May 23, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
The holy grail, the prime objective of billions of dollars of advertising, the wall behind which many campaigns that have failed to generate incremental sales have hidden, Brand Loyalty.
I cannot help but wonder if the label “Brand Loyalty” is sometimes just a metaphor for making the purchase choice easier. The environment we inhabit is now so absolutely over-run with messages information, and tactics to build “customer engagement”, that we all must have a serious case of cogitative overload, weather we know it or not, so we need a mechanism to sort the options.
In this context I am reminded of the old “KISS” principal, Keep It Simple Stupid.
Apple is often cited as the greatest marketing machine we have ever seen, an accolade I am comfortable with, but perhaps there is another dimension. Rather than building brand loyalty, perhaps they have just so simplified the purchase decision in an environment that is psychologically threatening by the number of alternatives, and the techno-speak that most use as communication , that they grab the sales almost by default.
Apple has successfully made buying a piece of tech few buyers understand simple, and attached a cache to that simplicity. This spoof makes the point, but mind the language.
May 22, 2012 | Customers, Sales
For years with my sales consulting hat on I have pushed the notion that when selling a product or service that requires the B2B buyer to exercise some level of consideration, so it excludes the everyday, commodity purchase, there are only three ways to get the sale:
- Demonstrate how your product can assist them to increase their sales
- Demonstrate how your product can assist them to reduce their costs
- Demonstrate how your product can increase their productivity.
This has worked well over a long period, in a wide range of situations, but recently the socilaisation of business driven by the web has added a fourth headline sales driver that to date I have always included in the first:
Assisting a potential or current customer to grab an opportunity.
The world is changing so rapidly that a successful sales operation needs to understand very well the competitive and strategic environment in which their customers compete. In gaining and renewing that understanding, you will see opportunities for your customers that they may not necessarily see themselves. Whilst this is part of helping them increase their sales, the new tools of communication and collaboration that enable the development and leveraging of IP/IC are such that few can stay on top of them all. Therefore being a part of their business development process, by providing valuable insight, and perhaps a view informed by a different perspective, will deliver a stronger relationship, and contribute value to the process that will translate into sales.
May 18, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketing groups usually set about segmenting markets by one of two basic ways:
- By demographics, age, sex, education, income, with/without children, and so on, or,
- By product category, for example meat is usually segmented by breed, cut, pack size, price.
However, there is a third way, one that disregards the traditional segmentations, one that recognises the difference between cause and effect.
You do not buy fillet steak because you are a 35 year old graduate earning 150k +, with no children, you buy filet steak because you like it, or your partners school friend is coming around for a BBQ, you buy it because it is the right product for the job to be done. Nobody buys a Ferrari to get from point A to point B, they buy a Ferrari to make a statement, as a car costing 10% of the Ferrari will offer reliable, relatively comfortable transport.
The marketing of every product can benefit from these simple questions, asked from the point of view of the prospective customer:
- What job do I want done?
- How will this product deliver on the job to be done?
- Which of the acceptable product options offers the best value, however the I define value in the circumstances?
Apr 29, 2012 | Change, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
It is simply a fact of life that digital media is evolving faster than the existing institutions around it, particularly the regulatory ones.
The decision during the week to reverse the Federal Courts decision on the streaming of “almost live” NRL and AFL games by Optus, determining that after all, it was a breach of copyright, is a case in point. Regardless of the merits of either sides case, and the logic that the continuing success of the professional codes relies on funding from TV rights, the world has moved on, but the business model of the professional games has not.
We will wait around for another year or so until the high court comes down with a decision, and there will be a winner and loser, but from a long term perspective, both will be losers, simply because another year has been wasted trying to shore up the gunwales against Digital Darwinism, and we all know how successful that has been in the music industry, newspaper publishing, and a host of others.
If both games wish to engage with youngsters, those who will be around for a while to fund the games by watching, buying branded gear, attending events, they need to consider how these youngsters consume entertainment, and adapt.
The current copyright law was conceived in the 1700’s, and whilst it has evolved, it no longer is a reflection of society, but a distorted shadow vainly trying to keep up with technical changes happening at digital speed.
Apr 27, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising.
When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming.
Therefore the task is to be sufficiently compelling to a targeted audience to bring a quality response, then the cost is not considered, because you get an outcome that (presumably) makes commercial sense.
My son recently sold a car on line, it was a good car, but not one that would be for everyone. He thought he would just put up an ad, and it would just sell, easy, because it was a good car, and the price offered good value.
Failure, this first ad got almost no response, and those that did respond were not interested in the car, just getting it at half the advertised price.
We had another shot at writing an ad, putting in much more detail, and then placed it more specifically to attract a specialised buyer, one to whom the particular characteristics of the car beyond the provision of a transport device would be of value.
It got a number of responses, several very good ones, and it sold very quickly at the full price.
The cost of the second ad was irrelevant, but he is still complaining about the first placement.
Apr 19, 2012 | Customers, Strategy
Observing and working with a wide range of clients and networks over a long period, it seems to me that there are three foundations of strategy that appear time and time again, present in the successes, and absent in the failures.
- Differentiation. Clear, sustainable differentiation from competitors in a manner that customers value is the essence of strategy. Differentiation comes in many forms, superior product, service backup, design, marketing and distribution, and many activities, often seemingly mundane, but a part of the process of delivering value to customers.
- Simplicity. Successful enterprises are simple to the extent that everybody understands what they are doing, why, what role they play, and what constitutes success.
- Intellectual capital development. IC evolves from learning from mistakes and experiments, continuous improvement loops, communication feedback mechanisms, cross functional, cross company, and increasingly cross geographic collaboration and behavior. All these things create a culture, a “way we do things around here” that becomes the driver of corporate DNA evolution, and the creation of Intellectual Capital.
Strategy is probably the most commonly written about subject in management, scary to think its essence can be distilled into three simple headings.
