Marketing 2010.

Marketing 2010 will be the same as Marketing 2009.

Media sellers will continue to claim their media is the best vehicle for you.
Advertising agencies will continue to create many bad advertisements.
Prognosticators will continue to declare that we face a new paradigm.

And reality will go on. Unaugmented.

The true role of marketing will continue to be about meeting customer needs and retaining their patronage. So, rather than make wild guesses about future trends that may or may not impact on your business, I'm going to start 2010 by getting some smart people to offer their answers to the basic marketing questions that will.

Thinking From Outside The Box.

Thinking outside the box is a phrase that has always annoyed me because it conflates two very different problem-solving approaches.

If you think the box is the problem, then you should be discarding it completely rather than merely thinking outside it (with the incremental change that implies). On the other hand, if you're happy with the box but need to approach it in a different way, you could quite profitably focus on thinking inside the box rather than engage in flights of fancy outside it. But, as the following example will show, you crucially need to do that thinking from outside of the box.

Rather than assume that technology has destroyed the "box" marked newspaper production, my friends at Newspaper Club have re-thought the box and acknowledged that is has definite customer benefits in terms of design potential, tactility and portability. By combining that insight with the spare capacity of digital printing presses and some new technology, they will soon be able to let anyone create their own small-run "newspaper" for whatever purpose they choose.

Their initial efforts have been things of beauty and people are lining up to create "newspapers" as promotional giveaways, wedding souvenirs and product samplers. But not everybody gets it - as this comment on a tech-site illustrates.

Ok, how much do you pay for something like this? Would having ads in distract you? Would they distract if they cut down on the cost? How often would you buy it?

If you're a writer, what sort of compensation would you want from an ongoing newspaper such as this.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and it's great to see how they did it, but am I curious how much cost and how long it took to do. There's a lot of steps between a one off and regularly published newspaper like this.

That's static inside the box thinking - where your product/service/market is defined by WHAT it is and what it has always been. By contrast, you can build in agility, dynamism and a degree of future-proofing - simply by defining the product/service/market in terms of WHY it is. By thinking from outside of the box.

The Media Is The Message.

Having written in my previous post that Eurostar's failure was a communication issue, I noticed a letter in today's Times from one of the passengers who had been trapped for 14 hours.

"The worst part wasn’t the length of the stoppage, nor the unbearable heat and darkness in the train before our painfully slow evacuation in the tunnel, nor even the lack of food and water. It was the deplorable dearth of information that really made it difficult.

I would much rather have been told that it was going to take 20 hours, then at least I could have accepted my fate and relaxed."

It's nice to have my wild blogging assertions proven correct. If you have to disappoint your customers, it's much better to disappoint them sooner rather than later, it's much better to then tell them what you're going to do rectify the situation and it's imperative that you apologise.

Social Media Panacea.

Snow arrives and the UK grinds to a halt. So too, it seems, do Eurostar trains. Techcrunch highlight the lack of communication 2.0 to bewildered and suffering customers, but that's to miss the wood for the trees.

The problem is not that they're not using Twitter - that's a symptom. The problem is that they have no information to provide. Social media is not the solution to that. A joined-up customer service strategy that acknowledges the ameliorating power of a flow of information, how ever depressing, would be.

The Importance Of Being Consistent.

The national rail company changed their website and it led me to send a couple of intemperate emails to their senior executives because the new journey planner left me baffled. I tweeted about it and some people seemed to agree with me.

Now, admittedly there were seeemingly issues with Firefox which meant that the crucial calender icon did not appear, but there were also loading time and loading order issues for others who could see it.

My main gripe was, as the screengrab above shows, that the user is faced with a variety of visual cues (drop-down menus, and empty boxes)which meant for me that I had no idea what protocol to use when I came to inputting a date. There was no drop-down menu, there was no calender icon and the box being filled with "Today" gave no clue as to what date format to enter.

In this era, it's fine (and perhaps obligatory) to speak in multiple voices to your heterogeneous audience, but that doesn't allow you to do so within the same instruction/message. At best, that leads to confusion. At worst, you commit the grievous sin of making your prospects feel stupid and helpless when you should be making them feel smart and empowered.

Getting Close To The Customer.

In Gary Vaynerchuk's talk that I mentioned in the last post, he recounted how officials of the NHL had resisted his idea that they should respond to every tweet and social media message. They felt it would be costly in terms of time and staff even though he pointed out that he personally got more than they did and he responded to all of them himself.

I'd go further. I'd insist that every senior executive regularly spent a day with the people employed to do that job. It's a much better way of understanding your customers than an orchestrated focus group and shows more internal commitment than that gimmicky policy of working on the shop-floor at Christmas.

Customer Service Isn't New.

Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Hsieh have picked up a lots of plaudits for focussing their Le Web talks on customer service. Deservedly so. But this is nothing new. That they seem so insightful to many people is simply an indictment of the levels to which things have been allowed to fall.

Customer service has always been there. It's encapsulated in the P of product. If you think that your product is simply that which your customer buys from you, you're deluding yourself. They're buying the product/service plus everything that you provide to make the consumption of that product an enjoyable and fulfilling experience that makes them better at doing something.

I once heard a marketing professor postulate a 5th marketing P (for Phacilitating Services) to emphasise just that fact. He was right because his base example of this was IBM's reputation for post-sales service and support in the 60s, but he was also wrong. Wrong because separating it from the product suggests that it's a marketing option you can choose to prioritise or not.

Customer service shouldn't be the centralised, prescriptive provision that all too easily conjures up images of mission statments, faux sincerity and ranks of low-paid transient phone-jockeys. It should be a distributed, pervasive culture in which everybody can fearlessly act on their own initiative to right a wrong or create a memorable interaction. Customer sevice is not an add-on, it's a necessity.

You Heard It Here First.

The Nokia store that I criticised on this blog back in April and August of 2008 is to close.

In this report, it is claimed that the failure of the £4 million investment was because "the store may have proved a little “extravagant” in terms of cost". No, it was because you couldn't use the phones. And worse than that, it was just a store.

Addendum: The Apple store across the street continues to flourish, but I notice that the staff are getting a little more officious. I recently witnessed people being dissuaded from using computers to check their email because this is an "iphone activation area". Are they in danger of becoming just a store? Not yet.

