly states that “Benadryl” and “KapSeals” are registered trademarks.

3. Remove the second TM instance associated with KapGels and underline it instead. This still treats the mark differently, but eliminates redundancy.

I’m certain that most laywers would say that taking my advice weakens the level of protection the ad currently enjoys. It probably does. But it also greatly increases its readability and visual appeal.