Jul 20, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Amidst the moans being heard from bricks and mortar retailers, you can still see in almost any store you choose to enter, opportunities to make the experience of shopping easier.
If it was more social, friendly, service oriented in stores, it follows that shoppers would find it easier to part with their money. Human beings are social animals, we herd, and congregate around things that interest and engage us, so it seems possible to dream up strategies that enable that behavior in a store, to make it an attractive occasion to go there, even if it is to your local supermarket, there are opportunities to reconstruct the experience.
Many consumers in high value categories, from furniture to electronics and whitegoods, are “showrooming”, doing some research on-line, then going into showrooms to have a look at the short list in the physical state, then go out and buy on line. Notice the disconnect there, sales people let them out of the showroom not just without a sale, but without permission to continue the nascent relationship.
On the other hand, I wandered into the Apple store last week, seeking information for a client, went back the next day for an information session targeted at the specific questions I had, and yesterday got a targeted email offering solutions to the problems I outlined in the session.
No wonder the Apple retail stores are breaking all retail records, and they are bricks and mortar, with a huge difference, they work at creating a relationship, recognising that it is the precursor to a sale.
Jul 17, 2012 | Category, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
Jul 16, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Jul 12, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media.
The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that beyond low cost commodity items, cost is not the way we make decisions, they are made on the basis of perceived value. Therefore there seems to be a disjoint between what we recognise as the foundation of selling, and the manner in which we make most purchase decisions.
The emergence of social media is all about the opportunity to build connections and relationships, with people, brands, locations, groups, you name it, all there, so why would a banner ad work in that environment?.
Sooner or later, Social Media platforms will realise that their future is in finding ways to monetarise the opportunity for a relationship provided by access to the interactions of their users.
Facebook, the great IPO failure of the year, is in a prime position, being the place everyone goes, so the current stock price may be cheap if they figure out how to sell the value of the opportunity to engage in a conversation, rather than the charge for the opportunity to interrupt it.
Jul 10, 2012 | Uncategorized
How far can you stretch a brand without diluting the power of the core?
The answer it seems is “it depends”. The stronger and more defined the brand, the more it stands for something specific, the less adaptable it is, and the converse is also true, the less defined a brand, the more able it is to be stretched, but on the other hand, why would you bother?
Should Coke launch a lemon variety?
Should Harley Davidson build a scooter?
Should Louis Vuiton sell a 69.99 suitcase?
Extending a brand is a sport of choice amongst marketers, the arguments are strong, mostly around leveraging the brand building investment that has already gone in, but it fails to understand that consumers build brands, not marketers.
