Meet The New Year, Same As The Old Year.

In the past year, I've not posted that often. My reasoning was that after four years of blogging, I didn't think I had that much new to write. Marketing isn't rocket-science and genuinely new things don't come along all that often, so I was convinced that everybody must have heard it all before.

Of course, if that were true, the conference business would be in a parlous state indeed but the real point is that too many marketers are seduced by the new rather than the useful.

I'm not saying ignore the new. Far from it. It's your obligation to be aware of it, to understand it and to evaluate it. But, don't obsess about it to the expense of taking your eye of the ball. Some few elements of the new may have a medium to long term impact on your business, but they will do so in the medium to long term and that's not this year.

So, in 2011, dont think about new, think about better. Better may perhaps be something new, but it's more likely to be doing the old things much better.

The Art Of Marketing.

"Paint what you see, not what you know."

Strategic Mismarketing.

Yahoo are pilloried for closing down a number of their acquisitions after failing to develop them. Nokia have been called the place where great ideas go to die for similar reason and Google, News International and many others have received similar appraisals.

Outside the digital world, we know that the vast majority of product launches fail and I've often repeated the dirty secret of investment banking that most mergers denude shareholder value.

It's all symptomatic of a failure to understand markets; the consequent pursuit of quantity of customers over quality of customers; and the failure to recall that realisation that having high quality (i.e. long-term) customers is dependent on exhibiting requires high quality customer-centric behaviour at all times.

Flash Helmuts.

BMW's cinema ad above is getting a lot of online attention, but to me it's all flash and no substance. The portentous nonsense at the start of the clip is the worst type of quasi justification that says everything about creative cleverness and nothing about creative relevance. It's an attention-grabbing gimmick that draws attention to the gimmick.

Until you can link the clever idea to a genuine marketing goal, the clever idea should stay in the drawer.

Pursue Greatness.

A new documentary focuses on Bruce Springsteen's recording of Darkness on The Edge of town back in 1977. In an aside he recalled his musical ambitions back then.

I didn't want to be rich.
I didn't want to be famous.
I just wanted to be great.

Not a bad marketing philosophy when you think about it.

Fiddling With Value.

A woman and a friend sit in a coffee shop at a railway station. They're engrossed in their iPhones and serving staff later report that they also kept a close eye on their computers.

So much so that they didn't notice that the other package beneath their table had gone missing. All very 21st century. A busy environment, attention in one tech-related direction, thieves in the other. Nothing to write home about, except that the package contained a bow worth £62,000.

What does that tell us about our concept of value today? The social value of the phone connection and the related value of the computer seem to take precedence over the greater financial value of the package. The social tools were more important than the tools of her trade - for yes she was a violinist.

I don't know if that's a new phenomenon, but it's a timely reminder that value is constantly shifting depending on context and mood.

And yes the violin went missing too. It's apparently worth £1.2 million, but when you get into figures like that, you perhaps lose sight of what was really going on.

The Future Of The Marketing Director

Everyone’s writing self-serving pieces about the future of advertising, yet few of them seem to realise that the true subject is the future of marketing. Central to that is the future of the marketing director, an important role that has, all too often, relegated itself to some kind of administrator of outsourcing.

The reversal of that trend starts with knowing what marketing really is: acknowledging that it’s not just promotion, that it involves every touch-point with customers (how ever tangential) and knowing therefore that it includes the work of a lot of departments outside one’s own.

This means that the classic role of evangelist must be for much more than simply the product/service, it must also evangelise on behalf of marketing itself as well as its specific aims within the company. The future of the marketing director will therefore involve:

The marketing of marketing.

Firstly, the Board and senior management have to be convinced of the value of marketing as an integral part of the product/service (in accounting terms, an element of cost of goods sold rather than an expense). Until this is achieved, marketing will be under-valued.

Relating marketing to corporate strategy.

By relating it directly to corporate strategy, the business credibility of marketing is enhanced. It also serves to ties in all stakeholders, most notably customer-facing staff. Moreover, it encourages longevity of vision and consistency of voice and thereby reduces short-term gimmickry.

Marketing to third parties.

The outsourcing of the creation of certain marketing elements may be inevitable, but your partners will serve you better if they are convinced of your mission. Faking such conviction is part of their job spec, but it’s better if they can truly be persuaded.

Becoming the account manager.

Being the manager not the outsourcer (internally with other departments and externally with third-parties) ensures a flattening of hierarchy, a continuous exchange of ideas and information and an increased ability to oversee processes so that there’s no need for sudden deadlines and rushed creativity.

Realism regarding your customers.

Acknowledging that you’re not marketing to your colleagues, your agencies or your imagined self is key. Spend lots of time with them - not in focus groups but in the real world – and know everything they do in relation to your product/service and to the rest of their lives.

Shaping the culture.

Marketing by creating the culture is more effective than marketing by interrupting the culture. The goal is to shape the ecosystem around and within your business through your interactions as described above and by all your promotional activities.

The result can be a unified marketing effort and that, after all, is what a marketing director should be ensuring.

Prompted Response Prompts Lies.

When it comes to customer satisfaction evaluation, I've written often of my distrust of prompted recall and my preference for the net promoter score. But I'd never expected to encounter them simultaneously.

Earlier this week I had a ten minute conversation with John Maeda as Part of his Fortune Cookie performance. Before I left the gallery, I was asked if I had heard of the net promoter score and, when I answered yes, was asked to rate my experience

You'll be surprised to read that I tend to grade low, so while I had thoroughly enjoyed the conversation I was going to rate it as an 8. But,under net promoter rules, I know that rating would be discarded as middling and so I found myself rating it a 9. In other words, the prompt had changed my behaviour and my perceived appraisal.

Now this was an art event and the prompt may well have been an innocent conversation-starter or, indeed, part of the event but the bottom line is, if you want
a true reflection of your customers' experience, you have to be utterly agnostic and make no attempt at prompting.

You may think it's going to facilitate the rating, but Heisenberg taught us otherwise.

Words Have No Meaning.

One of the great false assumptions that marketers make is that once you have someone's attention, then you've got them for good. Well I hope most marketers don't think that way, but I can't think of another explanation for this billboard ad I saw at a station today. Just look at all those words.

