Feb 18, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Strategy
Marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the ways they leverage understanding of how the brain works to build competitive advantage.
20 years ago most marketing positioning, segmentation and communication was based around demographic factors, but we have been increasingly understanding the linkages between a whole range of factors and individual behavior in a rang of circumstances as we have been able to collect and analyse data. This understanding has evolved to the point where the old fashioned demographic segmentation and positioning now looks like a Model T in the 2012 Paris motor show.
The evolving marketing skill is understanding how the brain works in order to gain commercial advantage, work that is based on academic medical research. But this research is just conforming what good marketers have known for some time, albeit intuitively. Simon Sinek’s simple “Why What How” presentation that has garnered almost 10 million YouTube views is just a marketers interpretation of Neuromarketing being applied.
Feb 16, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I opined previously that it appeared to me that Facebook had cracked the challenge of monetising their site by applying semantic search to their billion users and their networks with the introduction of the “Graph Search” feature.
This post on the Social Media Examiner site goes into some detail about the way Graph search works, and when you think about it a bit, the value is huge to marketers, as it offers highly targeted search capabilities.
I am a tennis player, a member of a local club that has the almost unique distinctions of retaining its grass courts, being a century old, and having many truly great players as former members. Funding the maintanence of the grass is an ongoing challenge, one that threatens the future of the club as membership declines with the lessening popularity of tennis, and the changing demographics of the local area.
There are a series of semantic searches I, and my fellow club members (assuming they use facebook, which many do not), can now easily undertake. Using these connections, through the “friends” networks, we can identify potential visitors and members, and market to those “friends” networks the joy of the game on grass, (particularly on a hot day), the value of membership based on the availability of grass, the heritage of the club, and the social aspects of the great game. The searches would look something like this:
Friends: who like tennis,
who like tennis and live in the Sydney inner west,
who like playing tennis on grass,
who would like to try playing tennis on grass,
and so on.
As those searches are employed, ads by sellers of tennis equipment, marketers of sporting brands, tennis coaches, even lawn care equipment would benefit from the highly targeted, and empathetic environment.
Potentially a gold-mine for marketers, as the value of Graph search to those networked on facebook is substantial. Suddenly Facebook looks like it has the potential to pay a dividend to those donkeys who got sucked in by the IPO, and did not get out fast enough, unlike young Mr. Zuckerberg.
Feb 14, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
20 years ago you could block book advertising across three TV channels, a few newspapers, and radio stations, and be pretty sure you would catch almost everybody.
Not now.
No matter how much you spend, you simply cannot block book all the channels that now attract our attention. The last 20 years has created communication channels inconceivable a generation ago.
Like time, attention is a non renewable resource, there is only so much of it, and unlike 20 years ago, there are almost infinite opportunities for us to spend our attention.
Marketers therefore have to reverse the order in which they approach gaining your valuable attention, as no longer can they easily access mass attention by intrruption. Now they have to earn the right to communicate, person by person, as just turning up and interrupting you will not work. Even if we happen to be there to be interrupted, we will ignore you without a very good reason to give you some of our valuable attention.
Feb 12, 2013 | Change, Communication, Innovation
The next big wave of innovation just may be co-ordination services.
When you think about it, the web has given us huge amounts of data at our fingertips, but created the problem of dealing with all the options we have. Usually we want only a very few options from which to make a choice, the more tailored those options are to our needs, the better, but we are now being deluged.
Think about the co-ordination of travel needs of inner city residents and transport. Often they do not need a car much, but when they do, a standard rental is not always convenient. Enter Zipcar. Travel planning is made easier by the on line room booking systems, AirBnB co-ordinates those plans with the needs of owners of non hotel facilities that people may like, and a bit of extra cash. The list goes on.
The current “scandal” of horsemeat in Findus products in Europe, and the Jindi cheese Listeria recall in Australia highlight the frailties of food safety sensative supply chains. We have the cpability to make the whole chain absolutely transparent, every product traceable, and if we used it, the problems would be gone. The challenge is the collection, analysis and delivery of the data, co-ordinated with the need for the data.
Co-ordinating and organising all this data, seamlessly, instantly, across all your devices and locations should be a fertile field of innovation.
Feb 6, 2013 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Modern life gives us an array of opportunities to go somewhere, physically or digitally, and have presented to us a huge range of choice in any category of interest we may have.
There is a paradox here.
Concentration of anything, attracts those who may be interested in purchasing to the location, whilst creating the hurdle for those hoping to make a sale of differentiating their offer from everyone else in the concentration.
This morning I was waiting for a meeting in a café in a local shopping strip that is little more than a concentration of cafes, bistros, and dining of all sorts. I was struck by the breadth of choice, and the resulting challenge of differentiation for the operators.
The café I was in is one of about 7 or 8 within 150 meters, all selling good coffee, a range of simple, tasty menu items, but all pretty much the same to a casual visitor. I wonder what would happen if one of them started roasting their own coffee, creating that intoxicating smell, and the opportunity to tell a story about the beans, why the tastes varied, where they came from, and how the skills of the barista influenced the outcome. They may also make a bit of extra margin.
The provision of a cup of coffee is pretty commoditised, buying roasted beans from one of the roaster/distributors is a transaction where the individual café has little leverage in the price negotiation, but there appears to be plenty of margin in the roasting business. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Feb 5, 2013 | Governance, Management, Marketing
This is definitely not referring to the pallet of old brochures gathering dust in the warehouse, although most businesses still seem to accumulate them.
I am referring to the sales leads, data bases, prospects, active conversations, existing customers and relationships, that together constitute the marketing inventory. When you think about these things as “Inventory”, an asset, you instinctively consider the means by which you generate a return, as that is what you do with assets.
The similarity of marketing inventory to physical inventory is that you can use the same sorts of measures for marketing inventory that you use for physical inventory, pretty much broken into the sorts of categories that Lean inventory management would require:
- “Flow” and Balance through the system of leads, prospects, active prospect, execute the sale, they are essentially “how many” questions.
- Conversion rates from one part of the system to another. Conversion trends are valuable pointers to both tactical success and emerging problems.
- Velocity through the system. As in physical inventory, the quicker the better, whilst maintaining flow and balance.
Considering the sales and marketing effort in this way encourages a sensible demarcation between the functions, and generally removes the argy-bargy that often happens. Importantly, it focuses attention on the cost and return analyses that enables resources to be used where they generate the best return. Having your expensive sales force out doing cold calls with a 1% hit rate now makes no sense, as the process has been completely disrupted by technology.
