Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Year Of Thinking Dangerously.


And so we end the year as we started it, amazed that stuff like this gets made. Huge amounts of money spent on two of my pet hates - name changes and celebrity endorsement - tactics that pander to the egos of executives and agencies alike while doing little for genuine differentiation.

Worse still, this is happening in insurance, that most commodified of industries that has focussed on price competition, that suffers from many complaints and that could still be something very different. It's a service that makes a huge impact at a time of high emotion and peril.

What more could a business want in the way of attentive users and what better chance to make them passionate about you by acknowledging that insurance is, at heart, in the emergency service business? None of that will follow from unified group names or irrelevant celebrities and, as the You Tube comments show, people don't like the huge amount of money they're throwing at it in a time of economic downturn.

It's lazy, standard thinking and lazy thinking has got so many sectors in trouble in 2008. Lazy thinking is not going to work in 2009. 2009 has to be the year of thinking dangerously.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Pick N Mix Is Not A Strategy.


When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people nostalgically bemoaned the passing of an institution and recalled making personally important purchases there decades ago (usually records or pick n mix).

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people realised that they hadn't been there for years and recalled that they didn't really know what they sold.

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, quite a lot of people who did shop there recalled how they sold the best value children's clothing on the high street. But who knew that? Could Woolworths' salvation have lain in becoming the best children's clothes store in town? We'll never know.

Because Woolworths used to stand for something in people's minds, but increasingly tried to stand for everything by selling a wide variety of unremarkable products and, inevitably, customers drifted away.

Ultimately, it didn't stand for anything and ultimately it no longer exists. Here endeth the lesson.

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Monday, December 22, 2008

Online Advertising Needs A Rationale.

..one of the main reasons for this is that advertisers and publishers are not always using the right measures to analyze advertising effectiveness. With average click rates on display ads falling under 0.1%, the correct metric to use is clearly NOT the click.

The click may well not be the correct metric to use. But the fact that click rates have fallen so low is not the justification for such a statement. The online advertising business really has to get its act together.

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Relatively Good Isn't Good Enough.


In 1817, David Ricardo wrote about comparative advantage and the mathematical proof that, regardless of your productive capacity, you could improve your community wealth by specialising and trading.

In basic terms, it tells even the most advanced producer to focus on that which they are best at producing and to exchange any surplus production for whatever else they need.

The corollary of this is that even the worst, most inept producers can exploit a comparative advantage by specialising in producing that which they are least bad at producing. They will improve their wealth (at least, marginally) by trading but, being inept, they are not going to get rich.

It was therefore surprising last night to hear Lord Mandelson (Britain's Minister for Business) give a speech outlining his ideas for a new policy of industrial activism in which he constantly referred to the need to identify those areas in which this country has a comparative advantage. Not once did he refer to sustainable competitive advantage.

The point is this - comparative advantage is all about looking at your competitors and trying to stay ahead of them via benchmarking and other unadventurous tactics. Competitive advantage is all about focusing on customers and being absolutely as good as you can be.

It is entirely possible to have a comparative advantage and still be the worst performer in a category. That is a lousy basis for an individual business, let alone a national industrial policy. Remarkable is not relative.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Frameworks For People.

Last week I heard Lord Rogers exude cultural and moral leadership in discussing his philosophy of architecture and urban design. His description of cities as "frameworks for people" seemed to me to be a good way to think about any product or service.

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Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Downside Of Over-Delivering.


The mantra says under-promise and over-deliver. But over-delivery lies in the eye of the customer and not in yours.

For example, if you say your estimated delivery day is Thursday, delivering on Wednesday is not great service if your customer comes home to find a failed delivery note.

You may well have gone the extra mile in respect of your normal performance. However, if it's not something that the customer appreciated then you weren't just wasting your time, you were potentially wasting theirs and that's unforgiveable.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

How To Make Them Talk About You.

It’s simple and yet seemingly oh so difficult. Give people something that makes their life richer, that does this simply and intuitively and, most importantly of all, does it in a way that doesn’t frustrate.

Avoid feature creep, avoid taking up too much of their time (that scarcest of resources) and avoid causing irritation.

Do that and you find that people are hard-wired to talk about this thing that gives them pleasure.

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Friday, December 5, 2008

Marketing Begins Upstairs.

In a recent Seth Godin post, he draws the distinction between making and taking statements. The latter are approaches aimed at stealing market share, the former are designed to create new markets and as he rightly points out are distinguished by a company taking a stance and standing for something.

I'd go further than that. I think it emphasises my often-stated belief of the synonymity of marketing and corporate strategy. You can't stand for something if you only consider it at the promotional stage - that way lies greenwash etc.

By any proper definition, marketing includes product development. But ideally that follows from strategy. Marketing is not a department. A true marketing perspective has to permeate every element of the boardroom. It doesn't and that's where so many problems start.

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Thursday, December 4, 2008

Creative Commons.


I've never bothered to fill out a social networking profile beyond the bare minimum but if I had, then Warren Zevon, Carl Hiaasen and David Letterman would all have featured. So I knew already that the three were intertwined in real life - even though I came to each of them individually and by unconnected routes.

But reading Zevon's biography, I was surprised to see how many other people I like were also part of his life at some time. In similar vein, I'm frequently discovering that people who've become friends turn out to have a read the same obscure business book as I did years before we met.

I don't know what this means or how it happens, but it's not coincidence.

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Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Is Advertising Immortal?


There are a lot of advertising-funded business models around.

If we can just build a community, then advertisers will want to reach them. Will they?

If we undercut more expensive advertising media, we'll have a competitive advantage. Will you?