It starts with a few superfluous humanising sentences about how they used to be bad at explaining things but they're trying much harder now and then goes on to explain how. Thereafter they probably telling me some more of their greatness, but even I (with a blogpost in mind) couldn't be bothered to read further. In fact, I was bored after the first sentence - it was all about them and nothing about what they could do for me.

It's the sort of worthiness that would be ignored in a magazine or newspaper where the next page is crying out for your attention; around a billboard the number of distractions are even greater and yet they want to preach to me - if not in tone, certainly in verbosity.

If you want to transmit information in an ad, then think elevator pitch in a very fast elevator. Know what you want to say and say it quick and clearly. That way you might keep my attention.

Customer Service Insight.

Tonight, amongst other nonsense, I heard a creative director declare that twitter could be a great customer service tool. No it can't. It can be a great customer mood monitor, it can be a great way to field customer complaints, but that's not what we should understand as customer service.

Customer service is what happens throughout your contact with the customer. If you do it right, you shouldn't need to have a Twitter presence because your customers will be happy.

Why Targetting Is The Wrong Marketing Mindset.

In a presentation today, Microsoft's president of online search Dr Qi Lu emphasised the need for their focus to be on user experience rather than driven by data.

But what troubled me was that he kept using the dreaded words consumer and targetting and implied that effective targetting of consumers was the marketer's holy grail. Indeed, he spoke ominously of the creation of "computational behavioural models to predict human intent".

Targetting just oozes all the wrong connotations: the passive customer, the picking off of individuals as they stray into your corporate cross-hairs, not to mention the assumption that you know how all customers behave.

It's too confrontational, too aggressive and too interruptive - even if I search for your product online, it doesn't mean I want you to market to me right now. You don't and cannot know my motivation.

Far better then to use all these technological capabilities of which Dr Lu spoke to be constantly available/accessible, to be where the prospective customer is likely to be and to be listening for their cues.

Reverse the metaphor. Think of your product/service as the customer's target and your marketing as a way of perfecting their aim.

Why 360 Marketing Sends You Round In Circles.

My friend who carried this bag had no idea what it meant - she just liked the bag. To me it was simply a further outbreak of the 360 plague that infects our world to very little marketing effect.

Whenever I see it, I am struck that while I know it's meant to indicate something like constant interaction, it primarily reminds me that 365 is a much better known number - and thus 360 seems like taking 5 or 6 days off. It seems to be a diminished claim.

It's all very well for marketers to think they understand what 360 means in their world, but that's not enough to justify pasting it everywhere regardless of the sub-context, under the assumption that your customers understand it and in the misguided belief that it will aid differentiation. That way leads to things like Vodafone360 People.


Vodafone 360 People "brings all your friends together backed up in one place" which I'm not sure has much at all to do with the generally agreed 360 ideal. It strikes me that it's simply been bundled under the heading of Vodafone 360 that they advertise heavily in stores and brochures. It's the branding equivalent of scrambling around for some copy to fill the media space you belatedly realise you've bought. To confuse things further, they also promote Vodafone 340 in the same places. And no, that's not 360-lite. It's simply a phone.

I'm all for marketing making the meme, but when the meme's making the marketing, you've got problems.

Don't Treat Customers As Revenue Sources.

My mobile phone provider frequently fills my time with irrelevant offers designed to bring them more revenue. My mobile phone provider also knows I make a lot of international calls. But when they implemented a new international call plan six months ago, they failed to tell me about it. As someone admitted, "they don't shout about it".

Presumably, they don't expect their customers to shout about it, but I did.

Firstly on the phone where I had to endure a whole bunch of security questions despite making it clear at the outset that I was just seeking to clarify when the plan was implemented.

That just served to remind me of the insurance company with which I once worked. They discovered that they asked a woman more than twenty scripted questions when she rang their emergency claim line before they got to the important question are you ok? At the time she was less than ok - her house was burning down in front of her along with the policy details they were demanding.

Then I tried by letter. I addressed it by name to the customer service director, but received a written response from someone else. Its first words? "Good Morning" followed by an acknowledgment that I had now signed myself up to the plan and the implication that all was now well.

That just served to give me the impression they were an outsourced worker with no authority to deal with my query (other than to fob it off). It also made me realise that this customer was in the middle of a common pincer movement comprised of a cost-cutting exercise and a revenue-maximising approach.

Yes, it maximises marginal profit. But in a world of inert (and thus continually profitable) customers, your focus should be on making them more inert. You really should avoid giving them reasons to contemplate leaving you.

Marketing's Digital Obsession.

Marketers have realised that women are the key purchase decision-makers. Marketers have belatedly begun to realise that demography is skewed to the elderly (even though economics classes were pointing that out twenty years ago. Marketers will eventually have to acknowledge that technology is a tool and not the the reason for the behaviour. But in the interim, we'll have to endure a lot of nonsense like digital paper.

How ever fine or specially treated it may be; what ever digital machine you might insert it in; regular paper is and always will be analogue not digital. To suggest otherwise is just another example of marketing's obsession with newness. An obsession that's arguably even worse than its fixations on youth and authenticity. A product-focussed logic not a customer-centred one.

People don't necessarily want new. They want better. If your new is better then that's great, but make sure it is. All too often, new is complicated, functionally-bloated and impenetrable. Or just more expensive. Better may derive from innovation, but never forget that innovation doesn't have to be technological. It's just as likely to mean a different way of looking at what already happens.

So be careful that your focus on modernity isn't lazy marketing shorthand, underwritten with the belief that the public can be blinded with science.
You may just be revealing your technology fetish and the fact that you don't understand the true nature of the technology, the reasons why your customers do what they do and their familiarity with the concept of the emperor's new clothes.

New may well seem or indeed be different, but that doesn't mean it's a source of viable differentiation.

Marketing Words Are Not Enough.

It's a bank, not a roller-coaster and self-delusion like this is the marketer's worst enemy. Enthusiasm may seem great in meetings, but it's the customers who decide and it's obvious that excitement isn't at the top of their banking needs.

Moreover, I guarantee your branch will not be exciting and if you over-promise, you're bound to under-deliver.

