Think Local.

I caught up with an old friend/client who runs three business locations in Manhattan - downtown, midtown and uptown. It turns out that even within that small area, the effectiveness of various media is different.

Downtown people are more susceptible to online, midtown density lends itself to outdoor and uptown needs the direct marketing route. The customers are similar but their environments and lifestyles are different.

It's a good reminder that aggregating an audience geographically can be as naive as doing it demographically.

Markets Are Presentations.

"A bullet-point that wraps around is not a bullet-point, it's a badly written sentence."

Another great quote from SXSW. This time from a panel about presentations and said by a trail lawyer turned presentation expert.

It's applicable to presentations, of course, but to so much more. After all, a presentation is simply the act of marketing information to an audience. So when you endure your next presentation, use the time effectively. Work out why you're hating it and make sure you're not subjecting your customers to a similar experience.

Kubrick's Five Marketing Lessons.

Marketing is everybody's job and yet many people deny their role in it. They do so either by neglect or ignorance. Neglect occurs when people forget that every interaction is a marketing occasion or, more accurately, the opportunity not to create a bad impression/experience. Ignorance is often more benign and occurs when people are living by marketing principles without knowing it.

I witnessed a great example of the latter here in Austin while sitting in on a fabulous chat with Jan Harlan - brother in law of, and executive producer to Stanley Kubrick. He explicitly denied any real involvement in marketing campaigns, but so many of the things he said about his production philosophy were steeped in great marketing thinking.

1) Get the first three minutes right.

That's nothing other than engaging the customer. Ensuring that you rapidly pique their attention and curiosity while not confusing or boring them.

2) If there's something wrong with the ending, check the beginning.

In other words, focus on getting the product right by focussing not just on where you're aiming (because as I keep saying, your actual customers may not even be there), but on where you're starting from.

3) You've only got one chance.

His full statement was, "you've got just two hours and an audience that comes once". That might seem movie-specific, but it's really not. Think of your customers as a movie audience with their attendant expectations and word of mouth potential and you'll be reminded that "always in beta" is more about continuous improvement than an excuse to make mistakes.

4) Trust your audience.

A corollary of point 1 in my eyes. Not giving them what they want is bad enough, patronising them in any way is worse. Don't keep them in the dark for sure, but don't treat them as idiots either. Give them the tools and the opportunities to understand and appreciate the full potential of your product/service. Their discovery will enhance their enthusiasm.

5) Go and get.

In typical self-deprecating style, he remarked that "Executive Producer is a meaningless title. What I do is I negotiate. I go and get what's needed." This included making four trips to Venice to buy face masks for Eyes Wide Shut because the costume designer was better employed back at base. Marketing departments are all too often about the business of marketing and not about going and getting.

The Problem With Marketing.

If someone says they work in marketing, the next response is frequently "What do you market?" As if all expertise was sector or product-specific.

The problem with marketing (well one of the many) is that its practitioners do a lousy job of marketing themselves and what they do.

Trust Your Users.

In the space of about ten hours last Saturday, a large room full of geeks and coders created twenty nine different "manipulations" of government data sources with a view to "Coding A Better Country" because:

"Government isn't very good at computers. They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame."

They adapted and mashed-up existing websites to generate unbranded utilities that delivered something they, as citizens, felt was better than that which already existed.

You can see an archive of what was produced here (videos here) and dwell on the fact that, yet again, it's a case of what can be achieved if you help your users decide how they want to use your product/service rather than imposing on them your view of what they want.

It doesn't lead to a diminution of your business. It makes people more likely to be your users/customers.

Joy To The World.

When the going gets tough, there is a tendency to talk everything down. But what people really want is to be told that there is hope out there, that there is a route to something better. Maketers know this and it's leading to a surfeit of advertising designed to elicit feelings of joy.

But joy is a feeling of deep happiness and contentment. It is not some fleeting moment of a smile when you see a gorilla or a station filled with "dancers". This is not a time for coating your product/service with a patina of positive thinking. It is a time to shape that product/service so that people feel utterly content when they use it with nothing going wrong at a functional level and their spirits lifted by your having eased them through some aspect of their day

Tougher to do, but much more arresting than mere entertainment.

Instant Identification.

Q Why was a gas company collecting money from an office?
A Because it's a security company with a bad logo (G4S).