Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store.

On my recent trip, I finally got around to making the obligatory visit to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store.

When you read about this place, you tend to read about the zany merchandise and the humour of the place. But while that's all there, what I saw was a great example of marketing to different audiences.

The store itself is designed to be remarkable. It's their display advertising aimed at people such as me who will be intrigued enough to visit and then spread the word about the store and its real purpose.

Interestingly, a number of local people with whom I spoke thought it was just a retail store and were amazed to be told that it was really a front for an after-school education programme. They'd have been even more amazed to know the minuscule amounts that the store earns every day.

But the kids who stream in to use the service are reacting to different marketing. They may well have been intrigued by the display advertising initially, but they pay it no attention now. For them, this false shelving is the marketing. It's the door to the classroom.


They're much more interested in their secret place, their ownership of that place that's inherent in their sharing in that secrecy and their knowledge of what it's giving them.

Display advertising works for some people. To really hook your users you need something more powerful. I made one visit - they keep coming back.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Glass Half Empty.

Marketing is generally focussed on encouraging people to acquire something they don't have.

But what if people are motivated more by the fear of losing something they have rather than the disappointment of not getting something new?

If people are motivated by avoiding negatives such as fear, regret or death, how do you reframe your approach?

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

What Questions Are you Answering?

I spent some hours yesterday critiquing the usability of a forthcoming expensive website and did so largely on the basis that the designers had not asked what journey they expected their users to be taking. So, it was particularly apposite to see Ben pointing out the excellence of Google's print dialogue box as reproduced above. A dialogue box that is designed with the user's journey/questions in mind.

Businesses provide answers for and to customers' questions. Marketing which starts with the design of your product/service should be similarly predicated on those questions. Putting yourself in the customers' shoes is what you have to do, but that does not mean asking yourself or pointless focus groups whether they would like a certain new feature.

Putting yourself in the customers' shoes is all about imagining the journey they want to take in using your product/service. It's about predicting the questions they are going to want answered and it's about making sure you answer all of them better than anyone else.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Digital Marketing and Marketing Automation Hit Critical Mass in 2009

Well, our 2009 IDC Tech Marketing Barometer results are in; and if you missed the Telebriefing two weeks ago, here are some of the highlights:

Marketing Investment:

• 0.5% Growth for Global IT Spending in 2009, while Average Tech Marketing Investment Drops 10%.
• Larger companies (>$1B in revenue) will take the greatest hit in marketing budget as they wrestle with significant revenue drops in key parts of their portfolios and continue to improve efficiency.
• Growth areas still exist within: enterprise social media, security management, mobile data, SaaS, Internet advertising, business analytics and IT outsourcing & BPO to name a few. (source: John Gantz's presentation at IDC's recent Directions event)

Marketing Mix:

• The pendulum of investment swings to demand generation, with sales enablement closely coupled to this priority. (awareness building takes a "back seat", yet remains a key part of healthier companies' portfolios)
• We've been all talk as an industry with regards to full-scale shifts of our investment to digital marketing over the past couple of years. The economic downturn will catalyze this shift in 2009 with almost 70% of marketers indicating an increase in investment in digital marketing while 60% and 72% of marketers will decrease advertising and events spend respectively. (refer to the past couple of posts in this blog for additional details about digital marketing shifts)
• Sales enablement will become a high priority for getting internal and external sales teams (and partners) the most relevant content at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving specific opportunities forward. Endless pages of collateral and white papers will be replaced by more relevant content that is better leveraged across the organization. (check out the previous blog post, "Content Squared")

Organizational Structures:

• Here we go again as marketers shift their organizational structures. Some organizations will entirely abandon their relatively cohesive marketing structure to shift to an entirely decentralized organization in an effort to simply survive; while the better positioned organizations will "weather the storm" with a more centralized marketing function and/or leveraging marketing shared services to improve efficiency and effectiveness in execution.
• Marketing operations and sales operations teams will continue to work together, increasing focus on the lead management process and associated nurturing and lead qualification strategies.