Heed The Aged?

We live in a youth-obsessed but ageing world, a world where the elderly are often ignored. Well we do in the first world. Elsewhere, the vast majority of populations are heavily skewed to the under 30s, yet respect for elders is pronounced.

Why that is and whether it will change seem to me to be important questions for marketers to ponder.

What's Wrong With Marketing?

On an obscure train journey one afternoon this week, I sat near a microcosm of marketing myopia - three executives working in the promotion of horse racing in this country. In the space of ten minutes (and in their own words) they revealed a number of common marketing/business traits.


1) Assuming homogenous demand.

One of the three was bewildered by the fact that while Chester racecourse had booming attendance in recent years this was not reflected in the static television viewing figures of their racing.

The answer is that Chester, an idiosyncratic historic venue with a tight oval track, is a great place to visit. But, because of this, the racing is also idiosyncratic,harder to follow on screen and less appealing to those who bet.

She was wrongly assuming that viewers wanted the same thing on their screen as they did when attending in person. When you put yourself in the customer's shoes, you have to remember they have different shoes for different occasions.


2) Diversifying the product to increase demand.

One of the ways racing has sought to expand its attendance and television audience has been through additional features designed to appeal to specific demographics. Thus, there is a rise of fashion shows and themed "ladies days" aimed at enticing more women and post-racing rock concerts seeking out the elusive youth demographic.

To some extent this works in terms of attendance, but there has been some alienation of the core audience. Moreover, there has to be a question of what these new customers are buying and whether they will have any loyalty. Is their attendance the physical equivalent of a webpage impression or is it more substantial?

Expanding your offer is not necessarily the same as enriching it. While that may be a justifiable move if you're moving your business (and implicitly acknowledging that your original business is in terminal decline), it is also the road to the industrialisation of novelty that William Gibson derides in his new book. Intensifying your product is the better way to go.


3) Hiring from within.

In the course of their conversation, the executives spoke of their backgrounds and how they all understood racing. One man noted how the industry was a small world where "people do seem to pop up in different places and circle around". That's no doubt factually true and hardly unique to racing, but there was no questioning of whether that was good thing.

In a fast-moving world knowing what your industry did five years ago may have some value, but it's definitely a diminishing asset. Knowing how things were done five years ago is of questionable value, especially if your industry is declining and/or you looking to get new customers. On the other hand, being able to determine why it's declining is invaluable.

If you want to be successful, look at what successful marketers do and adapt it to your industry. Not the other way round.


4) Celebrating the deal.

Finally, there was a lot of discussion and back-slapping about the deals and partnerships they'd each negotiated with various third parties. These all were apparently "good fits" and destined to provide great success in the future.

Doing the deal isn't enough, even if your bonus structure might suggest otherwise. That's just the beginning of the work that must be done to ensure that they have a successful outcome for your business. When that happens, you can celebrate and look for the next one. Not before.


I'm sure there was more I could have learned from these guys, but unfortunately I had reached my destination.

Shouldn't Marketing Speak With One Voice?

Where I questioned Coke's lack of local distinction last time, today I'm bemused by what I perceive to be Old Spice's defensive localisation.

The ad above is one of a series that has appeared recently. This one refers to jet fighters and punching as designators of the manliest man in town, another cites monster trucks and tool boxes. To me, the tone of voice is completely at odds with the intelligent wit of "the man your man could be" that is also airing here.

It's much more aligned with the status quo of the marketplace and seems to be designed to appeal to (or more precisely not alienate) the traditional Lynx/Axe customer.

But, unless you're the market leader, your marketing must surely be designed to change your world in some way. A status quo in which you're floundering is exactly what you're fleeing and any hint of trying to sell your product in the same way the competition does should be avoided.

The Coke Laziness Machine.

You've probably seen the video above. It was posted in January and has over two million views on YouTube. A UK version was apparently launched today in the hope of repeating the viral trick (though it appears to have been online since early July and as of this morning had not managed that feat, having only been viewed 3,000 times).

I don't get it. There are no media regions in the digital world and thus think global, act local must mean more than repeating the same stunt in different countries and posting it to the web. If it's interesting the first time, then it will have spread and "we" will all have seen and have no interest in seeing it again. Or am I missing something?

How Marketing Is Really Seen.

Overheard on a train:

We'll give the marketing agency the message and image we want to convey and we'll just get them to make it look nice.

Make It Obvious.

Many people think that the art of the headline is to attract attention. Well, the one above ticked that box for me but when I delved deeper, I discovered that the noise was emanating, irony of ironies, from a "marketing" company upstairs (read phone sales training company) and that the closure was voluntary, not enforced.

The art of the headline is not just to attract attention. It must also impart information and lead to something that doesn't disappoint.



Addendum: If you utilise multiple meanings in your heading, then you must deliver on all of them. This is advanced practice and should only be attempted by experts.

Make Marketing Relevant.

Before enjoying an epic of epic-ish epicness last night, I was assailed in my cinema seat by a horrible advertisement featuring inane vox-pop proclamations extolling the wonders of cinema.

That's right, my enjoyment of the cinema experience was diminished by an advertisement preaching the joy of the cinema experience to people who were already sitting in a cinema!

The screen real-estate was there, the audience was there and the had an ad, so the marketing geniuses decided to throw them all together. No doubt because there was no incremental financial cost and it would gain eyeball attention. It took me back to the bad old days when magazines would call up an old colleague to tell him that he'd paid for space in their next edition and what did he want them to run in it. His answer was usually the same tired old ad he'd run in the previous edition.

Advertising opportunities may be abundant, but to undervalue them like this is to reveal a failure to comprehend that the scarce and thus valuable element in the equation is your audience's time. That is and always has been finite. If you make them waste it, there will be a very real cost to you. Even if you can't see it in your budget.

Meet The New World, Same As The Old World.

Just when I'm sure I have nothing new to say, I see that other people are saying nothing new and getting talked about.

The particular insight that caught my attention came from a Lufthansa social media executive who declared that businesses should "Make your product your ads and your customers your ad agency."

