Flunking Ozarka

I’m going to ask Ozarka® Brand Natural Spring Water one more time: Please sell me just one of your Bottle Mate® XL water-bottle carriers. Here an extra opportunity to be responsive to your customers (well, me anyway).

I am getting older – you probably didn’t know this. As large as I am, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t easily wrestle with the 5-gallon bottles (40 lbs or so each) in which Ozarka delivers water to us. The Ozarka routeman leaves them at the front door; our dispenser is at the back of the house.

Yesterday, I saw our routeman, Alex, use this really neat plastic handle to move the bottles. The specialized, easy-to-use tool is made of nylon and glass-reinforced polymers and it slips over the neck of the bottle so someone can just lift it with one hand. The name “Bottle Mate XL” is molded right into the handle. This is some good trick. I immediately wanted one of my own.

I asked Alex where I could buy one; he answered that it was issued to him by the company, it was the only one he had. He didn’t think the company sold them, and the only thing he could suggest was to call Ozarka’s 800 number. (BTW, Alex humped those bottles to the back of the house – the kind of nice gesture I’ve come to expect from Ozarka drivers – thank you.)

Okay, on to the telephone number, 1-800-678-4448. I called Ozarka (it’s one of many water brands owned by Nestlé Waters North America Inc.) and spoke with a very nice woman in Massachusetts. I explained what I was seeking, told her I was a long-time customer – and she replied that the company’s Bottle Mate XL was not available for Ozarka customers. Why not? She didn’t know.

I told her I’d be glad to pay for it...she still didn’t care; just repeated that the Bottle Mate XL wasn’t available for us civilians.

Now, do I waste more of my time trying to get one from Ozarka? Or search the web to find another source? According to the Internet, the Bottle Mate XL, so called because “In response to popular demand,” it has “an improved hand grip 33% larger for big hands or gloves in cold climates,” is manufactured by the Bottle Mate Company – which only sells the items 10 at a time. I’ll keep looking – I’ll find a singleton somewhere.

But right here, right now, there’s an opportunity for Ozarka (which I generally respect) to offer a relevant item, an adjunct to its normal line of products, to fit the changing needs of some of its customers…older guys who’d like to think they can lift 5-gallon water jugs but can’t do it as effortlessly as they used to. Don’t flunk this.

So attention, Kim Jeffery, President and CEO of Nestlé Waters North America. Listen up, Bob Davino, Nestlé Vice President of Marketing. Why not give me a call (713.598.4238)? Tell me you’ll sell one of these Bottle Mate XLs to me. I promise I won’t tell anybody else about it.

PS: If you can’t bend your rules for a good, long-term customer like me, I’ll call Pittsburgh Water Cooler Service in Glenshaw, PA…there’s a Bottle Mate XL for sale right on its website. Then won’t you be embarrassed?

Berol Cranks

Nobody is marketing pencil sharpeners these days. They’re simply selling them. But a classic brand – a relic of the machine age – came right out of our back room this past weekend. The machine in question: a Berol® Giant® Apsco® pencil sharpener. (Why does the unit label read “Sanford” in the picture? See below.)

It’s not the Apsco Dexter Model B, mind you – that’s a much older item. Nor is it the kind with the see-through celluloid holder for pencil shavings and graphite dust (which I always thought wouldn’t last very long).

No, I think ours is the better-known AP806 – a model which is still in production under a different name: “Sanford Giant.”

These machines are no longer on the Berol website because the Berol brand is owned by Sanford, the world’s largest writing instrument manufacturer. Along with the Berol brand, Sanford also own Parker, Waterman, Rotring, PaperMate and Karisma, among others.

Talk about your long-term brand: what became the Eagle Pencil Company was originally founded in 1856 in Germany by Daniel Berolzheimer. The company opened a pencil shop on John Street in New York City and a manufacturing operation at Yonkers, NY. At this point (I think), the firm was called Berolzheimer, Illfelder & Co. Berolzheimer’s son Henry took over the business.

Five successful years later, Henry purchased the city's first iron-framed building. This factory, which produced pencils, pens, pen holders and erasers, took a whole city block covering East 13th and East 14th Streets. The company’s showroom was on Broadway.

In the custom of the day, sales agents were established in France, Germany, Russia, Austria, Norway and Cuba. To supply the wood slats, the company’s Cedar Mills were established in Florida, Alabama and Tennessee. It’s now the California Cedar Products Company, CalCedar, which has a fine corporate history. Berol itself kept growing (and acquiring other pencil companies) for more than 100 years.

The Berol Corporation was formed in 1969, merging nine different office supply companies from North America and the UK.

In 1986, Empire bought Berol, creating an office supply superpower swimming in pencils. The new corporate entity was then called Empire-Berol. In 1995, the European part was acquired by Sanford Corporation in the UK. In the US, Sanford is part of Newell Rubbermaid. Confused yet? Don’t be: brands migrate even when the products remain the same for decades. Especially a device that keeps on working, year after year.