Behavioural Marketing.

Iain really liked this campaign and bracketed it with Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice. While I like it, it's not much more than a digital version of the traditional promotional competition. The key for me is that it's utilising technology rather than the behaviours related to that technology. It works but it's not new.

Social media and digital aren't inherently new behaviours, they're new technologies/ecosystems that facilitate existing behaviours. But where Burger King was really smart was in placing a new version of that behaviour - Facebook friending - at the centre of its interaction. A behaviour that hadn't existed without the technology.

Marketing is all about behaviour, but changing behaviour is really difficult to do. It's much smarter to adapt your marketing to existing behaviours in a way that gets the user to think about your product/service and perhaps become inclined to change another behaviour.

Don't Just Focus On The Big Idea?

Last week, Faris (a big thinker) asked me "What's the Big idea?" We were in a pub - where such questions often get asked - and it was the day of the UK ad industry's Battle of Big Thinking where a number of mutual friends (including Amelia and Katy) had, no doubt, spoken eloquently and brilliantly about a variety of ideas.

But were they big ideas? Is social media a big idea? Is branding? Faris and I agreed that fire and alcohol might both be classified as big ideas, but we weren't sure about the rest.

Big idea are big because they are so rare and yet businesses are obsessed with having them, be that in their product range or their marketing. That seems like a futile effort to me. The only important big idea for business is their underlying strategy which should underpin everything they do - though, of course, the search for the big idea often causes them to ignore that fact.

That aside, it's much better to focus on having a lot of arguably smaller ideas: small ideas that can have immediate impact, small ideas that can generate further small ideas and small ideas that might just turn out to be slightly bigger than you first thought.

The Medium Is the Message.

Last week, I attended an unusual evening built around neuroscientist David Eagleman's book of short stories about what happens when you die.

As well as the engaging conversation of Phillip Pullman, there were a series of live and recorded readings by luminaries such as Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry and Miranda Richardson. And it was this that fascinated me - some of us preferred the live performances, others found ourselves more engaged in the disembodied voice of the recorded readings.

In an attention economy, it is crucial to remember that distraction takes many different forms.

Thank You Notes.

It was interesting to hear a group of newspaper letter-editors reporting an increase in one type of letter. The type where readers make public their appreciation of customer service that they have recently received.

Therein lies the seeds of an economic direct-mail campaign focussed on every local newspaper in your markets, but I'd say it was safer and smarter to focus on your customer service quality and let your customers do the direct-mail part for you.

The (Same Old) 4Ps Of Marketing 2.0.

When the new "paradigm" comes along, people often describe it in ways that differentiate it totally from what came before. Often to enhance their guru status. That's a mistake. Revolution is rare - evolution far less so. Relating the new to the old can be much more insightful and is also more welcomed by the unconverted.

In that vein, I prefer to look at marketing 2.0 in terms of existing frameworks rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the two ends of the transfer are still essentially the same - there is stuff and there are customers. They may be changed people and it often is new stuff, but the real changes lie in the interaction between the two. The traditional 4Ps still apply, but they present new problems.


Price

Economic theory dictates that equilibrium prices equal marginal cost. In the digital world of cost-less replication, that price is increasingly tending towards zero.

While that may not make obvious business sense to producers, there is all too often someone who will think they can do this profitably via aggregation or just delusion and there is increasingly an audience who expect it to be so. Thus, even if you are not valuing your worth at zero, they are.

Solution – sell something with a marginal cost greater than zero.


Place

This used to mean distribution and it used to be on the high street. Now its more likely to mean visibility and is increasingly found online – not necessarily for the final purchase, but certainly for the discovery

It’s not so much about identifying the best places to capture physical footfall. It’s about being wherever the digital footfall is. Fish where the fish are – don’t expect them to come to you anymore. Just as "now is preferable to free", so too is proximity.

Solution – be searchable, findable and spreadable.


Promotion

Promotion has all too often been confused for the totality of marketing. Moreover, it's arguably been shown to be less effective than previously believed. Vested interests resist but we have to think more closely and seriously about what we mean by promotion (not just advertising) and what the role of marketing/promotion is.

As connectivity gets greater, promotion gets smaller – that doesn't mean restricted, just more personal. Don’t dictate what users do with your offering, just give them space to use it and reason to proselytise it.


Solution - fan club not fanfare.


Product

Product is still the most important element of the marketing mix. It's just clearer that this is the case, that bad products are more easily uncovered/spoken about and that the definition of product must be expanded to include customer service and usability.

Your product/service has, of course, to be unique and remarkable. But what has changed is the "always in beta" philosophy of "fail quickly, fail cheaply". You don't dictate what the product is, you make a suggestion and adapt it in response to your users' wishes.

Solution - have a point of view, not a point of functional differentiation.


Bottom line - you can create all the additional Ps you like. Yes, we need to consider participation, permission and proximity. Just don't tell me that's new or that the old disciplines no longer apply. It isn't and they do.

Have You Heard the One About Differentiation?

I read this in an unlinked article about the threat that online plagiarism presents to comedians' live performances.

The secret is to be unique so that they can't steal from you: "That's what comics should think about: it's not the jokes; it's about themselves. It's about your personality. They can't appropriate "you".

I'm sure you can see that the marketing punch-line writes itself.

Marketer Of The Year.

"My customers will be happy I've been honest with them."
"I own my shelf-space and I can do anything I want with it."
"I don't work, I just play all day long."

More wisdom than you'll get from any marketing conference.

Marketing Isn't A Destination.

One of my biggest gripes about the development of marketing is the increasing trend towards the outsourcing of thinking and execution to third party agencies.

It's not that the work done by those agencies is necessarily bad - indeed as a result of writing this blog I've had the pleasue of meeting innumerable practitoners who are smart, funny and conscientious (though rarely glamorous).

The problem is that they cannot be as invested in your company as you are and they shouldn't know your customers better than you do. But, all too often, marketing directors run the risk of becoming administrators of these third-party relationships rather than poduct/service champions.