Product has always been the first P of marketing and always will be and word of mouth is the best advertising money can't buy. But to talk about outsourcing your marketing is a dereliction of duty, even if you say it at a social media conference. Outsourcing marketing is what got us into a mess in the first place.

Looking Through Your Customers' Eyes.

A local supermarket has a checkout aisle designated for customers who are using a basket rather than a trolley. It's a common feature designed to speed shoppers through rather than have them abandon their purchases when stuck behind a line of full trolleys in another aisle.

The problem is that its speedy processing of customers means that its queue is often the shortest in the store. Cue the tired, distracted shopper with a full trolley who quite naturally joins the shortest line, usually unnoticed by the harassed till operator until they've unloaded their trolley. Cue the frustration of shoppers with baskets whose exit is now delayed.

Why does this happen? It happens because the signage indicating the status of each aisle resides high above the shoppers' heads. It's visible from a distance but the designers, the user experience gurus and the store management (I've asked) have neglected to consider when their customers make their checkout choice.

Occasionally a shopper is exploiting the situation, but generally it's an honest mistake. They're looking at eye line to determine the most efficient way out of the store with their shopping. They're definitely not gazing upwards.

The managers have thanked me for my observation and said they'll retrain staff. In other words, they'll add further burdens on busy low-paid staff when the simple act of placing an eye-level sign at the checkout entrance would get their customers to self-regulate.

It's not enough to claim that you put yourself in your customers' shoes, you've got to put yourself behind their eyes as well.

Make Marking History?

Further evidence of marketing's identity crisis. Though the parallel with marking one's territory has some validity.

How Much Do Customers Care?

I think Umair means to highlight the importance of corporate purpose in the mind of the consumer though he tweets a little ambiguously. If that's a correct interpretation, then he's positing a prevalent thesis. One that's certainly useful to think about, albeit one that equally can lead us astray if we focus on purpose at the expense of the basics.

Look around at what people do and look at your own behaviour. A "moral" element might be the deciding factor in a choice between equals. While I'd like it to be different, I'd currently contend that most of the people, most of the time don't care - for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to personal finances, convenience and ignorance.

That said, never, never forget that some of the people some of the time still constitutes a very big market.

Memory Of The Future.

Memory of the future is the provocative phrase that I came across recently that refers to the brain's ability to use memory to picture and plan future events. I term it provocative because of its combination of memory a word that evokes looking back and future that evokes looking forward.

Being ignorant of its neuroscientific origin, I immediately conjured up the idea of memories of what we were told the future would bring - the ones that usually involved personalised-jetpacks and dehydrated food.

Inevitably memories of the future are usually unfulfilled, but the whole concept is so redolent of ambition, aspiration and lost opportunities that it seems to me to be a rich seam for marketing to mine. While it's uniquely individual inasmuch as it combines memory of what we expected the future to look like and what we hoped our own personal futures would become, it taps in perfectly to the whole idea of consumption being about creating that future.

I'm not sure yet where this lead, but if your product/service could promise that our memory of the future is, in fact, our future, that would be a compelling first step.

50 Ways To Leave Your Customer.

The Jet Blue flight attendant who quit his job via the emergency shute and the fake Dryerase resignation video were the big things online yesterday.

Both earned admiration from many quarters, but how many of you thought of the lesson for your business? What was being admired was people who had supposedly fired their customers. Steven Slater had had enough of rude customers while "Jenny" was sick of her customer i.e. her boss.

If you choose someone to be your customer then they are nearly always right and your behaviour should reflect that, but you don't have to accept everybody who wants to be your customer. So, if you admired Steven Slater and/or Jenny then you should surely run your business the same way. You'd feel better about it and you'd have a better business because you'd care more.

Old Spice Addendum.

AdWeek reports that, “According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent."

If it's up 11% in 12 months, it could probably only be up 107% in a month if the sales had been negative in the interim so I think my original suspicions seem credible.

App Infatuation.

Briitsh Gas have an iPhone app. They told me so in a press ad. It will show how my consumption has changed year on year, quarter by quarter.

That's interesting information, but I don't need an app for it. I can see it on my provider's bill already - at a time when I'm more likely to be thinking about the issue and where they already have my attention.

Just because you can have an app, it doesn't mean you need one or that your customers' experience will be enhanced by having one.

Customer Survey Dissatisfaction.

Modern life is replete with customer satisfaction surveys impinging on seemingly every digital, telephonic or physical interaction and CEOs citing how x% of their customers were "either satisfied or very satisfied" with the service they received. It's also replete with dissatisfied customers.

So before you undertake one of these exercises, perhaps you should ask what its purpose is. Are you seeking to elicit genuine information or are you box-ticking? Do you want to learn or to obfuscate?

What does satisfaction actually mean? We all have different satisfaction spectra determined by our previous experience, so it's pretty meaningless to survey it. Even if we were consistent in our appraisal, there's the timing issue. Our satisfaction is dependent upon our happiness relative to when we're surveyed because memories fade.

Crucially - the dissatisfied customer, the target you're really trying to find will either have forgotten it happened or more likely will no longer be a customer and their dissatifaction will not be captured.

The key to increasing customer satisfaction is to improve your product and service. It's not to bias a survey.

Make Marketing Cute.

If, in the coming months, you see advertising campaigns featuring sleeping babies in various settings or pictures made out of food, you will know where they got their creative inspiration. From Mila's Daydreams above and Little Food Junction below.


They'll be "cute" and "human" but they'll only work if they're also truthful. It's that final attribute that will make them as authentic as their inspiration.

The Number's Up.

This is not another post about The Old Spice campaign. But it is inspired by the seemingly ubiquitous innumeracy that has spun out of it. Specifically, there is a Nielsen figure being quoted that sales have risen by 107% in the last month. Think about that. Sales have doubled in a month. That would be extraordinary. If it were true.

But while I haven't fully confirmed it, I don't think it is true. What is much more likely to be true is that sales for the past month are 107% higher than for the equivalent month last year. That's also impressive though maybe less so if, as I pointed out in my Cadbury post, it's an increase from a deflated level. Saliently, the fact is that nobody involved with the company or the campaign has even made that claim. They know that they're playing a long game. The blogosphere, however, is less restrained and the virality of online information means that the seemingly false interpretation has spread like wildfire.

