Maxmise Your Recommendation Stream.

The Scenario: Two people meeting for a coffee around three o'clock, both having had lunch nearby. They opt for an old haunt, the cafe at Bibendum where they have enjoyed coffees, snacks, dinners and lunches at various times in the past.

The Promise: The website says the cafe "is a wonderful spot to watch the world go by while enjoying a coffee and croissant" and the adjacent oyster bar allows for "A quick glass of wine with or without a nibble".

The Reality: The courteous manager regrets that head-office has instituted a new policy - lunch now continues till 5 p.m. and you can only have coffee in the open-air section. The "protection from the elements means that it’s a perfect all-year-round venue" no longer applies.

The Logic: Head-office presumably saw a fall in revenue per table between 3 and 5 p.m. on their spreadsheet and instituted a policy designed to increase those average revenues.

The Flaw: Revenue figures on a spreadsheet aggregate individual transactions but don't aggregate the overall expenditure of those individuals. Numbers are not human. Customers are not numbers.

The Outcome: Available tables remain empty, revenue not increased one penny and customers disgruntled. Worse still, revenue may actually fall because my companion's lunch partner (on hearing of her plan to go to the cafe) had remarked "oh yes, now the weather's improved we must start having lunch there again".

The Moral: Deciding who you want as customers is crucial, but you need to do it right. If you only see business in terms of your revenue streams and forget about your recommendation stream, you may well run aground.


(photo courtesy of kexi's flickr)

Knowing What You Don't Like.

I heard it suggested that women like Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex & The City all the more because men cannot fathom why. I don't know if that's true or not but my immediate reaction was to suggest flippantly that it was a default position resulting from the fact that they didn't want to be identified via the other characters as primarily either overtly promiscuous, frigid or subservient.

Perhaps that's nonsense. I'm not a woman after all. But just as great marketing is all about removing the reasons not to buy your product/service, perhaps it's worth thinking how your product/service allows customers to defines themselves in terms of what they are not.

Look Before You Leap.

We are all aware, I believe, of the nature of canine congress. Thus, should we ever muse on the mechanics of creating a cross-breed, we might have a notion of what is practical and what goes where, so to speak. But, unless I'm just peculiarly ignorant on this matter, I would suggest that we might well have a faulty vision.

It turns out that breeders cross a male of a smaller breed with a female of a larger breed and not vice versa as I might have guessed. The reason is not simply to make the union more visually comical, but rather to ensure that the puppy is of a size that is manageable during birth.

Obvious, isn't it? But all too often, we focus on the creation of something and not the consequences of what we have to deal with down the line. Your latest marketing initiative may seem like a great idea, but it only is if you've ensured it doesn't cause you pain in the future.

You Think I'm Cynical?

"Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist."

George Carlin (1937-2008)

Getting To No.

I received Barry Moltz's book Bounce through the mail a few weeks ago. It's a timely reminder (from someone who had a number of entrepreneurial failures before successfully selling an online business) about the need to have a practical perspective about failure and success, their symbiotic relationship and their proximity.

He writes from a business owner perspective, but his sales background gives a number of his ideas great resonance for marketing.

When making sales calls, I believe that to get to yes, I have to first get to no with the prospect to find out whether they represent a real opportunity.....a no is useful, it tells me the prospect is not in enough pain or doesn't see enough benefit in my product to purchase it now

That's all about resilience and pragmatism and it leads him to the conclusion that

in the sales process, most of us don't lose to a competitor; rather we lose to "no decision" or to "no response" - in other words, not hearing back from the prospect. Recognize that the absence of a decision is really a no.

It's a great lesson. Too many marketers are scared of no and delude themselves that their prospects are not saying no when they effectively are. But if you face up to no, then you can focus on those who are more likely to say yes (and will do so repeatedly) or, in their absence, you can focus on what it is about your product/service that is at odds with the needs of the market and thus inspires indifference.

Negative Marketing.

Marketing is everything that connects a provider of products and services to the meeting of specific customer needs. It's usually all about helping and/or persuading people actively to do something. In contrast, governmental marketing is often about persuading citizens not to do something. It's an intriguing mind-shift. Do you lecture, humour or shock or do you reframe the negative as a positive. And which works best?

At the launch of the latest anti-binge drinking campaign, the windows of an empty building in Covent Garden were filled with tableaux illustrating the various TV ads that have been created. It's looking at the problem from a different angle (as I do with these photos from behind the shop window) and seems to take the reframing route. They show people the downside of binge-drinking and suggest that "you wouldn't start the evening like this, so why would you end it like this?"


Even in the daylight when the windows were suffering from sun glare, it was evident that people were being stopped in their tracks and laughing at the tableaux. But is laughter the right route and how long before someone posts an online image of their replicating the actions against the respective windows?

Are soiled home furnishings really the key impact of binge drinking? Or is it damage to your health and personal reputation? If you dont want to shock by showing twenty-something cirrosshis patients (of which there is a growing epidemic), then why not focus on how unattractive it makes you by showing the reaction of members of the opposite sex to drunken antics? Though, of course, the secret to making smoking socially unacceptable was the focus on its health consequences.

At the launch, there was talk of drunkeness as a cultural norm, but that's the consequence not the cause and leads to the "cheap alcohol" red-herring. To my eyes, binge-drinking is much more about lowering one's social inhibitions and it occurs also in Scandanavia and Japan where alcohol is far from cheap but emotions are also repressed. If you want to change behaviour, then perhaps it's fruitful to investigate the reasons for the behaviour as well as the consequences. But politicians and civil servants do that even more rarely than marketing directors.

When Creativity Gets In The Way.

Why does a sign on a phone that's promoting reverse (collect) calls need to be difficult to read? Presumably, because somebody thought that "creativity" was more important than communication.