If we don't charge for this, our audience will accept that they have to watch some ads in lieu of payment. Even if they did, would an advertiser really be interested in reaching a bunch of freeloaders?

It's amazing how many people who talk of disrupted markets, new paradigms and constant change are so wedded to old-world solutions. Change does not discriminate. If your marketplace has changed, then all bets are off. Not just the ones you don't have to make.

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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Customer Loyalty And The Pareto Tyranny.


Customer loyalty is much prized and much misunderstood. The obsession with it is such that companies often confuse habit for loyalty. They see their healthy sales figures and believe they have loyal followers rather than habitual customers. They believe this right up until the point when a competitor disrupts their market and their "loyalists" suddenly jump ship.

Last week, at an airline innovation forum, I also saw that this leads to customers misinterpreting loyalty. They were heavy users, they were anointed by loyalty schemes and they were not satisfied. They had a sense of entitlement derived from the belief that their perceived loyalty should be rewarded.

But are they really loyal or are they merely conditioned by habit and the switching costs implicit in reward schemes? Haven't they essentially made their purchase decisions of their own volition? Haven't they decided that this was the best value available to them? Shouldn't that be enough? They've assigned their lazy loyalty and if they didn't think it worthwhile wouldn't they have moved on?

Apparently not. These customers felt the key to the airline's future was to serve them, the heavy users, better. And many businesses feel that too - citing a bastardised confluence of Pareto and the idea that it costs more to get a new user than to retain an existing one.

The latter is technically true, but if it leads to customers expecting special bonuses then it's not far from competing solely on price. If they say they want more for the same price, it's not very different from saying they want the existing offer for less and, as we know, if you compete on price you're saying you don't really value your offering.

This is the heart of the loyalty conundrum and the received wisdom that companies should focus on the 20% who provide 80% of their profits. There can be no argument about focusing on keeping them happy by providing the best product/service but that should be a given for all customers. It's smarter still to exploit their "loyalty" and profitability by trying to sell them ancillary products and services which will contribute to the growth of a business.

But how much extra profitability can be wrung out of them? Too many businesses overlook the potential for real growth that lies in nurturing a proportion of the less profitable 80% towards true loyalty and greater profitability. If you can generate true loyalty in them via excellence of customer service, constant improvement or alliance with some shared belief, their sheer numbers mean they can have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Without knowing the actual numbers involved, I'd hazard a guess that an airline that could engender that in the back of the plane might reap rich rewards. Indeed if they could get economy passengers to pay a ticket price a couple of percentage points higher than that of the competition, they might, in fact, be doubling the profit margin of the largest part of their customer base.

The key to customer loyalty is not the creation of a pampered elite, it's about maximising the number of profitable customers.

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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

It's Spreadable Marketing, Not Viral.


In a New York bar last month, a (non-media) university friend of his asked the rest of the table to explain what Faris actually did - apart from use very long words that she didn't understand? We laughed, he pled guilty and we continued drinking.

This month, he's written an excellent post derived from his own thinking and his attendance of MIT's Future Of Entertainment conference. It gives us the simple language with which to clarify what viral marketing really is.

What we mean when something goes 'viral' is that LOTS OF PEOPLE CHOOSE TO PROPAGATE IT. It requires people to do something. Voluntarily. For their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they pull

In other words, it's not interruptive advertising. As Henry Jenkins said at the conference, it's much more about gifting and

you don't put a catalog in a gift! That's gauche advertising. And viral advertising is basically this: "here's free media, give it into your friends as a gift, also it includes advertising!"

That doesn't work because, as Douglas Rushkoff said

"People don't engage with each other to exchange viruses; people exchange viruses as an excuse to engage with each other."

This is where marketing is going. This is where it has to go.

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Monday, November 24, 2008

A View from the CFO's Office. . .

I recently attended MIT Sloan's annual CFO Summit in Newton, Massachusetts; not just to earn the CPE credits needed to maintain my CPA certification, but more importantly, I wanted to gain an understanding of CFOs' perspectives in this difficult economic environment. This is something that every CMO should understand to help optimize their management strategy as well as their tenure.

It was no surprise that the theme of the conference was "Relentless Volatility". Jack McCullough, one of the two co-chairs of the event, put it well in his opening remarks: "My investment banker friend in London described this environment as being similar to a divorce but worse. . . 'I've lost half of my net worth, but I'm still stuck with my husband.'" I'd like to summarize several key comments from the event that may offer you some ideas for how best to not only ride out the storm in the upcoming year, but even perhaps to leverage the situation to improve your position and take share in this tough market:
  • As part of your annual and intra-year planning process, ensure that you leverage scenario planning to best identify what challenges you may encounter in the next quarter or year, as well as what steps you need to take to minimize the potential damage from these risks;
  • Communication in this volatile environment increases in importance. . . not just with your functional team, but also with senior management; (i.e., don't be intimidated to better engage your CEO and CFO, especially when you need help or need their advice)
  • Ensure that your executive team knows that you not only understand the current challenges you face, but that you also have a plan to address them; (and meeting with the CFO offers a great chance to ensure that your plans are grounded in reality, as well as a chance to share your vision and increase their comfort level with your management framework and strategy)
  • "We've spent a significant amount of time reallocating our budgets to ensure that we're focusing on investment in the high growth, high profitability areas vs. in the "harvest" areas that may not need as much investment", Norman Robertson, CFO Progress Software; (e.g., IDC CMO Advisory Practice research indicates that the average technology vendor allocates 38% of their marketing budget to newer, higher growth business areas or product lines vs. existing, more mature business areas or product lines)
  • The large companies will no doubt be reducing their on-campus recruiting efforts this year. Therefore, now is a great opportunity to hire the best and brightest individuals from the top schools.
  • And finally, continue to drive innovation within your team, motivating individuals to take chances in an effort to change how they do business today. We need to give our staff the opportunity to be leaders, stepping into the light that no one else may see.

