Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Aug 24, 2012 | Customers, Sales
I wandered into a car dealer a while ago, largely killing some time, but I do need a new car, sometime soon, so I was tyre kicking with a rough agenda.
One of the salesmen saw me get out of my old Pajero, and instead of sliding up with the typical opener, “got a few beauties here you might like to look at” he said instead, “great car those old Pajeros, don’t make them, like that any more”. A conversation was started, and I was engaged to the point where I will probably have another look when it actually comes to making the change.
Most sales programs I have ever seen are all about the “closing”, 101 techniques for a quick close, but the real opportunity is for an opening, the opening of a conversation.
Aug 21, 2012 | Customers, Management, retail, Sales
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen.
As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to annoy, sometimes terminally, marketing personnel by insisting they all spend periods of time, particularly during the annual peak sales periods, out in the field, carrying a bag, talking to the retail personnel of our customers, and interacting with consumers in the retail space.
Most came back energised, engaged and motivated, some did not, and they usually found their career prospects better elsewhere pretty quickly.
Often other functional management also benefitted greatly from seeing how the product they made, counted, delivered, or engineered lived in the sales environment.
50 interactions with intelligent customers and consumers, and those who preferred our competitor products may not be a statistically significant sample, but you will learn more from those interactions than you will from reading expensive research reports behind a desk.
Jul 27, 2012 | Customers, Marketing
A Verb, a word that is something that describes an action, like work, run, achieve, but often, unfortunately when marketing is the topic of conversation, words such as complicate, confuse, dodge, unmeasurable, and such can be added.
Seth Godin sees marketing as a series of concentric circles, the closer to the centre, the more objective and product benefit focused the language becomes, and it is a very simple, but insightful way of looking at it.
Successful businesses in the future will see the practice of marketing take on a few common characteristics that have the action aspects of the verb:
- Measurable
- Accountable
- Customer centric
- Transparent
- Motivating
- Innovative
- All encompassing
- Engaged
What have I missed?
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.
Jun 13, 2012 | Change, Customers, Management, Marketing, retail
Data mining as it is evolving in retail is a fascinating exercise in identifying behavior characteristics that apply to very small percentages of the shopper population, and doing something with them. Progressively retailers are getting better at leveraging the data, and as the penetration of cards increases past a critical mass, so will the effectiveness of the marketing and promotional programs. Of course, consumers are well aware of this, and have well developed “relevance meters” built in.
Consider the category management of potatoes. Pretty dull stuff? no, fascinating stuff. I am making these numbers up to illustrate the point, but consider, of 100 customers using their cards at the checkout, perhaps 10% have potatoes in their trolleys, and 10% of that 10% have a particular variety, and of that 10% (now down to 0.1%), they also have sour cream and chives in their trolley. Pretty reasonable guess that the potatoes will be cooked in their jackets, with sour cream and chives garnish, particularly if the shopper is single, no kids, and also buys steak. An opportunity to offer the consumer a deal on a bottle of red wine on her way out of the shop, or in the associated retailer across the way? Multiply that by 5 or 6 million cards, and you have a pile of data to mine.
The gold standard of retailer card data mining is Dunhumby, now owned by UK retailer Tesco. They did such a great job in the development stages of the Tesco loyalty card, that the retailer bought them to keep their competitors away from them. In a move that recognises the future, Dunhumby is now crowdsourcing ideas via Kaggle, a fascinating startup that turns data mining into a competition for data nerds.
This is Category Management on steroids, and represents a monumental change in the skills needed by FMCG suppliers deal with dominant retailers. In the Australian context, very few FMCG suppliers have any idea of the power of the data tsunami coming at them, and how this will impact on their brand marketing strategies. It is also the realisation of the vision of category management the few of us who were playing with this stuff 30 years ago had when the data was warehouse withdrawals, we had a bit of U&A consumer research, and managed it all with calculators.