Regardless of the previous years of the repositioning and the fact that those videos were only created two weeks ago, the received wisdom will be that the combination of online video and social media doubles sales in a month. Everybody will be switching their budgets into an Old Spice style digital extravaganza because they think something has been proven.

It will take time to determine the undeniable effectiveness of the campaign and its various elements on actual sales, but it shouldn't take time for marketers to understand what basic numbers actually mean.

What Were You Thinking?

When you took interruption marketing into the street?

When you outsourced customer service to reduce costs?

When you treated new customers better than loyal ones?

When you tried to up-sell rather than attend to waiting customers?

Were you thinking about improving the customer experience or were you thinking about improving your evaluation?

Headline Marketing.

The headline says that 9 out of 10 people use social networks. The reality of the article is the claim that 90% of the over 15's who use the internet use social networks. Not quite the same thing.

The headline you’ll have seen recently says that e-books are outselling physical books on Amazon for the first time. In fact, e-books are outselling hard cover books for the first time. Paperback sales far exceed e-book sales which across the whole book sector only accounts for 3% of sales. Not quite the revolution that was suggested.

The headline is not to forget the importance of looking beneath the headline and of truly understanding the numbers. On the other hand, it also shows the importance of a headline and how easy it is to make people believe.

All Customers Are Idiots.

All customers are unthinking idiots. Some of the time. I certainly am and you probably are too. That's agreed. Now what?

You could feel superior, treat them like unthinking fools and create awful bland marketing that ultimately doesn't work.

Or you could realise that they have better things to do than consume your marketing. You could do what marketers are meant to do. You could make them think.

Make Marketing Timely.

So the World Cup is over. It was interesting last week. This week not so much. So why do I get an email today hawking some social media monitoring analysis of international interest in the event?

Because, in an age of real-time data capture, they presumably did what they always used to do. They waited to the end of their survey to finalise their findings rather than compile it on the fly and produce an interim report that might have sufficiently piqued my interest so that I would be hungry for the final results.

The time when people would be most engaged in that data would be during the tournament or, perhaps, in the run-up to the next major one. Now we're in the land of post-mortems and looking to the next event. Interest has moved on.

Targetting's not just about who and where. When is also key. The customers' schedule trumps your production schedule. Fish when the fish are hungry.

Don't Create The Hype.

Today sees the launch of the "Manifesto for a Networked Nation" a government initiative designed to maximise digital inclusion by 2012. I fully endorse it.

And yet, where Finland recently declared online connectivity to be a legal right, here I'm distracted by the hype of an alleged economic saving of £22 billion.

Maybe it's my general antipathy for government marketing - how it all seem overly expensive, years behind the curve in its methodology and designed to prop up advertising agencies and management consultancies - but that sort of compulsory financial justification immediately makes me very suspicious.

I may be wrong but I see an amalgamation of savings estimates from a variety of sources (including consultancies) coupled with hints of double counting and the exclusion of incremental costs, not to mention supplier redundancies.

I accept that there are 6.4 million over-65s in the UK who have never used the internet and that an average household saving of £560 a year can be made by shopping and paying bills online. But even if one assumes that this represents 6.4 million single households with average bills (both unlikely), simple multiplication yields a maximum saving of £3.3 billion excluding ISP costs - a far cry from the £6 billion claimed because

Achieving a similar increase to over-65s’ disposable income by increasing the Basic State Pension by £10 a week — ie £520 a year — would cost around £6bn a year.

As I say, I may be wrong or ovewrly sceptical, but the lesson is a universal one. If you use numbers in your marketing, you better be able to back them up. And if you have a real purpose-idea to promote, as is unquestionably the case here, then go ahead and promote it. Don't obscure it with hype.



Self-Congratulatory Addendum: After writing this post, I read a very supportive piece in today's Times. Under the headline "There is a social and moral imperative to get people online. This is not hype. This is really happening." it referred to the £22 billion as "one of those statistics that give the project a "pie in the sky" tone." I hope it's not.

Not So Much Fun.

The VW Fun campaign won a big prize in Cannes. It's been all over YouTube and the blogosphere for months. I think I've seen all the videos. You probably have too, but over at digital buzz you can see them again and read about the recombinant frenzy that it generated.

So clearly it was a great success?

The Fun Theory was all about generating interest in Volkswagen’s Blue Motion technologies that deliver the same great car performance with reduced environmental impact.

Blue Motion? Reduced environmental impact? Really? Maybe it's just me, but that genuinely shocked me. All I took away was VW and fun. That, in itself, is no bad thing of course but if it wasn't the aim, then is it a success for VW or just for the agency?

Speaking With One Voice.

I'd never heard of Woot, but I was aware there was an online retailer doing what they did. I'll be watching them closely now - not because they just got acquired by Amazon, but because of the way they responded to it. Not with legalese or corporate platitudes but with the same human tone they used before they were bought.

Businesses grow, businesses evolve and business are acquired, but the one thing they must never forget is that they're still essentially making sales one at a time to individual customers.

The Great Banana Shortage.

Copywriting and the creation of scarcity are central to great marketing.

Let Customers Know It's Personal.

Customers tend to dislike outsourced customer service departments and endless telephone menus that seem to keep them away from any form of human contact. That makes personal service a competitive advantage and companies never shirk from declaiming their commitment to it - even if the reality may be very different.

The screen-shot above comes from an insurance company and was what I saw when a basic renewal proved impossible to achieve online. I interpreted the options as send an email into the abyss and hope for a response some time in the future or tangle with the premium rate phone line. I opted for the latter and got my policy renewed.

I also discovered that the innocuous "ask us a question" hid the option of IM interaction with a team of online specialists. Real people answering my questions in real time? Wouldn't that have been worth emphasising?

Marketing Gimmickry Is Just A Gimmick.

At a sparsely-attended promotional launch for an upcoming marketing trade show, the invitees were shown the event's new iPhone app. Rather than the advertised augmented reality, it was essentially a piece of mobile image recognition. It was perfectly adequate and of potential utility to the exhibition/conference attendees, but it was a gimmick.