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That's Not Marketing Either.


Actually, no. A brand should exist solely to meet a customer need and, if it does, then its needs and those of the customer will be congruent. A construct doesn't have independent needs.

On the other hand, a company does have independent needs and this suggestion is more a reflection of the interconnectedness of marketing and corporate strategy than anything else.

Successful corporate strategy connects the needs of customers to the need of a company to achieve a return on investment. Not vice versa.

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Friday, November 21, 2008

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.

Rightly or wrongly, I stopped looking at my blog stats well over a year ago. That way neurosis lies. But, via my RSS reader, I am informed of how many of you kindly subscribe using that tool.

Overnight, not having blogged in two days, I lost three subscribers and that got me thinking. Had I (or Loren Feldman) offended readers with my Motrin post, had I bored them into submission, had they just lost the blog-reading habit or had readers switched to another RSS system? I have no way of knowing.

And it's important to know why people don't want what you're offering. Not because you should shape it to every person's whim, but because it's as informative to understand people's aversion to your product/service as it is to understand their loyalty. Motrin's biggest failing was not being ready to deal with that aversion and thus not engaging with it.

Keeping your current customers happy is a crucial business skill, but your new customers (and thus growth) are people who don't yet use your product/service and who just might share the views of those who are leaving you. Do you bother to find out what those views might be?

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Shaky Foundations Of Neuromarketing.

That is the problem with all neuroscience. We don't really know what we are seeing when we watch the brain work. Is it the thing itself - the thought, the flash of insight - or just an aspect of it, the bark rather than the dog.

Professor Lawrence Parsons - Sheffield University.

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Monday, November 17, 2008

Marketing Headache, Motrin-Style.

There has been a little kerfuffle in interweb land this past weekend. Most people won't have noticed it. But some people got quite excited because Motrin were very slow in reacting to the "noise" and didn't apologise and/or explain that they had been joking as quickly as they should.

The whole sorry saga is detailed here and includes what I had intended to be my only comment on the furore.

But I was forced to blog about it because of the intervention of the honeymooning Loren Feldman who gives an alternative perspective.

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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Criminalise Your Customers?

Tara pointed me to this story about a Dutch coffee-shop chain that

By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree...is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn't

That's smart as far as it goes. But it's indiscriminately interruptive of all wi-fi users and, more importantly, guilt is not the primary emotion you want to engender in your potential customers.

Far better to focus on the wittier messages rather than the hard sell. Far better to seek to make the miscreants (not to mention all those freer-spending wi-fi users) feel part of the community and invested in the fate of the business. Far better in the long run and far more likely to cause them to return.


Addendum: In line with this downtime interaction spotted by Iain, they could also use their interruptions to seek positive opinions or poll their miscreants about why they're not buying coffee.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Speed Marketing (Geeks In A Crypt).


So, I found myself in a crypt full of geeks.

Theoretically, I was there to learn some more about cloud computing, but instead I got a lesson in bad marketing.

If you're allocated five minutes to present your thinking and insights, you can do one of two things. You can try to cram your regular half hour into the reduced time which involves subjecting your audience to a blur of slides and/or an avalanche of speed-reading.

Or you can acknowledge that five minutes is not thirty and tailor your presentation accordingly. Embrace the limitations that are set rather than see them as an inconvenience. You may not impart as much information, but at least it will be heard.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Missing The Bus.


So, let me get this right. I could buy a coffee for £3, but rather than do that I should buy one of your £3 coach tickets and travel to an unspecified location where I can then spend some more money to buy a coffee I could have bought some hours ago?

Isn't the point of travel to enable you to do something you couldn't do where you were? Isn't the point of this example that marketers should always ensure that they and their media contractors know what it is that they're selling?

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Monday, November 10, 2008

Alone In The Crowd.


Marketers are increasingly trying and failing to inject social interaction into their activities. The key is to realise that something which seems social may not be social at all.

In this article about Sleeveface, one line stuck out.

"We know this one woman who got into it, and she used to do flash-mobbing. But she says you'd just turn up, do something funny and leave, so she didn't get to meet anybody. Sleevefacing is more social"

Too many markerters/advertisers think it's enough to turn up, do something funny and leave. It isn't.

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Thursday, November 6, 2008

Your Customer-Driven Future.

At the heart of the VRM philosophy is the intention to impel businesses to move away from a customer-focused approach and towards a customer-driven outlook. Some recent developments at Tesco.com (the online service of the UK's largest supermarket chain) provide an opportunity to clarify the distinction.

Customer-Focused

Tesco were the first UK supermarket to launch an online shopping site, but its initial iteration seemed to have simply cut and pasted their warehouse stock-lists into a template. Whereas a supermarket shopper would select the shelf for the category, identify their favoured brand and then select the size of product they wanted, hereyou had categories listed by size of product. You found yourself looking at a list of the various 250 ml aerosol deodorants and then the various 100 ml deodorants. An experience at complete variance with what you understood shopping to be.

I recall writing to the CEO and being told that things would get better and of course they did. But this was customer focus in action. Target those shoppers who might be net savvy and keep them in the fold by giving them a website as soon as possible regardless of its usability and the experience it offers them. Customer focus is about putting the passive customer in your cross-hairs and deciding when you squeeze the trigger.

Customer-Centric

Last week at the Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles, Tesco.com announced among other things that they had created software that enabled any online shopper to use their webcam as a barcode scanner when setting up their online shopping lists. That's all about making the process easier for the customer. It's about thinking about how the customer behaves and how you can make it easier and more agreeable for them. That's arguably a good definition of customer centricity.

