Aug 22, 2012 | Branding, Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go, who we interact with, what we buy and where, what we think of our jobs, partners, and future for our kids.
It is not too much of a stretch to think that a picture of these things can be built over time by a personalised version of the search and browse capabilities now available to us. It has been called the semantic web, web 3.0, and a bunch of other things, but it is really a bank of information about us, evolved by emerging AI that reflects out lives.
Imagine you were walking down a street, near a car dealership with a new French model, your semantic web planted in your device knows you like French wine, your current car is due to be changed, you favor sweeping lines in design, your kids have left home, so there is some money in the bank, you always hankered for sporty, a bit “left field” experiences, and you have a bit of time before the appointment that brings you to this location. Bingo, a personalised invitation for a cup of coffee, and a chat about the new model comes to you from someone in the dealership vaguely linked to you via a social network.
It is only a small jump away from where we are now, but changes the way the marketing process will work.
Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
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 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.
Jun 28, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media
How many times have you heard from marketers “my job is to create the brands”, (often followed by the “yours is to sell it” when they happen to be talking to sales people)
Many marketers use it as the rationale for their existence. Pity it is nonsense.
Customer experience with a product creates a brand, not any amount of advertising, promotion, engaging games, and all the rest. At best, marketing creates the environment in which a customer will try, come back to, or stick with a product, but ultimately, it is the experience that creates the loyalty of an individual consumer, and that relationship multiplied many times, becomes the brand.
This simple insight has the potential to change the nature of your marketing significantly, and also enables some sensible measurement of the impact of marketing activity.