The logic was clear - iPhone apps are hot, so we should have one and generate some PR. It won't because many of the audience knew more about the technology than some of the marketers that were presenting it and were consequently underwhelmed, it won't because it's not a reason in and of itself to attend the event, and it won't because it's of more interest internally than externally.

Worse still, it emerged in casual conversation that the event had a more striking selling point - for the first time in its longish history, the conference sessions are going to be free of charge. That represents more user utility than even the most sophisticated iPhone app could hope to do, but it's not shiny and tech-based and too many marketers think that makes it uninteresting to their prospects. They're wrong.

Customers Like Happy Endings.

My attention today has been attracted by two seemingly unrelated items that emanated from the mysterious East London lair of the post-digital hole in the wall gang. Russell Davies has highlighted a fascinating film about billboard painters in New York while Phil Gyford has tinkered with the Guardian newspaper’s API to produce a personalized version.

They’re both terrific in their own right, but together they got me thinking about completeness and anticipation and how marketers sometimes unthinkingly crave customer attention.

The image that grabbed me in the film was actually an incomplete billboard – about one third of the glass of beer to be exact. It seemed to encapsulate the craft of the painters that Russell rightly praised, the slowness of its production and the anticipation of what might develop. I imagined locals passing the scene many times during the painting process and anticipating their next sighting.

In fact, that's unrealistic because the film later reveals that they remarkably complete the billboards in a matter of hours. And while they do address the idea of anticipation by frequently replacing the image with others from a narrative series, I think that still misses a trick. After all, think how many posters you don’t notice. The incompleteness engages the viewer in the process in a way that the more run of the mill (and therefore potentially invisible) final image doesn’t.

While it might be a powerful trick, one must always be aware of not taking it too far. Marketers too often become obsessed with keeping people's attention as long as possible, but to no positive effect – by making it hard for them to leave websites, by overcomplicating processes, filling phone menus with promotional messages rather than dealing with the need or by making stores hard to navigate.

And that's where the brilliant idea of “finishability” comes in. It is this that Phil details in his design summary – his need for a sense of closure in a way that reading online doesn’t normally give.

Finally, I wanted finishability. I wanted to be able to read today’s news, know I’d read it all, and that I’m done until tomorrow.

Just as there is curiosity in the unfinished, there is satisfaction in the finished. Marketers should never be scared to let customers leave. As long as they leave on good terms, they’re likely to return. If you stall or aggravate them, that’s less likely to be the case. Don’t rush them, don’t frustrate them, but do ensure they have a happy ending.

The Marketing Wisdom Of Kid Rock?

When the song's bigger than the trend, you can't go wrong.

When the trend's bigger than the song, those are the people who fall by the way-side.

Marketing Saps.

When technology writer Dennis Howlett accused SAP of spamming him a year ago, his accusation was rebutted by one of their social media strategy team. Fast forward and we find that same strategist changing his tune.

Lesson: You can dismiss critics as cranks or curmudgeons and you may be right, but it's better for your sanity and your business if you take an objective look and see if they have a point. After all, they're on the receiving end.

There's also a lesson in the episode itself which only really caught my attention since it contrasted so much with the praise heaped on the SAP Developer Network 2003 in my current reading, The Power Of Pull.

Whereas in 2003, SAP were seeking to engage the opinions of their customer base, in 2009/10 they seem to be back to pushing information at them. I don't know if I'm right, but I suspect this may have something to do with the lingering pre-eminence of sales staff who are remunerated on revenues rather than the more intangible customer support service. Continued sales are the ultimate goal of all marketing, but when sales starts to drive marketing you are going to run into problems.

Lesson: Sales occur when the buyer wants to buy. So when the going gets tough, tough it out. Don't default to lowest common denominator tactics.

The Marketing Wisdom of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

Some time ago, I found myself engrossed in a documentary about Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. It covered their entire musical life and thus lasted four hours which, largely due to the Travelling Willburys nonsense, was about half an hour too much.

But, as ever, the story of a creative journey from obscurity to commercial success yielded a number of "marketing" insights.

Media
"All of a sudden the biggest radio station there was, was TV."

Creativity
"It's about reaching for bigger moments where new things happen."

Authenticity
"What they call country today is bad rock groups with fiddles."

Motivation
"We're all the romantic leads in our own life."

Attention
"Don't bore us, get to the chorus."

That's four hours I've saved you. You're welcome. Nobody should have to listen to Jeff Lynne.

This Is Not Just Sexism, This Is M&S Sexism?

Big or small. We like them all. At M&S you'll find beautiful bras to fit all sizes, at gorgeous prices. If nature has blessed you with more than your fair share, you certainly won't be charged extra for it. That big boob is all in the past. Bra £18. Knickers £8.

If you're going for "clever" it's better to be really knowing and consider what an impersonal body and double-entendres actually say to a customer who's also been exposed to ideas such as the campaign for real beauty and whom you're hoping to make feel good about themselves. Or perhaps I'm wrong and it's all good fun.

Unthinking Marketing.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Never more so than is exemplified by the recent trend for medical research to be condensed into simplified blurbs that are reprinted in mainstream media in an effort to drum up publicity. The supposed findings are recalled while the underlying research is ignored.

As marketing increasingly draws on neuroscience and other academic areas, there's a real danger of the same thing happening. Witness the recent tweetstorm about a study in the Journal of Consumer Research and the blogpost about it here. The headline thought that will get marketers overly excited is encapsulated in this statement from the actual paper.

"The participants were unable to recognize that a particular brand had been paired with either negative or positive images. Therefore, we were able to create an 'I like it, but I don't know why' effect,"

That's fine by me. It's another in a long line of academic studies trying to understand the way the brain processes rational and emotional inputs and I'm sure the authors make no more claims for it than that. My concern would be that marketers would leap on it as justification for all sorts of misjudged campaigns simply because they appeal to the emotions without looking at the methodology.

I'm not denying for a moment that low involvement processing hasn't been proven to exist. I just draw different implications from the study. Firstly, it seems to me that the implication is the biggest ad budget wins because it is that which buys you the greatest number of exposures of associations of your brand with goodness. That's hardly mould-breaking.

