Marketing By Numbers.

Many people are commenting about the staggering innumeracy that features on today's cover of the UK's largest free newspaper.



Now, they could be suggesting that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that the more you eat the more delicious it becomes, but that sort of counting only works in effectiveness awards papers.



But it is important and not just because it will get passed around the internet. It's important because the people who usually are numerate i.e the finance department will yet again use it to diminish the credibility of those expensive arty marketers.



Marketing is not just about selling. It's about understanding business. If you don't understand numbers, you cant understand business and you should get your coat.

Eliminate The Negative.

I've written before about the importance of eliminating mistakes rather than looking for the next big thing.



It sounds negative, but I still contend it's not about being risk-averse, it's about avoiding delusion. All too often, marketers' career ambition leads them to seek the heinous wow factor. The intention is to startle and dazzle, but I'm not convinced that customers are looking for that.



And anyway, that's not what they truly absorb. It may temporarily blind them, but then their eyes clear and they notice the minor irritations that are foisted upon them day in day out. It is those irritations that build into their true sense of your "brand".



To eliminate those negatives is to be truly customer-centric via the provision of enduring improvement. So, as Doc Searls restated it recently, "can you identify your core incompetencies?"

Making The Cutomer's Mind Up.

I don't know if it was just a British thing, but I remember when people used to ask "what make is it?" especially when they were talking about vehicles.

It also applied to white goods, electrical products and, I think, clothes. It was a question filled with aspiration, but it must also have reflected a belief that the "maker" was an important part of the equation.

I don't know when that attitude changed. I'm not convinced it has. Going back to thinking about makes and marques would be a terrific antidote to the pompous entitlement that pervades so much skin-deep branding.

Why Would I Have What He's Having?

So, I've been noticing a plethora of ads (such as the one above) that feature "real" people. They're cheaper than discredited celebrity endorsements.

The trouble is people don't believe they're average and they certainly don't want to identify with the typical customer. They don't see one of us, they see someone they'd cross the street to avoid.

Far better to focus on your customers' aspirations than some aggregated categorisation that exists in the marketing department and probably nowhere else.

Social Objects Masterclass.

I was roused from my marketing world exile last night by a live performance of the acclaimed MacLeod-Earls double-act. They were discussing social objects in a convivial social setting (well as convivial as a media member's club can muster).

Having known them both for years, it's a subject we've discussed at length, but I never fail to come away with some new nuance. That didn't seem to be true for some of the audience who were still thinking in terms of deliverables despite having been explicitly told not to.

The deliverable may, in fact, be the ability to distinguish between a contrived social object and a genuine one. The former is that produced by those marketers who see this as the latest marketing bolt-on. The latter is that which is shared by those marketers who know that disruption isn't gentle and that it requires you to question all your previous assumptions.

I've Been Away.

I felt I was repeating myself and didn't want to fill the blogosphere with even more noise.

But, in the past month, I've noticed the blogging world has been stirring. It's getting interesting again. I'll have to think of something new to say.

Do Customers Deconstruct Advertising?

It's all too easy to get bogged down in analysing advertising given the investment of time, money and reputation that it represents. I'm not always sure what good it does and I'm far from certain that non-marketing professionals ever do that - unless of course we foolishly ask them to do so in focus groups.

But I'm going to do it anyway because this ad from a company close to my heart has appeared everywhere. Can you see what grabbed my attention? It's the small i in innocent, juxtaposed with the capital J in juicy in the line at the bottom - a design conceit that means that the start of both sentences is different and, to me, visually jarring.

Designers rightly talk about fonts being important - but what's the point if simple consistency is overlooked? In the great scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter. It's unlikely to stop people from buying juice, but it irritated me and I wonder if I am not alone in that.