But it's splitting hairs. Customer centricity is still not enough because the imposed passivity remains and the customer only gets what they're given and nothing that they've driven. Echoing Adriana's earlier post, Doc Searls twittered this week from a web 2.0 conference in London,


Customer-Driven

The key to customer-driven lies in the verb. There can be no doubt here, the user is in charge and actively directing the process.

In a move that really hints at the customer-driven future, Tesco.com also announced last week that they were opening up their API. By summer 2009 anyone will be able to create widgets and programs that can facilitate the use of the system. Many of those geeks will be existing customers who have had frustrations with the current system or who have identified ways that make the process easier for customers.

The outcome should be that customers will be able to drive how the service works for them, that Tesco.com will gain a richer knowledge of their needs, and that those customers will be better customers as true loyalty displaces habituation.

You can make as many proclamations as you like about being customer-focused or customer-centric, but do so in the knowledge that you are well behind the curve. In a collaborative, post-messaging world, your "focus" has to "centre" on creating a customer-driven business.


Bonus link: The guy from Tesco who made the announcements has a blog.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Marketing's Planning Process: An Ongoing Activity, not an Annual "Trip to the Dentist"

As your marketing organization approaches the end of its annual planning cycle, remember that it shouldn't end on January 1, 2009. As marketers we must get better at managing our annual and intra-year process as a part of our regular business processes vs. a once per year disruptive event. Doing so could be a helpful step forward in improving our ability to manage investment, shift resources in response to market conditions, and improve alignment within marketing and with the rest of the organization. Based upon interviews with marketing leaders in the technology industry and findings from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Board meeting, I'd like to offer the following "food for thought":

1. Staffing: Do you have an individual or team who's accountable for developing, executing and governing your planning process? The marketing operations function can provide the foundation and discipline for a well-orchestrated and managed planning process. Although this role has been effective in planning and orchestrating marketing's annual and intra-year planning process, marketers' view of planning as a separate activity from their daily job coupled with their lack of financial acumen continues to hinder the success of planning. (email me to receive a copy of our recent mktg. ops. study. . mgerard@idc.com)

2. Process: Marketers have made significant progress in establishing planning processes, such as global marketing leadership boards, a consistent taxonomy, financial tracking and other performance measurement processes; however, the lack of consistent adoption of these processes across the organization including a lack of alignment with finance, sales and regional marketing must be overcome to advance marketing to a higher level of operation and performance.

3. Technology: It is only in the past 3-4 years that most marketing organizations have actually achieved an understanding of how much they spend on marketing across the organization, mostly leveraging highly manual processes and Microsoft Excel. A recent IDC study revealed that 40% of IT marketers in companies >$3B in revenue continue to use Excel and other manual processes vs. a more automated MRM(marketing resource management)-type solution. It is time for us to advance to the next level of marketing, including tracking of investment at a more detailed level. (e.g., by objective, campaign, activity, brand, product, country, or segment) MRM applications offer the opportunity to do this in a more systematized and efficient manner. But remember, process first.

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The iPod Generation Isn't A Generation.


While participating in a panel at Mondays's VRM conference, I made a comment about the need for all businesses to recognise that the iPod generation were accustomed to having an entirely personalised music experience and that this technologically-driven expectation would spread into every area of their life.

I was bemused by some of the audience's accusations about my use of a generational generalisation and their insistence that they were more technologically-aware than their kids. No doubt they are. For me, it was not the make up of the generation, but the behaviour that was the issue. The reaction, however, was based on traditional segmentation thinking which defines all "generations" as age-ranges.

The iPod generation is the first "generation/group" who've experienced iPods. They are purchase-defined, they are behaviourally-defined, but they are not age-defined. Indeed, I've always doubted that any segments really were.

It may be correct to infer that the younger members of that generation will have a greater sense of entitlement to personalisation because they have known nothing else. It is not correct to assume that the older ones think very much differently, both because technology is agnostic and not ageist and because that sort of thinking is predicated upon a chronological definition of generations.

If you insist on simplifying this complex world by putting individuals into boxes, then do so based on how they behave and how they think. Not on what it says on their birth certificate.


Image via kristabel.

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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Managing Expectations.


Imagine how people will be feeling tomorrow if things don't go as they've been led to believe. Anger, disenchantment and distrust will prevail.

When your marketing efforts overhype what you can deliver or you fail to fulfill your promises, the same feelings pervade your potential customers. It may not be as palpable, but the emotions will be there. Just as deep and just as damaging.

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Thursday, October 30, 2008

Gomorra Marketing.


One of the many great things about this movie is the way the characters emerge over the course of the narrative. Unlike many movies, no-one is introduced, you're not told who they are nor what you should think about them. The mystery draws you in, the discovery hooks you and the reward is all the greater because of it. The marketing analogy is obvious.

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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Medium Isn't The Message.


"Murky is why being embraced by extreme athletes and clubgoers and gym rats and middle-class office workers and computer gamers and break-dance fans is just fine - at worst, each group simply thinks Red Bull is something for them, partly because they have never been told otherwise."

"Timberland discovered success in the diverse, even contradictory, ways that consumers found personal narrative relevance."

Do you really think you can know your prospects so well that you can craft the singular message that a specific individual wants to receieve?

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Monday, October 27, 2008

Too Close To The Edit?


In what I think they said was Phil Spector's first television interview for forty years, the "genius that other geniuses come to" described The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations as an "edit song".