Their career development is predicated on the budgets they manage rather than the results they achieve. They become the "client" and develop a client mindset. They forget that the true client is, in fact, the customer. And from there, it's all downhill.

Trust.

Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

That's the final sentence from a piece in today's New York Times about online hook-ups, but it uses all the adjectives that marketers should be double-checking. Marketing is not about conversations, it's about the quality and nature of the conversations you have and when you have them.

Fan Clubs Not Fanfares.

Fanfares feed the egos of creators and advertisers.
Fan Clubs feed the needs of prospective and existing customers.

Fanfares are big, extrovert and short-lived.
Fab Clubs are small, introvert and long-lasting.

Fanfares aim to create water cooler moments.
Fan Clubs are the water cooler.


As connectivity gets bigger, marketing gets smaller.

Social Media Guru.

Word Of Mouth.

Lately, I've noticed a worrying increase in conversations and conferences around the issue of word of mouth and influencers. The industry's reaction to the realisation that people are ignoring their messaging is seemingly to search for an alternate way to control the message.

But if you're asking how do we generate word of mouth around our product/service, you're asking the wrong question. It leads to short-lived stunts, misplaced sponsorships and seemingly the resurrection of the debunked concept of the influencer. The latter can be the only explanation for a new frozen fish campaign in the UK being fronted by a retired rugby player.

The question is not how do we generate word of mouth? The question is how do we make our product/service so remarkable that it generates word of mouth?

The answer is to create and continually improve a product/service that makes the users feel better about their lives - whether that be in terms of perceived desirability, genuinely increased enjoyment or improved capabilities and confidence. And that's why generating authentic and persisting word of mouth is so difficult.

Light And Shade And Marketing Myopia.

If you go down to the Tate Modern today, this installation will greet you. All the pre-publicity described it as terrifying, but it is essentially a very large, unlit metal container into which you ascend. It's not very terrifying and it's not actually very dark. Your eyes soon adjust and easily discern the other people therein.

A couple of years ago, I walked into Anthony Gormley's steam cloud cube at the Hayward Gallery and was completely disoriented. I couldn't see beyond a couple of inches in front of me and people were consistently bumping into each other. It was an eye-opening experience.

Photograph taken by Stephen White

It turns out that black isn't necessarily dark and that white can be. Marketers should be very pleased about that. Too often, they're not.

Addendum: And sometimes, like art critics, they even get indignant if their users don't react as expected or, worse still, told.

The 8 Ps Of Performance Marketing.

Expanding upon the thinking behind my post about the lessons of live performance for marketers, I've come up with eight attributes of great performance. They all begin with P. That's the law.

Presence: Great performers command their stage.
You should command your category.

Purpose: Great performers exude so that their presence is unquestioned.
You have to similarly exude a sense of purpose, the reason you’re there.

Personality: Great performers radiate humanity and enjoyment.
You should too.

Prescience: Great performers never seem dated.
You'll be supplanted by the new if you don't do the same.

Poise: Great performers adapt to their audience, but crush hecklers.
You should listen to your users, but ignore or destroy trolls.

Playfulness: Great performers understand the power of humour and play.
You will slowly alienate your audience if you insist on being too serious.

Pacing: Great performers never coast.
You risk losing your audience if you do.

Persistence: Great performers don’t assume an encore, they earn it.
You should too.

Misanthropic Marketing.

I received an unsolicited email the other day.

Apologies for the out of the blue email. However, we thought that you may be interested in a free guest post for your blog which is based on SEO, Internet and viral marketing. The article will be completely free, unique and written specifically for your blog. The article will contain a link back to our website as per my email signature.

The article will be written by ********* who is a well-known SEO expert and internet marketer. He was rated #2 most influential marketer in the UK and 37th in the world in 2008. He also helps many large well-known household brands improve their visibility on the internet.

We would love to add to your already well-written and informative blog. As previously mentioned it will be completely free and we will produce the article within a few days if you agree to accept our offer.

Of course, I have never heard of this great influencer. And I somehow doubt his credentials given his desire to introduce a totally different tone of voice onto this blog. Hasn't he read about "authenticity" or does he just spin that to his doubtless myriad clients?

For better or worse, everything here comes from me (and that incidentally is why I have been posting less frequently lately - I'm keen to avoid repeating myself for the sake of writing a post). There are no third parties and if I have nothing new to say, then I won't be writing anything. I practice what I preach. My "well known" correspondent doesn't. He's not interested in my readers, he's interested in what they can do for him. Don't let your company fall into the same trap.

Decide To Misuse It.

While explaining their new customised newspaper business, Russell presciently observed that what they were saying to the industry was

"We've broken your business model, now give us your machines."
I was reminded of this last week during a presentation by an architect from Zaha Hadid's company. He was explaining how he had borrowed some CGI software to automatically generate a variety of ways to populate a piece of land with buildings. It was largely incomprehensible to me, but it seemed to work. And then he threw away this line.

"We just decided to misuse it."
Marketing is all too often about using tools, be that direct mail or a television campaign. The real skill is deciding how to use or misuse them.

That's something that's going to be increasingly true at a strategic level too. If the tools of your trade are the tools of a failing business model, you have no choice but to misuse them.

Performance Marketing.

Attention. Interest. Desire. Action. The goals of one famous marketing pathology. And the goals of any performer too.

I've already written about the marketing parallels of the way comedians end their shows, but attending a recent show by Sunset Rubdown reminded me how all our marketing should aim to mirror a live performance. It must be audience-grabbing, exhilarating, pacy and memorable. It's a one-off chance to impress and you have to perform.

Stealing a page from the Springsteen playbook, Sunset Rubdown started their show with three songs uninterrupted with a panache and utter confidence that had the audience eating out of their hand and me rather impressed. But then they paused to swap instruments and roles and the momentum was lost. This was repeated throughout the set and seemed to me to lose the majority of the audience and diminish their reaction.

I've since disagreed with some fans about but realise they are akin to the early adopters - and thus willing to put up with flaws because of their passionate devotion. But the majority are not so loyal and pacing is something that has to be addressed. They are a great band but, for me, they didn't recognise that live performance is a different medium and requires different techniques.

I'll return to this in more detail later, but if your marketing doesn't have the energy and focus of a great performance, you won't be getting the ovation you seek.

