What Chinese Want.

We hear all about China and its inevitable rise, but how much do most of us know about the place? My answer to that question was virtually nothing, so it was a very nice surprise to receive this book some months ago. It's taught me a lot (subject to cross-referencing of course) and is a good mix of assertions and business and cultural examples.

I find it hard to believe that Chinese cultural hierarchy is incompatible with creativity and innovation, but perhaps that is just an example of my uninformed pre-conceptions. And if you don't challenge your assumptions about the markets you're targetting,  you end up making big mistakes. You can never know enough and you need to be sure you know anything.

Addendum: This is not business-related but as an insight into other people's lives (this time in the southern USA) it's remarkable.

They're Not Consumers, They're Your Customers.

Marketers constantly emphasise their humanity, yet insist on using the impersonal term consumer. It's inaccurate, it's distracting and it needs to stop.

It's inaccurate beause the person to whom they're selling is not necessarily the person who actually consumes the product/service if, indeed, anyone does.

It's distracting because to label him/her as the consumer distances the marketer from the person that matters, the person who makes the purchase be that on their own behalf or on behalf of their family or someone to whom they want to give a gift.

It's their hard-earned money that is paying your salary and referring to them as your customers is a discipline that will remind you of that every day.

Bad Marketing.

Many people in business don't understand statistics or finance and that's appalling. Similarly, far too many people neither understand marketing nor know what it is and that's marketers fault. Shel Israel's article  about how marketing is ruining social media is just the latest illustration of that. There's nothing wrong with the argument, it's just that it's not marketing that's at fault, it's bad marketers.

Bad marketers are short-term salespeople rather than long-term marketers.

Bad marketers see everything in terms of marketing opportunities.

Bad marketers would rather do anything than opt to do seemingly nothing. 

Bad marketers see people as consumers not customers.

Bad marketers lack respect for other people's creativity. 

Bad marketers see channels where people see entertainment or utility.

Bad marketers overvalue the new and undervalue the present.

Bad marketers do what they've always done.

Bad marketers use all the jargon but understand very little of it.

Bad marketers don't question their assumptions.

Bad marketers are the reason  I wrote Geek Marketing 101 six years ago.

Bad marketers have given marketing a bad name.

Bad marketers are still doing what they've always done.

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.