Since he contrasted this with his own composition "Be My Baby" (which Brian Wilson calls the greatest song ever written), I took him to mean that an "edit song" was one that couldn't be faithfully reproduced live and was therefore inferior at some emotional and perhaps musical level. It's an interesting thought.

Perhaps that is what the repulsion of the uncanny valley is about - if something is refined or edited too much, the authenticity is lost and we sense the manufacture involved. This doesn't mean we have to get it right first time, but I wonder if it means we have to know when to stop refining and move to a whole new model/service. Incremental improvements are fine, but eventually they get tiresome. It's easier to be remarkable if you do something completely new.

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Friday, October 24, 2008

Wired Causes And Philanthropy.


Tom Watson has written a really interesting book (albeit with an appalling publisher-imposed title) in which he expands on themes espoused by Clay Shirky with specific reference to social activism, charity and philanthropy.

It is required reading. Not just because of the importance of the subject matter, not just because increasingly your business demonstrably has to stand for something, but also because it is filled with lessons in low cost marketing and you just know you're going to be expected to market smarter in the coming years.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Noticed Once, Never Forgotten.


When the going gets tough, businesses tend to play safe. When the going gets tough, it paradoxically becomes easier to stand out if you are brave enough to make yourself different. When the going gets tough and the competition is playing safe because of financial worries and reduced budgets, you can be frugal and still stand out.

The photo above is taken from a pdf of all the interns who worked with Seth Godin this summer. He featured it on his blog and thereby gave them a great platform to sell themselves. The one page that stood out (and not just to me) was the one that didn't list their qualities and skills, but just took the opportunity to say thanks. Being different got her noticed.

In similar vein, I know that Iain Tait is worth listening to, be it over a beer or at a conference or, ideally, both simultaneously. But so will anyone who reads this bio. I'm pretty sure it was written specifically for this conference, but it's so different from the other dreary ego-puffs that he will inevitably be noticed before he's even uttered a word.

Both people realised you have to be noticed before you can be missed.

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Monday, October 20, 2008

The Psychology Of Gullibility.


I couldn't resist a lecture with that title, now could I? It wasn't even the hoax I half expected it to be, but rather a discourse by Cornell's Head of Psychology, Thomas Gilovich on the causes of questionable and erroneous beliefs. He focused on three.

1) People have great pattern recognition machinery in their mind.

Unfortunately that means people often see patterns where there is, in fact, only randomness. A perfectly fair coin could land on heads ten times in succession and the odds of it happening an eleventh time would still be 50% but most people would think differently.

2) People test propositions by looking for evidence that supports them.

Positive reinforcement is much easier to find when you're actively looking for it. To test a proposition correctly you have to find both positive proof and a lack of negative disproof.

3) People are literally always of two minds about things.

We have a rational and an intuitive mind that battle against each other all the time. Intuition works better in situations where you have more data and/or experience, but people don't realise that.

Short-term marketers could and do take great advantage of any or all of those things and pull the wool over gullible eyes, but smart marketers who use them to help the customer feel more informed in their decisions and in control of their life will reap greater and longer-term rewards.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The Village Pet Store.



Not really a marketing post, just a recommendation if you're in New York before the end of the month. Though it does serve to remind you that someone, somewhere will always point out your business malpractices and that today that word will spread like wildfire.

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Make Marketing Transcendant.


Thanks to Lauren's art direction, I recently found myself amazed by the scale of the gallery that is Dia Beacon and being able to have huge rooms all to myself. I didn't understand a lot of it, but the comment of one of the artists Michael Heizer seemed to apply to the whole experience and many forms of business communication and interaction as well.

"It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe....if people feel commitment, they feel something has been transcended."

Transcendence is a great marketing goal. Hard for your competition to achieve and utterly memorable.

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Sunday, October 12, 2008

That's Not How We Explain Things.


Much as I love New York, it seems to me that the signage has deteriorated greatly - nowhere more so than on the subway. The most prominent part of this poster delivers a message that is incorrect for the majority of the day on which it appeared.

It would have been much clearer to announce that there were "No late-night Brooklyn bound trains" at this station, but that didn't happen because someone has decided that the conformity of communications format is sacrosanct. Consequently, timings appear in a small, unobtrusive header because the internal communication rules dictate that, even if doing so renders the message opaque.

Something to think about when you next hear the argument that you can't do that because "it's not on brand".

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Thursday, October 9, 2008

Co-Opting Causes Causes Customer Concern.


If your company believes in something, then don't just co-opt the sentiment as a tagline. Walking the walk is what counts, both in real life and in terms of customer approval.

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Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Missing The Customer Target.


Just saw this tweet from my CTO friend Matthias.

"I hate when Dell asks "what segment are you? small business? large business? home?" without explanation. Just show me computers, ok?"

He's right. Yet businesses still insist on trying to categorise customers by their criteria rather than ours. Why should they presume to know us better than we know ourselves? Make it easy for customers to tell you, if it's really necessary, and then just focus on giving them what they want.

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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Being Missed (aka Seth Godin Agrees With Me!).


Last night, I had the privilege of being one of a group of people invited to watch and comment upon a run-through of Seth Godin's newest talk. In it he adds some of the ideas from his latest book Tribes to the mix while synthesising a lot of thinking that is bubbling around social media and marketing. It was terrific.

Coincidentally, one of the points he made was what I had intended to blog about today. That point is that among all this talk of social objects, friending on Facebook or herd behaviour, the underlying test is what would happen if you were suddenly not one of the group. Would you be missed?

If your product/service is not so remarkable, so well able to meet your users' need and (in some more ephemeral sense) adds to their lives by virtue of standing for something, then they will not miss it if they don't buy it. You want your product/service to be one of those that people pine for when they're travelling overseas or suddenly discover they've used up. You want it genuinely to engage them rather than just get their attention. You want it to be something that truly engenders passion.