Our unit is a real machine – you can see as soon as you take it apart. On the faceplate, there’s a six-hole guide that accepts all popular pencil sizes. Inside (even after all this time), there is a shiny micromated cutterhead, “twin planetary cylindrical cutters with spiral cutting edges,” that would do a tool & die company proud.

The body is metal and the barrel is gray-painted plastic. It is about 4”x 4” including the crank. We’ve had it at least 30 years, maybe more; and it’s been attached to the bookshelf in the back room since 1984. (It’s pictured in a 1953 catalogue from the American Pencil Sharpener Company – APSCO – in Chicago, IL…obviously one of the companies that Berol swept up.)

The names have merged and separated and merged again: APSCO, Sanford, Eagle and Berol: still cranking after all these years.

But I’m here to tell you, the quality behind the original name has continued to deliver on its promise, quietly and modestly, for longer than I’ve been alive. Now that’s a brand!

Interested in pencils and their brands? Check www.pencilrevolution.com when you have an opportunity.

Better Datasheets

Weary, weary, weary of spec sheets that look like the Interoperability and Performance Data Sheet shown on the Novell site? Your customers are.

I’ve been doing datasheets for more than 30 years. I can tell you there’s good ones and bad ones. I can tell you there’s a misapprehension that only words (spare and technical) will serve – isn’t that what engineers want? “Just the facts, Ma’am?”

No, no and no. Whether you call them product guides or spec sheets, datasheets or inserts, there’s an art and a science to transforming datasheets into more engaging, more beneficial instruments of marketing and sales.

For this post, look at the outstanding Hypercom datasheets shown above. The series has been designed by Peg Grant at The Phillips Agency and written by me, admitted with a certain modesty. This entire new series has a colorful (even exciting) combination of features, advantages and benefits – FABs – that turn drabs into dazzlers.

1. ATTRACT THE VIEWER FIRST. Rule One, a picture’s worth quite a bit more than a thousand words. Even when the product’s a black box. Especially when the product’s a black box. (Tougher yet, it’s a service you’re trying to sell.) People use these products and services. People are attracted to other people like themselves, doing things, preferably in conjunction with the thing you’re selling. Why do you think People magazine’s so popular? This doesn’t mean four humans, gingerly portraying the right gender/race mix, around a conference table – or a computer monitor. Look at the users in the Hypercom datasheets: they’re top, front and center.

2. DON’T THINK ENGINEERS ARE WHAT THEY USED TO BE. If there’s one idea that’s stuck in everyone’s head, it’s the image of the geek-engineer with the heavy-framed spectacles. That’s two generations out of date. Today’s smart, savvy engineers are heavily engaged in a wide variety of lifestyle activities…they’re involved in life. So yes, make sure the product specs are available (we put the specifications on the back of the datasheets, in a single column). More important, datasheets aren’t just for engineers any more. Your salespeople may put them into the hands of purchasing professionals, company owners, CFOs, CEOs…even the folks on the loading dock. They’re going to have a voice in the decision-making process, so be sure to build in options that are relevant to the many rather than the few. And for heaven’s sake, post them to your website.

3. SELL THE SIZZLE. Well, duh. What’s really in it for me? Why do I want to spec it, buy it, use it, recommend it to my design engineers, production team, jobbers, distributors, customers? Will it make my hair grow back (too late for me, I fear)? Will it save me [a] money, [b] time or [c] stress? Will it benefit the lives of its users? Which leads to…

4. BAF, NOT FAB. Put the benefits first, then the advantages and finally the product/service features which deliver the goods. Bad example: “The ARM9 processor family is built around the ARM9TDMI processor and incorporates the 16-bit Thumb instruction set, which improves code density by as much as 35%.” Good example: “Get more capability in a smaller footprint: 35% higher code density comes standard in the ARM9, thanks to its advanced architecture and compact, faster-acting 16-bit Thumb instruction set.”

5. TELL ‘EM – THEN TELL ‘EM WHAT YOU TOLD ‘EM. Every user will NOT review every single word of your datasheet. So each new Hypercom datasheet offers sections where customers and prospects can browse. Some sections have copy, some have photos with captions, some have bullet-pointed BAFs. Wherever they look randomly, they’re going to see/read/absorb benefits – yet there’s a consistent organizational flow that helps connect to the engineering mind-set.

Above all, sell. Datasheets are valuable sales and branding opportunities. It’s real estate that should not be confined to lists of specifications, because telling isn’t selling. (And if necessary, educate your sales force on the new datasheet format you create. I once produced an entire 3-foot x 4-foot wall poster for Exxon Technical Marketing Services, on which we showed both sides of a new datasheet with callouts explaining the sales benefits of each section.)

There are more ways to design datasheets than any one person can assemble in a lifetime. Some work really well. If you don’t follow my line of thinking, you want to make other choices or you’re not certain, take three or four different datasheet formats on the road. Ask your customers…they’ll be quick to let you know what’s attractive as well as informative.

Now go. Talk with your own engineers. Together, you can work out how to turn their datasheets into powerful marketing tools.

Thanks to The Phillips Agency – Terri Phillips, the aforementioned Peg Grant, Anna Giles, Catherine Colangelo and all – for the opportunity to work on these projects.