Marketing Automation:

• Marketing automation will experience a turning-point in 2009 as adoption significantly increases in the technology sector. Drivers include the significant improvements in the transactional CRM system vendors as well as the increased availability and cost effectiveness of SaaS offerings from planning to event-triggered marketing to performance measurement.
• A few questions to ask yourself: Do I have a marketing operations team in place to deploy and govern marketing automation?; Are we ensuring that process drives the technology versus the other way around? How do we ensure consistent adoption and use of these applications across functions, business units and regions on a regular basis?; Have we partnered with finance, sales and other teams as part of this strategy?; and Do we have a marketing automation road map?

These are just a few highlights of the recent study as well as food for thought as you progress through your 2009 plan. As technology marketers, I continue to believe that we are better prepared than ever to respond to the challenges posed in this difficult environment. This will not only facilitate our survival in 2009, but will enable us to rebound quicker than from prior downturns.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Think Local.

I caught up with an old friend/client who runs three business locations in Manhattan - downtown, midtown and uptown. It turns out that even within that small area, the effectiveness of various media is different.

Downtown people are more susceptible to online, midtown density lends itself to outdoor and uptown needs the direct marketing route. The customers are similar but their environments and lifestyles are different.

It's a good reminder that aggregating an audience geographically can be as naive as doing it demographically.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Markets Are Presentations.

"A bullet-point that wraps around is not a bullet-point, it's a badly written sentence."

Another great quote from SXSW. This time from a panel about presentations and said by a trail lawyer turned presentation expert.

It's applicable to presentations, of course, but to so much more. After all, a presentation is simply the act of marketing information to an audience. So when you endure your next presentation, use the time effectively. Work out why you're hating it and make sure you're not subjecting your customers to a similar experience.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Kubrick's Five Marketing Lessons.

Marketing is everybody's job and yet many people deny their role in it. They do so either by neglect or ignorance. Neglect occurs when people forget that every interaction is a marketing occasion or, more accurately, the opportunity not to create a bad impression/experience. Ignorance is often more benign and occurs when people are living by marketing principles without knowing it.

I witnessed a great example of the latter here in Austin while sitting in on a fabulous chat with Jan Harlan - brother in law of, and executive producer to Stanley Kubrick. He explicitly denied any real involvement in marketing campaigns, but so many of the things he said about his production philosophy were steeped in great marketing thinking.

1) Get the first three minutes right.

That's nothing other than engaging the customer. Ensuring that you rapidly pique their attention and curiosity while not confusing or boring them.

2) If there's something wrong with the ending, check the beginning.

In other words, focus on getting the product right by focussing not just on where you're aiming (because as I keep saying, your actual customers may not even be there), but on where you're starting from.

3) You've only got one chance.

His full statement was, "you've got just two hours and an audience that comes once". That might seem movie-specific, but it's really not. Think of your customers as a movie audience with their attendant expectations and word of mouth potential and you'll be reminded that "always in beta" is more about continuous improvement than an excuse to make mistakes.

4) Trust your audience.

A corollary of point 1 in my eyes. Not giving them what they want is bad enough, patronising them in any way is worse. Don't keep them in the dark for sure, but don't treat them as idiots either. Give them the tools and the opportunities to understand and appreciate the full potential of your product/service. Their discovery will enhance their enthusiasm.

5) Go and get.

In typical self-deprecating style, he remarked that "Executive Producer is a meaningless title. What I do is I negotiate. I go and get what's needed." This included making four trips to Venice to buy face masks for Eyes Wide Shut because the costume designer was better employed back at base. Marketing departments are all too often about the business of marketing and not about going and getting.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Does Your Go-To-Market Strategy Align with Your Customer Needs? – Insight from IDG's Recent Marketing Summit and CIO Panel

IDG and IDC recently held its 4th annual Marketing Summit in San Francisco, with over 50 marketing executives in attendance. This annual, senior level event offers the opportunity to not only network with some of the technology industry's best and brightest marketing executives, but also offers the chance to hear from a panel of CIOs about "the good, the bad and the ugly" of our marketing and sales effectiveness. This year proved to be as valuable as prior years in helping to confirm some of our existing knowledge as well as offering contradictions to our preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't work.

