Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

If you guess this riddle you’ll understand why this road-side ad in downtown Mexico is ineffective:

Imagine driving through the desert and reaching a town so small it doesn’t even have a stop light. While there you want to get a haircut before continuing on your way. You ask a local if there are any barbers in town and he says “Why yes. Wayne and John are the only barbers in town and you can tell them apart by their haircuts. Wayne has a terrible haircut and John has the best haircut in town.”

Question: Who would you get your haircut with?

If you answered “John” you will get the bad haircut. Think about it.

Now, back to the road sign. I snapped this picture while staying at a pretty fancy hotel in . It looked great from the outside and from the inside. This road sign was right across the street from our hotel and the ad was targeting executives staying at my hotel. It read “With Nextel, many executives are so successful that they stay at hotels like that one.” It was basically saying that we, the executives in our hotel, weren’t successful enough since we weren’t staying at the hotel next door.

The ad may have worked, and I’ll admit the next-door hotel is nicer on the inside, but the outside looks horrendous. This clearly back-fired on the designers of this ad, though I’m not sure if they see it that way because the sign has now been up for months.

Marketing tip: It is important to match the outer appearance of your company with your marketing campaigns. Casein point: I recently returned from ExpoComm 2006 in Mexico City. It’s the largest telecommunications conference in Latin America. I put together a booth that represented well our brand. Even a reporter from one of the largest television stations in , after looking at our booth and well-groomed personnel, outstanding printed material, and spot-on multimedia presentation, asked “What’s your NASDAQ symbol?” We aren’t a public company, but that was the best compliment I could have received for all my work and effort to create a strong brand.

Image does matter!