Secondly, the study comparison was between "good" brands and "bad" brands but in real life you're not going to see many direct associations of badness with brands - even given the possibility of negative advertising. The real life comparison that buyers make is one between an array of brands all claiming goodness. So, to be seeking the title of "most good" may not be much of a differentiator even if you attain it.

If a study could reproduce the results, while comparing paired brands that only had different degrees of good words associated with them (rather than good versus bad), then that would be really interesting.

It's the sort of next level study that will happen, but unthinking marketers won't be waiting for it. They'll already have shown their "scientific justification" presentation slide and be spending the budget in pursuit of this latest meme.

1000 True Members.

It's strange how the online message of personalisation and focus has failed fully to permeate the offline world. Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly explained how to build a business on the back of 1000 True Fans and everyone knows the cost of acquiring a new customer to be greater than retaining an existing one.

And yet, we have bad health-clubs. Health-clubs that provide loss-leader offers to get you to join up and then rely on inertia-selling to keep you paying rather than nurturing you. Health-clubs that don't reduce their charges during hot, sweaty low-attendance summer months. Health-clubs that assume your loyalty until it's lost.

No wonder they have a churn business - they assume that's the business they're in and do nothing to rectify it. They don't reward loyalty, they don't keep in regular touch throughout membership and they don't offer new tailored services that might build that loyalty.

Recently, I happened to see a letter that my gym sends out a few weeks after a member has quit. It expresses disappointment at their absence and then lists a lot of amenities they are improving. Worst of all, the letter provides incentives to these leavers that are not offered to existing or renewing members whose loyalty gets them nothing. Though, only nosey ones like me know that. It's all about the gym and nothing about the ex-member.

That's inevitable because there has been no examination of why they left - no requirement in the quitting process to offer an explanation or provide an opportunity for remedy.

That's inevitable because there's no tracking of members whose attendance is diminishing and asking them why before they cut the knot.

That's inevitable because they believe that could alert the member to the money they're wasting as a high-profit, low-usage member.

It's all inevitable because it is company policy, the policy of a company with tens of thousands of members to track and analyse in the aggregate rather than think of them as discrete units.

It's a lesson that's not just applicable to gyms and membership. If you're lucky enough to have more than 1000 users, then just as Gore divide their employee groups into efficient maxima of 150, then surely you can divide your customers into subsets of 1000 fans and treat them like family? Or you can be in the churn business.

Elephants' Graveyard.

All over central London, 250 elephants are blending into their surroundings. This one is in Carnaby Street, the one below is in Golden Square. They surprise people. They delight people. Whenever you chance across one you see people staring, smiling and posing for photos.


Serendipity and joy combined. That's just what the marketing doctor ordered right? So I feel a little churlish noting that when my abiding reaction is that of a missed opportunity, of wondering why they didn't go the extra yard. But the point is that I noted the elephants, assumed they were connected to some sort of promotion and did exactly nothing. Yes there were notices, but I didn't take them in. I was more intrigued by the elephants themselves and people's reaction.

The moment was lost or, at least, not maximally exploited. Yes, people will be talking about the elephants, but where was the call to immediate action? Where was the invitation to do something then and there via their ubiquitous digital devices? Perhaps theres a regulatory issue here - but I fear that it's just a lack of joined-up ambition that prevented there being an obvious opportunity for text-based donation (rather than the opaque "text to help") or some sort of QR-code education.

Googling reveals that this is the work of the elephant family charity and has been successful in other capitals before now. The purpose is to raise awareness of the imminent potential extinction of the Asian elephant and the immediate aim is "to raise a projected £2 million" (I assume via donations and the auctioning of the elephants in July) "by attracting an estimated audience of 25 million".

Those quotes reek of PR speak and old thinking to me and while they've been successful before and I surely hope they will be more than successful in reaching their targets this time, I just fear they could be underachieving given the impact their brilliant idea has attracted.

Awareness is one thing, awareness of a campaign gimmick is something less. In this fast-moving attention-poor world, if you do manage the difficult task of getting their attention you need to enrich it by making it easy and compelling for people to act. Then and there.

Different Strokes.

This week I had the strange experience of being the only audience member I knew. This was at a lecture venue where, in the past, I have been concerned that I knew too many people and was therefore too close to the online echo-chamber.

Those often brilliant lectures have tended to be about neuroscience, social networks and anthropology. Marketing-related individuals know this to be the latest seam of official knowledge that must be mined for sound-bites and hence I've had no shortage of company in the bar afterwards.

The marketer-free lecture was a discussion of comedy and featured the writers and producers of some of the biggest TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic. I couldn't understand why I was alone. Sure, there was no mention of brain chemistry, but apart from being a fan, it seemed obvious to me that comedy can tell us so much about cultural landscapes, concise communication and connecting with people.

Confirmation came from Caryn Mandabach (producer of The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock From The Sun, Nurse Jackie etc) who was asked about her creative philosophy. Her response? Look around, see what's not there and then make that.

It's smart to follow an intelligent group, but discovery more often occurs when you don't follow the pack. You also get to talk to new people in the bar. Try it.

Learning By Doing.

Successful marketing, they say, is dependent on understanding your customers. Implicit in that is the need to understand how people assimilate information, about how they come to decisions, and about how they learn.

One part of that is to submerge yourself in learning theory and the psychology of persuasion and behavioural change. Another, I've discovered by chance recently, is to learn something new. Something that has nothing to do with your work and which preferably you can learn with a group of strangers and a number of teachers.

It's a humbling experience and that's reason enough to do it. But you'll also come to appreciate the peaks and troughs of learning; the variety of teaching methods, personalities and vocabularies; the ones that work for you and maybe why they do and others don't; and you'll witness all of the above as it relates to a random group of people.

I won't labour the metaphor, but as well as learning what you went there to learn, you'll also learn a lot about communication and the absorption of information, not to mention your own intellectual prejudices. And, best of all, you'll be doing it in real life rather than in a focus group.

Robotic Marketing Is Artificially Intelligent.

So, the esteemed Bill Thompson complained about computer problems delaying his flight and that reminded me of a train debacle some years ago. SouthEastern trains, clearly knowing a thing or two about the internet, noted my comment and retweeted it and thereby amplified some bad publicity about themselves.