The CIO panel, moderated by Rich Vancil of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, included executives from Chevron, Levi Strauss and Byer California (a mid-market company that manufacturers womens' clothing). Here are a couple of "gold nuggets" that I took away from this event including the actual quotes from the panelists: [my comments in brackets]

• "In a recent RFP process, I had discussions with five companies' sales teams. Only one out of the five companies was able to understand our needs and reiterate our challenges and communicate a solution without making it a one-way sales pitch." [How can we as marketers improve our sales enablement strategy to better equip our sales teams for these engagements?]
• "I prefer to print out white papers and read them at home, while my staff prefer web casts and other online material." [That's right, the CIO uses printed material to absorb information while more junior staff have adopted newer consumption methods. Always segment your customers. A role-based marketing strategy may highlight significant differences in how individuals consume information; including the continued need for an integrated, multi-media go-to-market approach.]
• "As a mid-market company, spend more time telling me about how you've deployed your solutions at companies similar to mine. Yes, you may have a Fortune 50 company as a client, but those companies will buy one of everything and put them on a shelf! I'll be investing my entire budget into one solution." [Segmentation and understanding of your customer, an often neglected area, continues to be a key success factor for marketing and sales engagements with customers.]
• "As a CIO, I may not use webcasts since every minute that I'm in the office someone is coming into my office; however, I may pass on the opportunity to my staff who I greatly depend upon to influence my decisions." [Once again speaking to the importance of a role-based marketing strategy. As B-to-B marketers, we need to not only understand the importance of selling to different members of an extended buying team, but embed this knowledge into our go-to-market and sales enablement strategies.]

As if we ever need reminding, the importance of maintaining our connection to our customers should never be underestimated. In fact, I find that the best marketers serve as a "beacon of light" for customer and market information for the entire organization. Don't let your marketing cuts inhibit your drive to serve this role in your company. Now more than ever your customers' needs are changing, if not due to rapid adoption of the Internet then most certainly due to the economic downturn.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

The Problem With Marketing.

If someone says they work in marketing, the next response is frequently "What do you market?" As if all expertise was sector or product-specific.

The problem with marketing (well one of the many) is that its practitioners do a lousy job of marketing themselves and what they do.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Trust Your Users.

In the space of about ten hours last Saturday, a large room full of geeks and coders created twenty nine different "manipulations" of government data sources with a view to "Coding A Better Country" because:

"Government isn't very good at computers. They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame."

They adapted and mashed-up existing websites to generate unbranded utilities that delivered something they, as citizens, felt was better than that which already existed.

You can see an archive of what was produced here (videos here) and dwell on the fact that, yet again, it's a case of what can be achieved if you help your users decide how they want to use your product/service rather than imposing on them your view of what they want.

It doesn't lead to a diminution of your business. It makes people more likely to be your users/customers.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Joy To The World.

When the going gets tough, there is a tendency to talk everything down. But what people really want is to be told that there is hope out there, that there is a route to something better. Maketers know this and it's leading to a surfeit of advertising designed to elicit feelings of joy.

But joy is a feeling of deep happiness and contentment. It is not some fleeting moment of a smile when you see a gorilla or a station filled with "dancers". This is not a time for coating your product/service with a patina of positive thinking. It is a time to shape that product/service so that people feel utterly content when they use it with nothing going wrong at a functional level and their spirits lifted by your having eased them through some aspect of their day

Tougher to do, but much more arresting than mere entertainment.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

The Changing Marketing Mix

The press is filled with stories about the demise of traditional advertising and the in-person, public trade show. Sounds quite similar in fact to the predicted disappearance of the "brick-and-mortar" storefront, and the emergence of a new on-line world where we can do all of our shopping in our slippers from the comfort of our home. Well, IDC CMO Advisory's recent 2009 Barometer study does continue to indicate that our traditional marketing mix is in the process of permanently changing. In fact, almost 70% of technology marketers indicate that they'll be increasing their program investment in digital marketing in 2009, while 72% of companies will be decreasing their in-person events spend and 60% decreasing their advertising spend (print, broadcast and corporate sponsorships). What are the top digital marketing initiatives for technology companies in 2009?