Misunderstood Marketing Terms: 1) Niche.

Niche does not mean too small for others to bother with - though it might start that way.

Niche does not mean specialist - though it might start that way.

Niche does not mean a different marketing mentality - though it might start with different tactics due to size of audience and budget.

Every market segment is a niche. Niche simply reflects customer focus. Coca Cola are niche marketers. So are you.

Remember Whose Time It Is.

I read a promotional message that assured me time was running out. Specifically, time was running out if I wanted to sign up for a seminar deigned to make my life/business happier/more profitable.

The time that was running out was not mine, but the sender's. They were running out of time in which to sign me up.

Time is the quintessential scarce resource and thus a potent trigger to action. But you have to ensure that the time you reference in your marketing activities is solely that of your prospects. If you don't, it won't seem truly personal and, like me, they won't sign up.

Collaboration.

Two aphorisms I heard this week.

"If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together."

"Stand on each others' shoulders, rather than on each others' toes"

The former is a Chinese proverb quoted by neuroscientist John Cacciopo in his excellent book about Loneliness, the latter a definition of open-source computing. Both speak to the benefit of teamwork - which, I think, is very different to simply working in teams.

Leave Something To The Imagination.

Maybe this is where we as consumers are missing a trick. Too many toys do all the work of imagination for the kids, actually making them less imaginative not brighter. Every subsequent toy has to be more and more exciting as a result, whereas the kid just becomes an observer to the next fifty quids-worth of mass produced plastic as opposed to the designer of their own little piece of genius.

Someone making an observation about his baby's infatuation with a toilet-roll. An observation that has implications for marketing, communication and product development.

Marketing Is Strategic, Not Tactical.

The Bahamas Tourist board are apparently sponsoring the next Mariah Carey album. The former still thinking that exposure is their goal. The latter seeking to guarantee cashflow and not wondering how that might impact her artistic credibility. I give up.

Cutting The Line.

Three lessons from my post office.

1) Don't put a sign announcing changes at the entrance.

It seems logical to put it there, but people have been visiting the post office since they were young and they are not there to browse. They have a purpose and will purposefully walk straight past your sign because they know what they want to do and will not be seeking guidance. If you want to change their behaviour, a sign won't cut it. You have to understand their existing behaviour and adapt to it.

2) Don't dislocate human contact with your customer.

Yes, the queues/lines are a source of dissatisfaction. The solution is to reduce the waiting time not to displace it by getting people to sit down and wait for a number to be called. Moreover, a queue does give the customer some sense of connectedness with their goal where waiting for a number to be called with no indication of "time till service" is alienating.

(Side note - if you do have an indicator of "time till service", make sure it's accurate and make sure it counts down - unlike that in my revamped council office that identified me as the only person waiting for attention from a particular department and proclaimed my waiting time as 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 15 as the attention failed to materialise. Seeing your waiting time reduce is encouraging, seeing your waiting time being relayed to you is beyond annoying).

3) Don't berate customers for not understanding your new system.

Were a customer to stride past your sign on the way to buying some stamps and then stop bemusedly when assailed with an interior that looked like a doctor's waiting room with faux-leather banquettes scattered around, don't ask him if he's got a ticket. Ask him how you can help. And if he were hypothetically to ask what sort of stupid system this was, don't answer one in which queue jumpers are frowned upon. He might take offence at the implication, he might never darken your doors again and he might write to the chief executive about it. Hypothetically, of course.

The queue is never the real problem, the wait is.

500 Days Of Summer.

Some blogs recently suggested that fiction titles were better sources of business advice than the traditional non-fiction tomes.

Accordingly I was going to recommend the new movie 500 Days of Summer as a guide to the futility of trying to match your product/service with people who are just not interested. But that's not why you go to movies, so I leave what you take from it up to you.

I'll simply recommend it highly and, in line with the impact of previous recommendations here, I expect its success further to confirm my influencer status.

Marketing Encore.

One of the oddest aspects of live performance is the end of a comedian's set. The end of a theatrical or a musical performance is usually very obvious. Climactic even. The audience shows its appreciation and there may well be an encore or a curtain call.

In comedy, the performer tells a final joke and that's it. You don't really know it's the last joke until they say "thank you and good night". And is there anything more incongruous than a comedy encore? The performers who've thought this through are few and far between, they stand out a mile and they tend to be the best performers anyway.

The way you take your leave of your audience is much under-rated. First impressions are important, but so are last ones. Is your audience's last impression one of resisting unwanted up selling offers, one of indifference as you look for the next prospect or one of unsatisfied needs that leave them in the same position they were when you strove to make that first impression?

Or is it something that cleanly ends the encounter in a way that leaves them eager for an encore?

Customer Service By The Book.

I walked into the sneaker store. Within seconds, an assistant asked if he could help me. My response was to point out that I had just arrived and might need his assiatnce shortly.

The timing of when you address your customers is arguably even more important than what you say. Good customer service takes that into account. Regimented customer service manuals do not.

Geek Marketing 101 (revisited).

Three years ago today, I posted a guide to my views on marketing disguised as a discussion of technology marketing. It became my most viewed post (thanks Guy Kawasaki). Three years on, I think it still applies. Three years hence, I fear, marketers will be making the same mistakes.


Geek Marketing 101 is so named because I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.

1) Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). Promotion and sales are just sub-sets of marketing.

2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don't speak geek.
Successful technology marketing must translate the creations of the uncommunicative into the needs of the untechnical. Spin is not good marketing. Lucid two-way communication is.

3) Simplicity does not negate complexity.
Reductive marketing that simplifies ideas does not undersell your complex creation. It facilitates an entree to your world. You can't have passionate users until they start using.

4) Think what, not how?
Think of the "product" in terms of what it does, not how it does it. You may be interested in the latter, but your users generally aren't. Portable computer memory is not a difficult concept to enunciate, yet flash drive and USB drive nomenclature is predicated on technological aspects not the actual function. Long words confuse, don't they?

5) Think will, not can.
Think of the "product" in terms of what most people will be happy doing with it and not in the myriad possibilities it offers. You may think speed and multiple settings are hot, but outside the lab such attributes may not provide the greatest satisfaction. Simple, intuitive interfaces will.