Being missed is ultimately what all the oft-quoted examplars have in common(think Nike, think Innocent, think latest industry poster-child) and being missed is what your marketing should be all about.


Addendum: The actual talk happens later this week and thereafter the slides will be online. You should check them out.

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Monday, October 6, 2008

Make Marketing Exciting.


If you're not excited about your product, why should a customer be?

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Thursday, October 2, 2008

Everything Is Marketing (Chapter 271).


The previously featured Ferrari emporium in Regent Street is seeking staff. But the marketing department - who previously used it to announce the arrival of the emotion of Ferrari - seems to have fogotten that its temporary storefront is still the billboard for their brand.

By allowing such a badly written piece of copy (for that's ultimately what it is), they've the location all the aura and emotion of the corner-shop window replete with DIY ads for gardeners and second-hand prams.

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

2009 Guidance for CMOs. . .

When budgets are on the cutting board, the marketing function often has to shoulder more than its fair share of the pain. The cuts of 2008 and 2009 will be no exception. In IDC's most recent budget survey, closed in September 2008, actual 2008 spend increase will be just 3.5%, a reduction from the 4% predicted earlier this year. In addition to the short term budget cuts, the pressures of the current downturn will usher in a period of more sweeping marketing organization change. In my five years as a CMO Advisory analyst at IDC, I have never observed so much management analysis regarding potential marketing-organization change. Here are some things to think about to help you to survive and thrive in 2009:

  • Transformation Starts at the Top. Many tech marketing organizations have far too many silos and lack alignment. For these companies, there is too much independent resource and spending at corporate and, in some cases, in the business units; and not enough spending in the field, closer to the prospects and customers. This also contributes to the dis-connects between the sales and marketing functions – as the sales department often perceives that marketing's actions are far removed from their efforts. IDC suggests further examination of the marketing organization's structure to improve alignment between corporate marketing, business unit marketing and field marketing.
  • Seek to Decentralize. Continuously question yourself during the budget planning process: where is the money owned; and where is it spent? IDC guidance is for the typical large tech vendor of greater than $1b in revenue to have at least 45-50% of its total marketing execution "spent" in the geographical regions. Currently, about 36% of the total marketing budget is directly owned and spent by the regions. Add to this the 6% of the typical corporate marketing budget that is "spent" by the field. The total is about 42% of spend in the regions, and so is short of the 50% benchmark goal.
  • Improve Relevancy. Two areas of essential guidance to help with the relevancy effort including campaign management and sales enablement. The first is an improved Campaign Management function. This role should seek to knit together disparate product-line marketing efforts into broader and larger themes. I have observed several top CMO's making these moves in 2008. The second area is Sales Enablement. Marketing needs to improve its ability to get the right marketing assets to the right sales-people, at the right time and in the right format. This is hard to do: its needs go above and beyond product marketing's attempts to do this.

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Don't Watch That, Watch This.


The news that ITV has developed a technology to embed advertisements into the uninteresting part of TV dramas is indicative of a desperate attempt to cling to a model that customers have started to abandon. Even if there is a lot of dead screen-space in ITV dramas these days.

People change their behaviour for a reason. The appropriate marketing reaction is to understand that reason and adapt accordingly. It is not to ignore their mindset completely and seek to impose your unwanted thinking on them. Viewers won't let this happen, of course, and ITV will have to think more about how to adapt their medium to their users' viewing habits rather than trying to change the way their users behave.

If they are to remain advertising-funded, then they must ensure that their viewers receive those advertisements that they want to see, when they want to see them. Not when ITV want them to see them. Like all broadcasters, they have to acknowledge that technology and choice means that it is the viewers (more so than the advertisers) who are now their customers.Times change and you have to change with them.

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Deconstructing Marketing Part 1.


Irrelevant use of sultry women will beguile your prospect.

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Button Fly?


As an habituee of achingly hip Shoreditch, I am clearly meant to notice and understand this consciously clever piece of marketing.




But is it really worth it? Isn't this just pandering to the theory of influentials on a postcode basis?

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Change Happens.

You get a letter from your health club announcing they've changed their membership rules and enclosing a new multi-paged rule booklet. You immediately wonder what that means, but you'd have to investigate to find out. You probably don't bother, but a residual doubt remains.

If they had simply sent a list of the changes they had made (in the form of the relevant before and after paragraphs), there would be no suspicion that they were trying to sneak something past you.

Change happens. Change is unnerving. It's also a great opportunity to build trust.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

12 Reasons Why Products Outweigh Promotion.




Needs

Products address what customers wants - if they don't, they die.
Promotion tries, too often, to dictate what customers need.

Discovery

Products are discovered by customers and that builds "ownership".
Promotion, in targetting customers, too often removes that potential.

Experience

Products are as much the experience of using them as what they do.
Promotion can only suggest or hype what that experience is like.

Passion

Products engender passion via tangible results and intangible satisfaction.
Promotion simply cannot do that.

Sales

Products generate repeat sales because of all of the above.
Promotion can, at best, amplify feedback.

Rationale

Products are what customers want.
Promotion is what retailers want.


None of this is to suggest that promotion is futile or indeed that you can't successfully promote a bad product in the short-run. Far from it. But promotion works best when it has something worthwhile to promote, because that very fact imbues the efforts with credence and enables the marketer to believe what they're saying.

To achieve that, you have to start by focussing on the creation of the product/service. Do so and you will find that the marketing themes will emerge almost naturally and will be more authentic and effective because of that. Fail to do so and you will find that nobody's paying attention.

