Oct 21, 2015 | Branding, Governance, Marketing, Social Media
Fundamental things apply
Great line for a song?
We all know the words, written by Herman Hupfeld from the song ‘As time goes by’, made famous in the movie Casablanca.
It also applies to marketing, particularly the explosion of techniques and tricks that have emerged with digital technology.
Despite all the rumors and offers of instant success, there is no algorithm for great marketing, no sure fire way of short-cutting the risks and uncertainty.
Great marketing takes time, effort, resources, curiosity and a willingness to be different, to see things others have not seen, to create the uncreatable.
You do not do that in front of a screen, the best you can do there is look at the results of stuff you have tried, get a superficial look at what others have tried, and manage digital development and deployment.
Instead of relying on digital bits to do the work, you have to get out and talk to customers, potential customers and others who may have an influence on the way a product is produced, delivered and valued by customers, whether they be a consumer of a simple product or a major corporation making a significant investment.
The fundamental things apply, the same things that have always applied, they have not been replaced by digital tricks.
We can now deliver a message to a tightly defined audience, as small as one, but if the message is poor, wrongly targeted, the product fails to deliver value, you may as well whistle in a hurricane for all the good it will do you.
Make sure the basics are covered, ensure the fundamental things that make a marketing program work are in place. There is no substitute.
Oct 6, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
VW advertising has helped redefine the practise of marketing and advertising over 60 years, and in the process built a brand valued in their last balance sheet at $US23 billion
How much of that 23 Billion has been trashed by the unfolding fraud?
The value of a brand is made up of thousands of individual things over a long period, all adding to a disposition or feeling in consumers minds.
In VW’s case, it really started with advertising in the early 50’s, the original “Lemon” ads that changed the way we thought about advertising, to the more recent “Star Wars” ad series.
I wonder about the impact of the recent publicity on the new car buyer.
Will they now be more likely to add another brand choice to the list of possibles as they consider and research their new car purchase? Will current owners be more or less likely to believe the message on the dash that tells them a service is now due?,
Every business from MNC’s like VW to the bakery around the corner has to be aware of the value of their brand, and the added vulnerability it now faces with the advent of social media, and its ability to generate commentary. United airlines found this to their detriment when they broke a songwriters guitar. This particular piece of payback has been viewed over 15 million times, spawned a host of parodies, song series, covers and even books, and it is a wonderful case study on corporate response to customer service for people like me.
Marketing people are now pretty quick to extol the virtue of social media as a tool to build brands, and some (the few who read balance sheets) even recognise the goodwill you can reflect in the accounts, but are they as vigilant on the flip side?
Rarely.
Investment in brands should be considered as a long term investment, something that will keep on delivering if you get the basics right and nurture it. For small businesses, they have the opportunity to appear to be much larger and sophisticated than perhaps they are if they think about the basics of brand building,.
Unlike physical assets, brands appreciate with use, care and attention, but the flip side is there as well, as VW has discovered.
I will watch their next set of accounts with interest.
Sep 28, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
courtesy: Hugh McLeod Gaping void
Social media presents enormous opportunities for small businesses to connect with their customers in ways not imaginable just a few years ago.
However, like every new tool that comes along, it can be misused and certainly abused, and is certain to be touted by carpetbaggers. Considering the following list may save you some heartache.
- It will not address failings in your band positioning and execution. Get those right, and Social media can be a great addition, but it will not backfill the failures of creative, customer and problem focused strategic thinking.
- It will not make your brand interesting to potential customers who are not interested in what you have to offer.
- It cannot help you when all you talk about is yourself. People are more interested in themselves than in you, and unless you grapple with and answer the “What’s in it for me” question, you will end up talking to yourself.
- It cannot guarantee to go viral. Very few things go viral, it is like winning the lottery, the more tickets, the greater the chance, but each ticket has the same chance as all the others.
- It will not make up for poor content. In fact, poor content can kill any potential success your strategy may have, stone dead.
- It does not operate in an objectiveless world, so cannot deliver on objectives you have failed to articulate and plan for.
- It will not compensate for poor customer service. In fact, one of the great things is that those with poor customer service will be exposed quicker than ever, and go broke, reducing the ‘noise’ in the market.
- It rarely seems to ignore the things you may rather have it ignore, like lousy customer service.
- It will not change the world, although there is evidence that it can make a major contribution in that direction.
- It is not free. Posting of social platforms may be free, but there is considerable effort and many challenges before you will have any chance of being noticed. That effort will incur at least opportunity cost if you do it yourself, or professional costs if you outsource.
- It does not just happen. Being good at leveraging the opportunities of Social media is like anything else, you can only get out after you have put in. Success always takes take considerable effort.
The message is that social media is not the panacea for anything, not a silver bullet for any problem, it is just a tool in the marketing toolbox. It might be new and shiny, and seemingly changing daily, and being touted as the next big thing, which to some extent it is, but it remains just a means to an end, not the end itself.
Sep 23, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business
“Free” is a really powerful word, it gets used often to gain attention, and put urgency into a call to action, particularly if the “free” period is short.
How many of us have not reacted at some time to the siren song of “Free?”
However, “free” has a huge downside.
Everyone has heard the old saying, “you get what you pay
for” and it holds true.
Free also means no risk, and no commitment.
Take it, but if you do not use it, there are no consequences.
As a young bloke I worked for what is now Meadow Lea Foods in the time we were building Meadow Lea into one of the great Australian brands. A lot of time was spent in stores, demonstrating the product, giving supermarket shoppers a taste of Meadow Lea on a square of bread.
Pretty boring, but it worked.
When we actually got somebody to try a free sample, that was not the end, we sought to convert that trial to a sale by actively selling the product, which meant the consumer had to make a choice, sometimes change the choice they had already made about margarine brand, a commitment, and that commitment cost them a bit of money.