6) Only you RTFM.
Regular people don't read the manual. It's too big (see 5), too complicated (see 3) and thus incomprehensible. It's not that people are averse to science and technology - they're averse to being made to feel helpless. The demand for books that simplify science is huge the world over. Your manual is marketing.

7) Technical Support is marketing.
In the absence of all of the above, your users inevitably need help. A technical support department speaking in non-technical, hand-holding language transforms their purchase from waste of money to life-enhancing boon and is the greatest marketing tool you have.

8) You're not marketing to people who hate marketing.
Don't allow your misguided prejudices about advertising and snake-oil to infect your approach and damage sales. People hate hype, spin and unfulfilled expectations. They do not hate having their needs met (see 1).

9) You're not marketing to people who hate technology products.
They're not Luddites, but nor are they geeks - that's what you're paid to be. However, they often hate how technology products make them feel because blinding with science is as bad as baffling with bullshit.

10) Marketing demystifies.
As the conversations develop, the users comprehend your products better and you better understand their needs. With increased confidence, they utilise more and more of your geekiness and, with increased awareness, you are better able to adapt to their behaviours. They feel more warmly about geeks and you may get the chance to buy them a drink. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?

Sign Of The Times.

All too often, "marketing" adds unnecessary detail and blurs the message. Why say soon when you give me the actual date? I know what soon means. And now I'm thinking about the composition of your message and not thinking about your message at all.

The Best Definition Of A Blog.

Your website is an image.
Your blog is a reflection.

Courtesy of Thomas Mahon of English Cut. Not a bad definition of effective maketing when you come to think about it, is it?

Inertia Marketing.

How do you buy things? Do you try new options in the myriad categories you consume or do you just buy what you usually buy? I'd contend that even the most ardent early adopter is pretty lazy and disinteretsed in the majority of their purchases.

That's why it's cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. That's why a lot of advertising serves as post-purchase reassurance (and will not be going away anytime soon). And that's why you have to do something remarkable to get people to change their habits.

Inertia is your true competition.

Sum Of The Marketing Whole.

That's nearly £20 per day! Or to put it another way, never assume that any single element of your marketing will be considered in isolation. Not even the last-minute, additional strap-line on your sales advertisement.

Make Marketing Simple.

It's all about making every aspect of the product/service experience as good as they can be and thereby making the user feel great about their achievements/ownership.

But job one is making every aspect of the product/service experience as straightforward as possible and thereby not making the user feel stupid.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes.

A recent review of the scientific literature has controversially suggested that breastfeeding does not bestow the benefits that have been claimed for it in recent times.

..it is very hard to separate the benefits of the mother’s milk from the benefits of the kind of mother who chooses to breastfeed.....In other words, breastfeeding studies could simply be showing what it’s like to grow up in a family that makes an effort to be healthy and responsible, as opposed to anything positive in breast milk.


I'm not qualified to question that view and the logic does seem valid, but by chance I recently heard Sarah Blaffer Hrdy mention (in an aside about infant abandonment) that primates who breastfeed experience increased prolactin and oxytocin levels which helps them bond with their offspring.

The marketing lessons: replication isn't enough and the most significant impact of your product/service isn't always the obvious one.

Common Sense Isn't.

In recent weeks, I've blogged less frequently than before because I felt it had all been said and that surely everybody knows this stuff.

But tonight, I heard industry practitioners speaking of clients worried about losing control of their messaging, obsessed with identifying those mythical influencers and, best of all, of the opinion that "the internet was only for people who love us or hate us - when we should surely be focussing on the indifferent masses."

Perhaps your competitors don't know half as much as you think they do. Perhaps that gives you a great opportunity to steal a march on them.

Direct Marketing 101.

This full-page Siemens ad appeared in today's Times. Complete with those two boxes obscuring the image.



Now I've nothing against VR codes. My friend used the first one in the UK, but did so via a full-size outdoor poster which was one big VR code. Here it's slotted in as an afterthought - one that won't reach many people, one that distracts from the rest of the copy and one that ruins the design.

It's effectively asking the readers to do something (scan the code)before they can find out what it is Siemens want to tell them. That's like the url that leads to a webpage with an "Enter here" button. That's like the customer service number that leads to a labyrinthine telephone menu. That's like the headline offer that forgets to tell you about the small print. It's all bad marketing.

If you've somehow earned the customer's scarce attention, then at least have the sense to tell them something. Directly.

Say It Ain't So.

Manuel Castells bored me rigid tonight while discussing his new book about power relations and networked societies, but he did suggest that a nugget of information is five times more likely to register in one's brain if it conforms to one's existing beliefs.

He suggested that this was why liberals listened to NPR and Republicans watched Fox News and that the media didn't actually lead opinions. I saw it as powerful confirmation of the idea that communications can only bolster what people already believe about specific products and services. If your product/service isn't credible, you can't convince people otherwise.

Let's Get Physical?

Projects that translate digital content into something physical (combining the ease of the former with the tangibility of the latter) are all the rage in the marketing world. They speak to some basic human needs for tactility and possession and are a reaction to the increasing virtuality of many people's lives.

While I love the whole idea of this Nike project and its modernisation of the age-old tradition of chalking messages on the Tour de France road, I'm not sure it is physical enough. If yours is one of the 100,000 messages, what is the likelihood of your seeing it? The race is, after all, nearly 2000 miles and three weeks long.

Obviously, a lot of these issues will have been addressed but, in the context of such a huge "tarmac "billboard", is it personal enough? Or is it simply physical?

The Congestion Of The Crowd.

Listening to Chris Anderson discuss his new book Free last week was an uneasy experience for me. Not because of my feelings about the limits of his argument, but because I realised I knew about ten to fifteen percent of the audience. While it was great to catch up with many of them afterwards, I was struck that my learning would be more differentiated and therefore valuable if I were in an audience of strangers.

This was confirmed a few evenings later, when I sat in an audience of strangers at a design seminar where various designers spoke of their influences and inspirations pecha-kucha style. Admittedly, I was there because I knew three of the nine people on stage, but that was pretty much all I knew. No prizes for guessing which experience was the more inspirational, informative and intoxicating.