• Corporate web site: No longer simply a marketing billboard, the corporate web site has become the window to the customer. The most effective corporate sites offer visitors the opportunity to not only learn about your products and solutions, but to also learn about the latest technologies and business challenges as well as offering the opportunity to interact with their peers and your technology experts. (e.g., through a community portal) The best sites also track the details of visitors to enable more of a 1-to-1 experience as well as tracking detailed customer data to improve marketing's lead management and nurturing process.
• Email: An often over-used vehicle for sending marketing collateral to the masses in a one size fits all mentality, this channel is being used more effectively for engaging with customers through an event-triggered marketing process. For example, providing respondents with additional, customized, relevant information based upon their responses to earlier communications.
• Search engine marketing: Although display ads will continue to be part of a strong portfolio, search ads and search engine optimization(SEO) will increase in importance. Search ads offer the opportunity to more surgically target your prospects as they reach out for information, while SEO continues to yield a strong return in increasing your companies' prominence in organic search.

However, before you hand the "key to the city" over to your digital marketing team, there are some important things to consider:

1. First and foremost, the rest of the marketing mix will continue to be an important part of a strong portfolio of marketing's strategy; and the balance of this mix will only get harder. For example, the CIO may prefer to continue reading their magazines and printing out pdf whitepapers; their direct report(s) will attend webcasts and read interactive white papers; and third level staffers will attend virtual events and online communities as part of their everyday job. Your mix will need to address the information consumption patterns of each of these roles – hence the need for role-based marketing.
2. As you continue to rush into digital marketing, ensure that your team does not leave their Marketing 101 learnings behind. For example, continue to leverage market intelligence as part of a market segmentation strategy; to identify your target customers, to understand what information is most relevant to your customers along different stages of the buying cycle, and to understand how and where your customers' consume their information.
3. Look for opportunities to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. While everyone is shifting to email and webcasts, a portion of your investment may be best spent on direct mail or in-person proprietary events.
4. Yes, continue experimenting with digital marketing, however, now is the time to begin including digital marketing as part of the fabric of your go-to-market strategy. Best practitioners are establishing campaign management teams to maintain an integrated marketing strategy focused on the customer, as well as developing centers of excellence in the digital marketing space as part of a shared services strategy.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Instant Identification.

Q Why was a gas company collecting money from an office?
A Because it's a security company with a bad logo (G4S).

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Customer Says No.

It's been a while since I linked to Seth Godin (and let's face it he needs the traffic) so let me commend his recent post in which he reminds us that if your potential customer hears you saying yes rather than no, they are far more likely to keep coming back to you. It's such a simple thought, but so often systems, the removal of initiative and lack of incentives mean that it doesn't happen.

But saying yes isn't enough. You also have to minimise the reasons for your customer to say no. Not hearing yes from you would be one reason they might say no, but there are many more. They include the prolonged telephone tree that gives you numerous filters before you get to a human being, the unwanted upselling of unrelated financial products and the confusing user interface. Eliminating anything that puts an obstacle between your customer and the sale is far more worthy of your time than dreaming up ways of getting attention or increasing awareness.

Get people's attention when you're sure that there's a direct route from that attention to their becoming a customer. Not before.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

You Have A Website?

So Skittles has done what digital agencies Modernista and Zeus Jones did some time ago and turned its website into a series of social media links. But where Zeus Jones and Modernista were demonstrating that they undestood the arena in which they were operating, Skittles have really just changed their website.

There's no branded utility here - if I didn't want to visit their website, I surely won't change my mind because there are more options now. If I'm web savvy, I'll have all those links on my desktop anyway. And inevitably, there are software conflicts - I was asked to upgrade my browser before gaining access. Is it only me who wonders how large a proportion of internet users have a set-up that works for them but falls some way short of that felt to be the norm by early-adopting website designers?

Yes, it's generating a lot of noise in the social media village, but where's the interaction that is at the heart of the tools to which they're linking? Why do I want a widget sending me what will inevitably be corporate-influenced RSS feeds on my computer? Where's the permissive engagement? To me, it's too close to an old-school awareness exercise.

Now people will say that Skittles (or anyone else) will be able to "leverage" that awareness for the good of their product, but there's no such deal here. Getting a widget onto people's computers is like the worst kind of sponsorship that just plasters its logo all over an event with no reference to the context - it's all about presence and very little about purpose. When you view it in those terms, leverage becomes a synonym for exploit and people don't like to be exploited.

Bottom line for me - people don't visit websites to be promoted to and they certainly don't return to them, so trying to update one beyond providing constant accurate infomation seems like an expensive exercise in futility. What you mean to your customers is no longer - if it ever was - determined by your website.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More