Meadow Lea ended up market leader by a country mile, 4 times the market share of the number 2 brand in a crowded and competitive market. It was more than great advertising that delivered that outcome.
Some advice. Superficial engagement such as downloading a free e-book is better than nothing, and it does get you an email address, but it falls a long way short of any real engagement and importantly, commitment.
Sep 21, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business
Share of wallet
The calculation is easy, sales over total wallet, the problem is in defining the denominator, or what is in/out of your wallet.
The definition of the wallet is the really hard bit, the debate however, can be extraordinarily useful in terms of focussing the attention of the enterprise on the immediate and longer term priorities, and how those priorities are to be addressed.
Markets can be broken up in as many ways as imagination allows, but often for me it has been useful to break it into three.
Target market. The immediate markets where you need success in order to pay the bills.
Adjacent markets. Those market segments around you that would benefit from your solution, in the event that you were able to create and deliver that solution.
Generic market. The wider market that many consider as ‘The market’.
Lets take the insurance market as an example, as there are plenty of current examples around.
The generic market is, pretty obviously, ‘Insurance’.
Insurance companies are seeking to deliver services in increasingly specific niches, and are often creating apparently separate businesses to do so, although they are really just brands.
NRMA for example started with car insurance, and under that brand also deliver, home, contents, and other types, obviously leveraging their marketing reach to homeowners. Under different brands, CGU, SGIC, and others they also deliver competitive personal products as well as more specialised ones. Similarly, Suncorp delivers a range of products under a host of brands, AAMI, APIA, Bingle, Shannon’s, GIO, and others, many of them overlapping and directly competitive.
If you happen to be the marketing manager of “Shannon’s” car insurance for car buffs, does your wallet include the adjacent market of home insurance for said car buffs?
The arguments for and against are obvious, the temptation to lose focus on the primary target market equally obvious.
For many small businesses there is also a geographic component.
One of my mates runs a café in Burwood, and having this debate with him is instructive.
How does he define his wallet between coffee consumers in Burwood and the adjacent suburb of Croydon, and between individual consumers in those suburbs Vs businesses to whom he offers simple “sandwich catering” to order. The manner in which he spends his limited marketing budget, the sort of offers he makes, and the staffing he employees are defined by the answers to the questions.
Defining your wallet is a fundamentally important process, give it due care and attention.
Sep 14, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
My small business clients ask me this all the time.
They know they have to stand out on Social Media, but the question is how?
The necessary steps and supporting processes are now pretty well understood, but not easy to execute.
1. Find a niche and own it.
This is about the most common piece of advice out there, because it is right, yet so few small businesses do it well. They are seduced by the numbers. ‘there are a billion people on India, if we could sell a widget to .0000015% of them we would be right.’ In contrast, success comes to those who find a niche that fits their expertise, and offer a product that is both differentiated and the best around in some way for the very specific target market. A friend of mine has a potential very deep niche in highly specialised light bulbs. He has access to the products from specialist producers around the world and combined with the specialist technical knowledge he has necessary to understand the best combination of characteristics for a particular use. However, he keeps on being distracted by the opportunity of selling a box of common bulbs available in a suburban lighting shop.
2. Understand the market intimately.
This follows from the point above. People are being bombarded by all sorts of messages, you need to know the ones that will cut through because they promise to deliver a unique benefit of some sort to the target specialised audience. A message about a “light bulb for printers” will not get through the mental defenses of a professional printer, but offering an “Ultra Vitalux lamp with double the normal lamp-life” almost certainly would.
3. Identify and connect with influencers.
In every market, there those who lead, who experiment, and are not afraid to take a shot, and there are the rest. If you can identify and connect with those thought leaders, their endorsement will influence the views and behaviour of the rest.
4. Create a “tribe”.
Seth Godin and Clay Shirky brought the notion of “Tribes” into the vernacular. If you can build one around your particular expertise, those in the tribe will become advocates for your product and expertise. The mistake most make at this point is that they take the opportunity to turn the group or tribe into something that is about them. It has to be about the group, any step beyond a hint of commercialism will kill it dead.
5. Build a brand.
A brand in this context is not the sort of investment exercise necessary in a mass B2C market, it can be done on very small budgets, with a bit of imagination, and a genuine and unique story. Brands are at their core stories about the products, so tell yours.
6. Have a point of view.
Being different makes you stand out, but different just for the sake of being different is flimsy. Stake out a position that is a key part of your brand story that will not resonate with everyone, and be the advocate for that position, defend it against the naysayers and the status quo.
7. Communicate consistently.
In this instance, consistently means communicating not just regularly, but with a consistent message and tone of voice across all the digital platforms and media you use. Digital marketing is a content hungry channel, so the trick is to pick which combination of platforms and media generate the best returns and stick to them, while perhaps experimenting on the fringes. To try and use all the options just a bit is a sure road to failure, much better to pick a small number that are relevant to your prospects and do them really well.
8. Engage with your audience.
Success in digital media is all about the level of engagement you can build with your audience , and subsequently their relevant networks, and those interested in the topic. This takes work, particularly as engagement evolves towards a transaction. Generally it becomes harder to automate the closer you get to a transaction, depending on the products being sold. For many B2B products, the close is face to face.
9. Be opportunistic as appropriate.
None of the above should remove the motivation to use circumstances as they occur to your advantage. Digital media offers great opportunities to become part of a trend, even initiators of trends by the use of hashtags, particularly in Twitter. The downside is that the opportunity must be empathetic with your niche, brand, and everything else you are doing or it may depreciate what your other efforts are delivering.
The huge advance that digital has made that makes the effort necessary to compete is that you can now see clearly what works and what does not, almost in real time.