That and the fact that it was truncated suggests to me that this was an automated, "cost-efficient" communications initiative. Nobody read the comment. Nobody realised that it related to a hellish five hour stay trapped on a snow-bound train with no power, consequently flooding toilets and lamentable customer communication and service.

No, they just thought any mention of their name was good publicity and sought to have it reverberate across the air. There's a world of difference between monitoring what people are saying about you online and being part of the conversation - if that's what you really insist on being.

It can't be long before someone exploits this laziness by sending out all sorts of genuine complaints or, worse still, defamatory messages alongside a company name and waits for their bots to do the rest. I'm sure some company somewhere must already have suffered this fate so the first lesson is to get your bots to be triggered by a combination of your name and positive keywords rather than your name alone.

But the real lesson, of course, is not to outsource your marketing to machines. The internet isn't actually a computer network, it's a human network. Forget that at your peril.

Coloured Opinions.

The xkcd blog asked their readers to identify/name colours in a survey. I don't know why they did it and I'm not sure they anticipated getting over five million judgements, but that's what happened. The graphic above shows the result of some subsequent analysis into gender differences.

Are women more interested in colours, more visually astute or have they been over-educated in bogus terminology by fashion marketing? Are men more decisive, visually illiterate or are they just disinterested in colours?

Who knows? What I take away from this is a reminder that we all have different opinions and passions about the simplest things and that your customers' nuance is not going to be the same as yours.

The Problem With Marketing.

The problem with marketing is not interruption. Nor is it false claims or agency/client compromise. All those things and more are deficiencies in the practice of marketing but they're not the root problem.

No the real problem with marketing is that it all too often follows the creation of the product/service and thereby is reduced to promotion. It is bad promotion that is the bane of most anti-marketers. Not marketing itself.

All those conference ideas about branded utility, shared interests and authenticity are good ones, but they'd be much better if they weren't add-ons.

Obsessive Sharing Disorder.

I haven't yet asked Iain if he was being serious or sarcastic. Chances are he was being both and I agree with him. We all know we are social, we all know we don't want to be interrupted, we all know that marketing needs to be shareable. We all know all this and agencies, books and careers have inevitably sprung up to fill the potentially lucrative vacuum.

But what is all too often forgotten is that it's optional not obligatory. We all want the opportunity to share, but most of the time most of the people aren't actually going to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 1:9:90 rule to be uncovered here. The massive are still passive.

We're becoming obsessed with the sharing when we should be obsessed with all our customers, especially the introverted majority. And in so doing, we run the risk of ending up with this sort of thing.

Props Don't Get You Props.

“Every time you take out a prop, your price goes down.”

Joseph Dunninger, the famed mentalist, was talking about magical props, but marketing props are just the same. Perfect the essence of what you sell and you won't need props.

Market Your Technology.

Two years ago, I saw these shoes in the exhibition section of a Nike pop-up store in London. The material from which they were made is now appearing in commercially available sneakers.

That exhibition made me realise that Nike is as much a technology company as a marketing company. Its a profile they've emphasised through initiatives like NikeID where technology is used to assist and enliven training regimes.

Next week, it will be taking a stage further here with Nike Grid when people will claim their own postcode/zipcode by running between specially adapted public telephone boxes. GPS iterations utilising apps like Foursquare are surely not far behind.

Running, their original raison d'etre, remains at the heart of all this, but layered upon it is the technology - another level of interestingness that draws you further into the DNA of the business. Making marketing interesting (while reminding them of the unique expertise that creates the products) engages the user intellectually, emotionally and socially. Every business could and should be doing it.

Refresh And Renew.

Seth Godin posted about Levy Flights the other day. This was not a reference to an obscure dancehall performer, but a discussion of the similarly obscure statistical distribution pattern that I first came across in Kristakis and Fowler's Connected.

A Levy flight basically illustrates that behaviour focuses in a small area for a period of time and then when that area becomes uninteresting, there is a flight/leap to another area quite some distance away where another period of grazing follows.

Seth's post sounded a little fatalistic to me, but Connected highlighted two interesting features of actual network behaviour. Firstly, when people make the larger leaps, the size of that average leapp is much greater than was expected under a random walk; but, secondly, those transitions actually occur more slowly than a Levy flight would predict.

That seems to me to suggest that customer ennui is not inevitable and that there might be more hope for retaining customers if you both make their experience continually excellent and refresh it regularly.

Talk The Talk: Use Conversational Language.

Sainsbury's have a Twitter account. They presumably think it will help them engage in conversations with their customers on a human level. But do their customers really want to talk to "colleagues"?

When seeking to engage the external (aka real) world, don't use the alienating internal language of the corporation. Just say "talk to us".

Four Years Blogging And All I've Got To Show For It Is?

Today this blog is four years old. This is the thousandth plus post which will be read by a select group of people. Blogging is supposedly not as popular as it once was. The huge majority of them lie inert. Some, mercifully so. But not this one. So, what have I got out of four years of blogging?

1) Chinese comment spam, ridiculous PR approaches and offers of irrelevant guest blogs from total strangers.

2) A sense of guilt at still not having made this blog more visually pleasing and more easily navigable.

3) A nagging doubt that I have nothing else left to say.

4) An awareness that you need to keep repeating yourself because ideas actually spread quite slowly and orthodoxy takes a long time to overturn.

5) A constantly renewing knowledge of bands that only five other people have yet heard of thanks to a reader who has a passion for such things

6) A stalker - albeit a very nice one.

7) A true appreciation of our increased connectivity - courtesy of the night when one of my posts went global and I watched as readership swept across the globe to the extent that more people were on my blog than usually visited in a month.

8) A whole new international social circle - such that I can look at various meaningless A lists and the wired top 100 and realise that a number of these people are now my friends, as are authors I previously admired from afar but now am able to meet in person.

9) A realisation that rankings don't really matter. I'm no longer in the Technorati top 10000 nor the top 50 marketing blogs in the world and I still get noticed by new people and read by others on a weekly basis. Famous and useful for fifteen people is indeed the rule to live by. But remember, the fifteen are always changing.

10) A deep gratitude to all the readers, commenters and bloggers who have made the past four years a lot more interesting.