Since you want to make your product/service stand out from the crowd, it really helps if you occassionally do so too. Looking at the world through different eyes is a great way to start.

I Am Not A Number.

Two recent snippets of information that came my way.

Channel 4 Television commissioned some research into teenagers so as to better tailor its education programming. Urban Tribes revealed that 50% of them consider themselves to be "alternative" while only 25% admitted to being "mainstream".

Jonathan Ive, Apple's creative director, reminded his audience this week that "we don't do focus groups".

Knowing best is all about really knowing and not just receiving answers and assuming they represent knowledge.

Make Marketing Interesting.

The resurgence of sales that follows an artist's death is just one example of the social aspect of consumption. Output that has been ignored in recent years suddenly become hugely popular and Amazon sales rise 700-fold.

It's all a timely confirmation of a recent New Scientist article that discusses the longevity of performers' careers extending beyond their peak. The reason? People are social animals who like/need to share common ground.

The human desire to find common ground in conversation pushes us to discuss already popular people.

The long tail of marketing is not one of low sales across a wide range of products, it's a long tail of continued sales across a wide range of time. Making your marketing interesting now will ensure that it remains interesting long into the future.

The Feel Of A Name

A woman was explaining to me tonight how the url of her new venture was pleasing to type in the sense of the relative movements of either hand.

This had occurred by luck rather than design, but it makes one think. I'm personally a little sceptical about the positive impact of a product or service name - unless it is a spectacularly good one. But making it easy/fun to type might be a clever reinforcer and a way to utilise the impact of the sense of touch in a previously unconsidered way.

Holding Out For A Hero's Story.

Intel's latest campaign takes the idea of creating a story to heart by looking at the concept of hero/rock-star in a different way and thereby differentiating their tone of voice.

Storyspace Is the New Airtime.

Marketers have traditionally spent a lot of their budget on obtaining airtime or its equivalent in various media. Exposure was deemed to be the direct route to attention and maybe interest.

Purefold suggests the provocative alternative of focussing one's budget on acquiring as big a share of the "storyspace" as possible.

Their stories are creative-commons-protected, crowd-sourced ideas centred upon subjects suggested and sponsored by businesses. Yours don't need to be. But you do need to have stories around which a crowd will congregate.

What Do You Want Your Customers To Say?

You're in a restaurant. You've been served and are eating your meal. Your table is then approached by a waiter/waitress and you can be asked one of two questions.

1) Is everything OK?

2) Is there anything else I can help you with?

Unless you're particularly belligerent or annoyed, your response to the first will probably be a polite "yes, thank you" regardless of the situation. You'll feel faintly patronised and the establishment will learn nothing about how to improve their service nor understand why you don't return.

Always ask questions that give you meaningful answers. You may not always like them, but it's far preferable to sticking your head on the sand.

Give And Take Marketing.

I was told yesterday that Yahoo had recently upgraded their messenger service for mac users. Was that person happy? No, because after waiting a long time for this improved version to be offered, he discovered that he would have to upgrade his otherwise perfectly adequate computer in order to use it.

I imagine that would be frustrating enough if he had to continue to use the previous software, but I was then told that while launching the new version, Yahoo had decided to make the original obsolete.

Now my friend is I'm sure in the minority of messenger users, but who knows how sizeable a minority? Compelling a frustrated user to become a non-user unless he is prepared to spend a significant amount of money on a hardware upgrade seems to me to be a very perverse act for a non-hardware company to make. I don't see the upside for them. And I know their former user is intent on ensuring they don't have one.

Marketing Mugs.

During eleven years of treatment for mental illness, performance artist Bobby Baker created a painting each day. Until August, a selection of them can be seen at The Wellcome Collection in London. They include a brilliant evocation of uncontrollable weeping and are all accompanied by captions such as

Terribly Tiny Dr T wearing her psychiatrist's shoe arriving in her shiny black Saab convertible to save our sanity.

and this one that particularly took my eye.

I drew quite a lot of mugs. I drank a lot of tea.

A nice summary of marketing's true aim. It's not about making your customers drink a lot of tea, it's about making your customers think about mugs which in turn will cause them to drink a lot of tea.

Authentic Vernacular.

If it doesn't ring true, there's no way you will make a prospective customer believe it. In marketing, hope conquers nothing.

Value Judgements.

Making general quality claims is bad enough. But as soon as you mention pennies and have the timerity not to mention what you'll be charging the customers, you've definitely lost them. How do you know what they consider to be good value?

They're the customers' pennies you're talking about, not yours. Customers judge value, not you. Don't tell them that you provide value for money, just make sure you do so unquestionably.


Addendum: Stella Artois' "reassuringly expensive" is the line they surely wish they could have used.

Nothing To Say?

If you say something when you have nothing to say then, at best, you will bore people; at worst, you will annoy and alienate them.

Since they have limited attention to expend, people don't want to waste any of it on your non-statements, so you should only say something if you have something to say.

If you truly have nothing to say, then the best policy is to say nothing.

The corollary, of course, is the redeployment of some of the time and money you would have wasted by making a song and dance about nothing. A redeployment towards examining the pressing question of why your business is so uninspiring to you, let alone your potential customers, that you find yourself having nothing to say.

Smarter Recession Marketing.

The reaction of many businesses to difficult economic conditions is to cut back marketing spending in line with general internal cost-cutting and to focus on providing value for money by cutting prices.

The former may reap some long-term benefits in helping to identify those marketing efforts that are most cost-effective, but it also suggests that marketing is viewed as an expense rather than an investment. Moreover, it also implies that you're in the same boat as everyone else and that you product/service is as vulnerable to a downturn as your competitors.

Wouldn't it be smarter to emphasise your difference from the competition and thereby your confidence in the value of what you're selling? Wouldn't it be smarter to emphasise the value for money you provide by focusing on quality, durability and relevance? Wouldn't it be smarter to think of totally different approaches and might there even be some mileage in showing their purchases to be a quasi-social investment in the well-being of the economy?

Cost-cutting is fine and entirely necessary where it is a case of trimming wasted effort and expense, but that applies at all times. As does the marketing imperative to be different, to be note-worthy, to be remarkable. It's amazing how many businesses forget that when times get hard.