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Cheerful Bottom?


Now that's what I call advertising. But does anybody look at banners - other than people in the business (like Kaylen who sent me this).

Bonus link: the website is very welcoming. Or do I mean unnerving?

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Direct Marketing.


A reminder that the obvious can be very effective.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Yell.com - The Illiterate Directory.


I know I'm being pedantic, but it should be Marcus's not Marcus' and for a directory to repeat this error throughout their ad is shocking. As is the ad by the way. But given that they're presumably selling themselves as purveyors of accurate information, why didn't they choose a posh name that didn't end in S and avoid the issue completely?

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Monday, September 15, 2008

What Price Authenticity?


Authenticity is one of the great marketing buzzwords of the day, but walking around the preview of the Damien Hirst show made me wonder what we actually mean by that word.

This photograph (taken from the preview catalogue) shows a number of the works being created. On closer inspection, you may notice that the artist himself is not involved in the process. He makes no secret of this and I'm not here to debate whether that makes him an artist or a designer, but it raises an interesting dilemma.


This sketch and many others were exhibited in what was by far my favourite room of the preview show. It seems to me that it is clearly authentic Hirst. It's his sketching, his writing, his imagination and his signature on the front. I'd love to own it but can't afford it.

Oranges and Lemons is the piece that emerged from that sketch. It's got butterflies, manufactured diamonds, his signature (on the back) and it's clearly inspired by his imagination. I'm less sure that it's what I would think of as authentic, so I don't really want to own it and, anyway, I can't afford it either.

Received wisdom would have us believe that the more authentic something is, the more highly prized it is. But there's more to it than that. It's what the customer base determines to be authentic that actually counts and tomorrow we shall see what value is attached to authenticity. The guide price for Oranges and Lemons is £300,000 to £500,000. The guide price for the sketch is £20,000 to £30,000. Are butterflies and manufactured diamonds really that authentic?

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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Recombinant Culture?


The mela is a multicultural celebration that is "all about bringing communities together and understanding different cultures." I have attended some which featured the food of many lands as well as their music and dance. Today's fitted that bill too, but its unique apogee was an attempt to bring communities together via that renowned multicultural phenomenon - the Abba tribute band.


Frida's developed a Scottish accent and Agnetha has, well, just developed. But worse than that, they just remind me that imitation is not all that flattering. The mash-ups and collaboration of web 2.0 are great if leading to improvement, but a recent return visit to the Cans Festival suggests that dilution is the more likely outcome. It takes more than effort to be original.

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Friday, September 12, 2008

Don't Make The Straight Man Funny.


So here's the second Microsoft ad in very long form and it's funnier. It has more characters and a better script, though I'm not sure what it has to do with Microsoft per se. Yet they still screw it up at the end by trying to get Bill Gates to be wacky (and I'm sure that will feature in the thirty second version). When he's the straight man here, he's funny. But, as with all marketing, when you try to suggest that something or someone is different from how we know them to be, it just gets embarrassing.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Damien Hirst Marketing.


Today at Sotheby's preview of the big Damien Hirst sale, I noticed that many of the encased pieces such as "Here Today, Gone Tomorow" (pictured above) were bigger than ever. It was interesting then to read Hirst's words in the catalogue.

The horror is them getting thrown away, for any artist I think. You want your work on the wall for people to see. I think that's one of the reasons I put boxes around things, so that you can't fit it in the loft/attic.

Does your product/service have a box?

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Perceptions Are Illogical.


Changing well-established perceptions is a difficult marketing task and there's been lots of online discussion about the merit of Microsoft's new advertising campaign. But I want to focus on one aspect of the process, the underlying logic of change.

It seems to me that at least one reason why Bill Gates is featured is that someone made the following deduction. Bill Gates is Microsoft. But Bill Gates is perceived to be a hard-nosed business nerd. If we soften the perception of Bill, we'll soften the perception of Microsoft.

At first, that might seem easier than trying to change the perception of Microsoft directly. The trouble is that even if they succeeded in changing the current perception of Bill Gates, Microsoft would still be associated with the old and long-standing perception of Bill Gates. If you want to move both ends of an equation, you have to do just that, move both of them.

There isn't any real need to try to move both ends anyway. Why not just create a new equation. What they want to do is change the perception of Microsoft, so that's what they should focus on doing. The way to do that is not through advertising, but through actions and products that inevitably make customers feel that something has changed.

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Friday, September 5, 2008

A Closed Shave.


You assumed I couldn't write another post about assumptions? This is the beautiful new hybrid razor or azor from King of Shaves that I recently picked up from their promotional bus. It's a company seeking to shake up a category and, as I am already a great fan of their shaving oil, I was intrigued to see if their promise that one could Shave Close, Longer, For Less would stand up.

It did, but sadly it would force me to have a goatee, because I found all those areas that a goatee and moustache cover quite impossible to shave. However, they're definitely onto something because shaving the rest of my face with long smooth strokes was a revelation. Fast, soft and incredibly close. I'm not sure if my experience is typical, but if I shaved my legs I know what razor I'd use.

If I'm right, I wonder if they'll start to think beyond their original assumptions and exploit another market in line with what the product does, rather than what they intended it to do. Many companies have done that in the past, but many more have floundered because they were too invested in their original plan.

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

Never Assume.

As I wrote in my post about magic, assumptions can easily lead you astray. Take restaurants. It's pretty easy to guess one of the most important aspects of a restaurant as far as customers are concerned and according to this article, you'd be right.

Cleanliness was rated as the most highly valued aspect of restaurant selection among almost all respondents.

