Know Your Customers.

Chatting to a colleague yesterday,  I was surprised to learn how often marketers still fail to discover how their category users decide on their purchases, let alone why.

The primary concern of these functionaries remains the sourcing of messages/proclamations designed to change people's behaviour. Well,  good luck with that. Behaviour change is very, very difficult.

It's surely much simpler to seek to understand existing behaviour and then position your product/service in that vicinity either by devising new products/services or by reframing the user behaviour in terms of your existing products/services.

Marketers often claim to know who their customers are, be that in demographic or, more usefully, related behavioural terms. I prefer a more obvious definition. Your customers are those people who decide that your product/service meets one or more of their needs/wants in a better way than any existing alternative.

If you don't know why,  then you don't know who your customers are and you're probably doomed.

Marketing Awareness.

Creating awareness is often rightly derided as an unimaginative advertising goal. But that doesn't mean it's an inherently bad goal. Indeed,  if you share my conviction that it is the user who decides what your product/service means to them, then you could argue that awareness is all you can genuinely hope to achieve.

British Airways neither make grandiose claims that they won't match in real life nor do they fall in to the trap of boasting about their sponsorship status that, at best, comec across as faintly ridiculous.
They simply suggest that people don't buy their product and stay at home to support the home team during the Olympics.

Now, nobody is going to change their travel plans because of this campaign, but it  doesn't matter if people take them literally or not. They'll register British Airways being supportive as a sponsor should be; a little something will be added to their opinion of British Airways, and when they want to fly maybe that will increase the  likelihood of their being first name that comes to mind.

Just a small hint writ large is perhaps all you need.




Addendum: Sadly someone in their social media team ruins it by responding to a YouTube comment thus

Hi lethak - our 'Don't Fly' message is a tongue-in-cheek way of asking everyone to get behind our athletes for the Olympic Games. We understand people will still need to fly during the Games and we we will be happy to welcome them on board, but we will be equally happy to fly them after the Games if they choose to stay in the UK and be part of the #HomeAdvantage. Thanks.

Facebook Likes Are Like What?

1747 likes for a lecture which took place in a hall with a capacity much smaller than that, but which was not full. Draw your own conclusions.

Social media are broadcasting media. They're predicated on self-validation rather than intent.

Segmentation Mania.

Marketers will try to justify almost any worldview. After all, they reason, if enough people share or can be convinced of that worldview, there'll be a profit in it. But it's a dangerous fallacy. One that fuels a segmentation mania that alienates customers and distracts business focus.

The problem is that every business will develop different ways of imagining market segments, most likely attuned to their own strengths, the egoes of senior executives or the biases of the people charged with developing them. Today, this is increasingly exacerbated by the abuse of data capture and production flexibility. 

Data capture that enables the infinite slicing and dicing of customers all too often devolves into character sketches that are more caricature than clarity.

Production flexibility that facilitates customisation all too often leads to attempts to transform  product offerings that simply transform featuritis into modelitis.

In this blogpost, the writer shows where that leads in the phone industry and contrasts the efforts of some phone companies to produce myriad phones to slightly different specifications with the singular focus of Apple.

From my perspective, the former leads to customer confusion, reduced product presence and diminished aspirational appeal while Apple seems to eschew that type of micro-segmentation in preference for a bipartisan worldview - people who might want their products and people who don't
and a strategy of making the former as large as they can via organic growth built on product focus.

Businesses operate in a world where so much is possible. The successful ones are those which identify what is necessary.

Unintended Consequences Make Better Marketing.

A number of desks will soon feature marketing pitches based on the concept of the "reluctantly wealthy".  I know this because the phrase appeared in the comments in Rob's blog the other day and  caused quite a stir.

The idea stemmed from the realisation that the wealth of a successful individual is sometimes only a by-product of some other attribute, be that industriousness, creativity or a passionate belief. People see the wealth, but miss what lies deeper.

If you can recognise the unintended consequences in relation to the situation you're marketing, you're  likely to appeal to a much more resonant motivation that lies beneath rather than repeat the superficial notion that inhabits your competitors' lowest common denominator efforts.

Political Marketing 101?

Having checked that it was not from the candidate's opponents, I had to wonder if this personalised marketing was an example of subtlety or incompetence. Marketing may often engender indifference, but it always has an impact.

Hotel Reservations.

A spokesman for the British Hospitality Association recently justified the fact that some luxury hotels charge more for wi-fi by claiming that affluent guests are less likely to complain about the cost.

“It's a commercial decision, and entirely up to the hotel,” he said. “Many owners regard wi-fi charges as a legitimate revenue source, and considering the size of some hotels, it can be a very lucrative one.”

There are two things to say to that:

The person whose tweet alerted me to the article is the founder of a very successful company who was unhappy about such charges on a trip to Australia. He noticed, he complained and then he publicised the fact.

As soon as you start thinking of customers as revenue sources, you're placing the extraction of money ahead of good value service provision. Those customers will quickly notice that your priorities are diverging from theirs and they will divert their money to those of a more customer-focussed competitor.

Everything a business does is a commercial decision. The trick is to make them good ones.