Customer Satisfaction Cannot Be Bought.

An awful lot of marketing is predicated upon the incentivisation of customers. Offer them financial discounts and/or perceived psychological benefits and they will buy your product/service.

In contrast, the Yale-based weight-loss site stickk.com is predicated on research that suggests that avoiding a negative outcome is much more of a behaviour enforcer. Facing a self-imposed financial loss if you fail to meet your target is apparently much more of a spur to continued action than being offered a positive reward.

The concept of opportunity cost which states that the true cost of something is having to forgo the next best option) seems to me to back this up and has been at the heart of my belief that not reducing customer irritation while avoiding blandness. A reward is nice, but inevitably short-lived. Having disappointment removed is less obvious but ultimately more noticeable.

Customer Data Should Help The Customer Too.

Conference badges are simple things. You fill in a form for an event and some days, weeks or months later you're wearing a badge with some of that data on it.

But is it the data you want to appear on you badge? Have you ever been prompted regarding which lines of data (company or occupation for example) will actually appear on the badge or in the yearbook or in some other piece of potential self-promotion.

If you're collecting data, you're no doubt keen on building a database of attendees in a format that makes your life easy and will allow you to market to them in the future. Wouldn't it be better marketing if you spent a little time showing that you were also aware of the self-promotion opportunities that they wanted to exploit?

Letting them know/influence how their badge will look is just one very simple way of potentially delighting them. But because it falls under the label of conference administration and not conference marketing, nobody does it. The business world is filled with missed marketing opportunities and most of them will cost you nothing.

Look Behind The Customer Numbers

Last year when I attended Innocent's first AGM, there was a lot of heated discussion about their test-marketing smoothies within McDonald's outlets. This was an act that certain evangelistic customers seemed to feel was a betrayal of their ethical principles.

Thus, at Innocent's second AGM this weekend, there was an expectation of a lot of dissent regarding the recent sale of a slice of the business to Coca Cola. That it didn't really materialise was a reminder that noise does not equate to strength of feeling. Later, in discussion with one of the founders, it emerged that they had received 260 complaints. For a compamy with sales of 100 million smoothies a year, that's a very small number.

I've always said that to create a great product/service, it's imperative to focus on eliminating annoyances for your customers, but you also have to keep the numbers in perspective. It's what lies behind them that counts - as evidenced by another number that I discovered. Specifically that, on their ninth birthday, 38 customers chose of their own volition to send birthday cakes to the company.

260 complaints versus 38 birthday cakes. I know which number I find more compelling.

Customer Facing Marketing (Update).

Two alternative approaches to dealing with the persistant complaining customer (i.e. me as detailed here.

One company accepted that I was right and they were wrong (or more specifically "somebody at the service centre doesn't understand how to do percentages") and a refund is coming my way. I conceivably may buy from them again.

The other accepted that I was right, tells me that I should have been kept better informed and then offers me a 10% discount on future purchases within the next six months. I have no incentive to buy from them again.

Right the wrong quickly and you may still have a customer. Act as if you expect repeat business from a dissatisfied customer and you won't.

Measurement Maketh Marketing?

A number of recent conversations with advertising people have featured their defending of campaigns designed to "raise awareness" of a product/service. Of course, with the exception of the impulse purchase, it is probably important that a potential customer has some awareness of your offering, but I've always been concerned that awareness carries no inherent implication of action.

If your marketing solely raises awareness of your existence, it's more than likely raising an equal awareness of your category and will result in a general sales spike for you and your competitors. Unless your marketing prompts awareness coupled with genuine interest and, I would argue, a degree of real desire to purchase, then there is no guarantee that your sales spike will be better than your competitors.

In an age of metrics, building awareness has the advantage of being a goal that is reasonably convincingly measurable in terms of unprompted customer recall (though prompted recall still seems totally disingenuous to me). But to do so is to elevate measurement above effectiveness as your marketing goal. It's the difference between being Miss/Mr Congeniality and the one that everyone wants to date.

The 4 C's Of Social Objects.

What the world definitively does not need now is yet another blogpost about social objects. I just want to remind you that regardless of what social media agencies might say, the social does not have to be about socialising in the sense of directly interacting or indulging in the dreaded conversation.

Consider that most quoted of social objects the iPod. It fulfils 4 C's of social media, but conversation is the last of them because it's specifically designed to isolate you from conversations. Remember that when you think of social objects in respect of your own marketing efforts.


Copying

Talking is just one way that we communicate. As Mark continues to tell us, ideas spread predominantly via copying. We see something that we like and we adopt it ourselves. We don't have to discuss it with the previous user. The "conversation" has happened anyway.

Confirmation

Confirmation follows from copying. Seeing the social uptake of something we've bought serves to confirm to us that we made a good choice. Nobody needs to tell us that, but every time we see it, we feel better about our decision and the product/service. A lot of marketing (think car advertising) works on that post-purchase reinforcement.

Communality

We see fellow users and delight in the realisation that not only did we make the right choice, but that the act of doing so ordained us with membership of a community of like-minded, savvy people. Our people, but not necessarily people with whom we have to have a conversation. Kathy Sierra summed it up perfectly when she wrote of the nod.

Conversation

And finally there is conversation. But it's not conversation about the product/service. Most of the time (as I wrote before) we don't want that. However, we enjoy conversations that spring from the preceding C's. Those are the conversations you want to inspire or simply faciliate amongst your users and prospects.

Interruptive conversations are much more interruptive than they are conversational and are the result of imposing an old communication model or a new communciation world. Avoid them and your product's social life will be a much richer and happier one.

A Nonsense Of Customer Service Urgency.

We confirm receipt of your letter addressed to the Managing Director who has referred the matter for our urgent attention.

A member of our customer service team will get back to you within ten working days.

Can you spot the dissonance between the words and the promised action? It's not what you say that counts, it's what you do.

The speed of resolution isn't really that important either. After all, some problems are more complex than others. Thoroughness is good, but applying an arbitrary ten day response is not only daft, it's impersonal.