But what is cleanliness? In Barcelona you might be surprised to see the floor of a tapas bar strewn with discarded paper napkins and assume that it was a sloppy institution. You'd be completly wrong. The discarded napkins are, in fact, a traditional vote of customer approval. The messier the floor, the better the food.

Never assume that your prospective customers think the same way that you do or indeed the same way as the majority does. Just find out.

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Padded Bra. Padded Justification.


Talking of giving marketing a bad name. Wonderbra has created an interactive website and poster comprising hundreds of photos of real women and a few celebrities united by larger chest size. Nothing wrong with that. It will garner a lot of publicity. Nothing that original either. It's just an extension of Dove's real beauty theme. But what annoyed me was the creative director's justification.

"Smart brands now know that it is increasingly pointless just to talk at your market. Today it's much more about involving them in the whole process of marketing."

Yes, they'd like to be involved in the sense of being seriously listened to. On their terms and when they wish to be involved. That's common sense. But sticking them in a poster is not involving them in the marketing process. It's barely involving them in the promotion process. Crucially, it's not the sort of involvement that will make them more satisfied customers.

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Magical Marketing.


There's a magician/illusionist involved here, so we know it's a trick and it's pretty easy to work out how it's done. Like most magic, it's based on false assumptions. The trick works and impresses because the illusionist knows the assumptions we'll make and ensures that we make them.

Efective marketing should also be based on knowing the assumptions your customers will make. Advertising agencies call these insights. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. But, I'm not sure the analogy should be taken all the way. Here, the patsy knows he's been fooled, yet doesn't mind because he went in expecting that to happen.

In some categories, specifically those with a fashion basis, customers are relatively happy to be "tricked". Fashion, however, is fleeting. If your product/service is less transient, I think it's probably acceptable to exploit customer assumptions in pursuit of giving them greater satisfaction, but I don't think that justifies deceiving them. That's where marketing gets its bad name. Any thoughts?

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Monday, September 1, 2008

Inside Out Or Outside In?


Interesting that the cover asks "Can America withstand the world's thirst for oil?" rather than consider the unsustainable reality of one country consuming 25% of the world's oil as the source of the problem.

Marketing is not just about looking outwards. Even if something changes in your external environment/market/category, you should never forget to look within.

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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Nike's Retail ID.


This is the interior of Nike's 1948 pop-up store in London. It's one of five aroud the world that will exist for the next couple of months. Hidden away in a side street far from the regular retail haunts, it is fiendishly difficult to find and relies solely on word of mouth for traffic. So it's no surprise that it was empty when I arrived mid-afternoon on a weekday. There, however, the similarities with Nokia's flagship store ended.

Physically interesting, it's a mix of footwear gallery and specialist retailer, but the thing that really marked it out were the staff. All of them interested and interesting. Excited by the design and technology that surrounded them. Keen to inform, explain and opine.

I was sorry to have to leave. I will return. The whole thing made me think about Nike more than ever before and in different ways than perhaps was intended. But that's what retail spaces should do. Isn't it?

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Rise of the Campaign Manager Role

Even the most successful technology firms continue to struggle with consistent and effective execution of their campaigns and related go-to-market strategies, unable to improve their alignment with marketing or the organization as a whole. The campaign management function provides the opportunity to solve the foremost problem of tech marketing today: that of the declining return on marketing investment that results from executing marketing mix elements in separate and disintegrated streams. Tech marketing departments that have not structured for this role yet should do so.

Here is some key guidance and insight based upon my recent interviews with marketing leaders in the technology industry as well as findings from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Board meeting with 33 marketing professionals:
  • Campaign managers provide the missing link between the business units, marketing shared services and regional marketing. At Quest Software, campaign management serves as the liaison between marketing shared services groups and the business units and ensures sales' involvement in the campaign management process.
  • The foundation of a successful campaign is a detailed go-to-market strategy that includes, but is not limited to, target segment(s), messaging aligned by audience, marketing mix, channel strategy, objectives, and metrics and targets. IBM uses a master brief at the start of any new marketing program, product announcement, or launch to help lock in these elements.
  • A campaign's go-to-market strategy and execution requires tight global alignment across marketing and sales, while ensuring that specific parties remain accountable along the process with established timelines. Symantec has developed tiered campaign processes and ensures that regions are leveraged as part of this process to secure their involvement and improve efficiencies of planning and execution.
  • Yes, process comes first, but don't underestimate the power of technology. Differentiate with newer campaign management software to establish and leverage one-to-one relationships with your prospects and customers and continue improving lead management processes, particularly lead nurturing activities.
  • Common functional and cross-functional metrics continue to apply for campaign performance measurement, yet room remains for new metrics. Don't be afraid to experiment with new metrics. . . and don't underestimate the value of more qualitative metrics.

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This Accident Blackspot Sponsored By.


Well, maybe it's obvious that the pole of a street lamp is just gold-plated attention-space that's crying out for some media.


But, having zoomed out, you can see why it struck me that that the locals must be pretty good drivers to be able to focus on the three lanes of traffic decelerating on the hill that leads to a major intersection at the centre of this town, absorb whatever message was placed there and avoid an accident. How long, I wonder, before some transgressor or victim sues the advertiser for distracting them while driving?

I can see the superficial appeal to insurers, garages and undertakers, but when assessing the location of one's promotion media, it's probably important to think about impact in terms of more than just effectiveness.

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Monday, August 25, 2008

Cool Britannia?


A media guide accompanied London's eight minute presentation that took place during Beijing's closing ceremony. It apparently declared that one intention was to show that London is “the coolest place on the planet”.

As one commentater observed, the mere act of claiming to be cool is an infallible indication that you are not. Marketers should remember that and also be aware that this applies to all adjectives, not just being cool.

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