Will I be happy in ten days time. Who knows? Am I happy that it will take ten days before I get a clue of what they're thinking of doing? What do you think? The speed that matters is the speed with which you inform the customer what you're doing and not merely that you're doing something.

Your Prospect Is Always Right.

Good marketing is about helping the customer, informing the customer and crucially about not frustrating the customer.

My friend Mark McGuinness has a new angle on this. We're used to companies buying up multiple versions of url in order to capture any browser search, but I've not seen it done on Twitter. Mark realises that people like me might mis-spell his name so he's anticipated that and ensured that when I made that mistake, I was still just one click away from where I wanted to be.

He could have opted for an easily spelled pseudonym, but this is better. Not only does he "own" his name (which in itself makes it easier for users to find him), he shows that he's thinking about what they want before they even get to him. Attention to detail costs very little and returns a lot.

Escape From Cubicle Nation.

Pam Slim and I met in a non-descript corridor in the Austin Convention Center about six weeks ago. We'd known each other for some years. She was an early commenter on this blog and we'd spoken via phone and email on a frequent basis, but we'd never met. The fact that we immediately started chatting as if we'd seen each other yesterday speaks volumes to me and made me think.

Because if marketing is all about making people like your product/service so much that they want to hang out with it, wouldn't it be useful to ask oneself the question "What makes me like somebody?". Not with the aim of anthropomorphising your offering along the lines of the ghastly Microsoft Clippy, but to identify the traits that appeal on a human level.

For me, some that spring to mind are common sense, energy, intelligence, communication, transparency, realism, passion and fun. Pam has all these in abundance which is why I like her and which is why I think you'll like her book that came out yesterday. When the time comes that you choose or are forced to go it alone, you should have it (and her) by your side.

Customer Facing Marketing.

If this were a conference presentation, you might call these case-studies but really they're just personal customer experiences I've had this week.

1) A made to measure order from a household furnishings store. Delivery time 3 weeks "but will probably be ready in two - we'll call you". Four weeks later - no call. The response to my enquiry, "it hasn't been delivered yet, we'll call you when it is."

No apology = No repeat sales.

2) A twenty month old television explodes. It's no longer under warranty and the supplier doesn't accept (yet) that they sold me a defective product. Repair quotes vary from person to person and ultimately a sliding scale discount is offered due to age of product. Throughout the saga, the staff have been courteous and tried to help, but the processes and the incomprehensible paperwork have made it seem adversarial.

No transparency = No repeat sales.

3) A bottle of beer in a case clearly had a defective seal and I suffered a less than enjoyable taste sensation. The other bottles, so far, have been fine. I return the defective bottle to the supermarket complete with empty carton. I barely have to say a word before I receive a complete apology, a free case of beer and a gift certificate.

No arguments = No end of repeat sales.

Sainsbury's - from whom I made the smallest purchase - understand that it's all about customer service and word of mouth (and always has been). The other two don't.

No Claims Bonus.

The sign should obviously have read "Please do not touch. Even clean hands damage surfaces".

And all the others in the gallery did just that - or so I saw afterwards. But this was the first one I actually noticed. What I assume to be somebody's deliberate removal (damage) of one letter made it all the more noticeable.

The original notice delivers a message that goes unnoticed. The altered one is much more noticeable because it is visually haptic - you subconsciously feel it as well as read it.

If you just make claims, they'll be ignored. If you show them to be true, they won't be.

Measure For Measurement's Sake.

At a terrific discussion about Indian creativity this week, (where Vikram Seth was just one of the panellists), Amartya Sen spoke of how economists had spent far too long

"engaged in really silly fighting about how much mathematics to use in economics - it depends on how useful it is and sometimes it's frightfully useful - and other times it's a complete distraction.

Remember that when you're next asked about marketing ROI. And if your finance director doesn't know who Amartya Sen is, tell him or her that he's a Nobel laureate.

In economics.

Let Your Users Fill In The Blanks.

You've probably taken a Myers-Briggs pesonality test at least once in your life. You've possibly reacted with some surprise to the first personality signifier, the E or the I (which labels you extravert or introvert) because you didn't see youself as introverted. And you would have been very wrong because the Myers-Briggs' axis is not the same as the normal societal extrovert/introvert delineation.

Such presumptions abound in the corporatisation of social media. The "media" isn't about indiscriminate broadcasting of messages under the guise of socialising. The "social" isn't about transferring work and costs to you users under the guise of a conversion to collaborative media. But many organisations insist it is.

Similarly, true excellence in user experience lies in facilitating whatever users want, whenever they want it, but all too often user interfaces are about what someone else belives their user wants. They imagine they're providing a blank canvas but, in reality, they're providing their own interpretation of "blank".

If you assume or dictate, you have to be absolutely sure you're right. If you're prepared to be proactively reactive and truly put your users (with all their vagaries and demands) at the centre of all that you do, you're far more likely to find out what it is that is right.

Differentiate By Being Better.

Q. Why are so many new products so bland and derivative?

A. So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

source

Markets Always Change.

At a seminar about the future of music, I heard a provocative suggestion. If every cellphone owner were prepared to pay an average annual subscription of $10 for unlimited music, the numbers would look like this.

4 billion phones x $10 = $40 billion.

Current size of music industry = $20 billion.

Crisis, what crisis? Of course, the specifics are debateable, but the point is undeniable. Change the way you look at your business and all sorts of discoveries will follow. What's this got to do with marketing. Well not that much if you view marketing solely as promotion, but when you remember that it encompasses the P of place (aka distribution) you'll agree that marketing really has to be approached with a long-term perspective. Its short-term practitioners are the problem, not a symptom.

Markets always change. Always have, always will. It's a crucial marketing discipline to anticipate and, where possible, lead those changes.

Qualitative Research.

We are all customers.

We all know what we appreciate as customers.

We all know what we detest.

So why don't we treat our customers as we would wish to be treated?

How To Make Spreadable Marketing.

1) Take an understood and loved tradition, something that is already social and spreadable. Like the easter egg hunt.



2) Substitute your product and prime your passionate users ahead of time.



3) Make it simple (but not easy) and include as many people as possible.



4) Let people react to your generosity of spirit.





5) Maintain personal touch until the end.