In a small business, every action has someone responsible for it, whereas in a large organisation , or worse, a public bureaucracy, nobody has responsibility for the dumb things they do, they just become an automatically imposed “rule” that carries the sanction of the organisation.
Taking responsibility is not just good policy, good for the employees, it is good marketing.
Ironic isn’t it, Tiger Woods has had his squeeky clean image trashed, and in the process has dropped hundreds of millions in endorsements, but his profile has never been higher. Gossip columns, serious discussion in the business pages, piles of stuff on the net from academic analysis to jokes (some pretty funny), surely there are those out there whose products do not depend on the endorsement of the moral right.
The bloke might have his brains wired to the wrong spot, but he is a seriously great athlete, a cross-racial/cultural icon, and he commands attention, what do you want in a spokesman?.
If I was trying to build a brand of mens grooming product, a mid price muscle car, rugged menswear, and several others, I would be getting out my cheque-book while the price was down, and the exposure was up, (‘scuse the pun)
The communication options to be leveraged are terrific, advertising is almost sure to go viral, and I can almost see it, although it may not do a lot for Tiger’s stated aspiration of saving his marriage, although the chances of that would have to be pretty thin, and I suspect of value only to the spin doctors.
Business is basically simple, it is people that generate the complications and distractions, and us that allow the distractions that make it complicated.
The simple rule: spend less than you have coming in, and work like hell to bring it in.
Now the economic sun appears to be coming up again ion Australia, don’t relax, don’t listen to the hustlers who promise the world without a hope of delivering, listen to your loyal customers, understand their needs, service the daylights out of them, look for ways to do everything you do better, and have a great 2010.
Too often marketing is seen as an expense, to be cut when things are tough. Often this is an outcome of a lack of accountability for results emerging from the investment made in marketing.
It is in the interests of marketers to pro-actively take responsibility for their expenditures, figuring out ways to turn the qualitative into traceable quantitative data.
Advertising on the Box will give you a TARP level, essentially reach and frequency against a target audience, printed media will do a similar job, but after 2 generations bred to filter out unwanted advertising, how effective is that?.
By contrast, the quantitative tools embedded in other sorts of expenditures can be accounted for by the behavior generated.
Coupons in the US started in this manner, but have evolved into simply a discount. Direct response advertising can be accountable, but not all of us are up late enough to see the steak knife ads.
The web is starting to offer tools to count the behavior generated by the ads, click through, and purchase, which have changed advertising media choices forever, it is just that most have not realized it yet.
Demand for a whole host of products appears to be splitting into two camps, the price sensitive camp, and the risk averse camp. What other explanation can there be of the situation where you find people willing to pay for something that is on the net, just a “click” away for free?. ( I am ignoring those few who have yet to turn on a computer)
This is a relatively new paradigm that appears to be emerging as the net reduces the marginal cost of production and distribution of many products and services to virtually zero.
For free entails risk, whilst paying carries an implicit if not explicit promise of service and support, which is does not come for free.
The marketing challenge is to leverage the for free into something people will pay for. A new word, “Freemium” is appearing as people consider this challenge, Rupert Murdoch’s stated intention is to use the freemium model to get people to pay for what has been free, but I have yet to see the notion of “information integrity insurance” being used as a reason to charge for what has been free. The Wall St journal would be a great model to consider, as information integrity is a foundation of its value proposition.
Social media is more than Facebook, Twitter and U-Tube, it is a suite of tools that enables rapid connections to be made, it creates and leverages knowledge, and enables very rapid development of an organisation of those who may be unconnected physically.
Imagine, the government decides to put a waste plant in the local park of your community. Predictably, there will be substantial local opposition in the local community who will want it elsewhere.
Under the “old” way of organizing a protest, someone would get on the phone, and try to stir up some passion and get people to a rally in Macquarie Street, (and a few will turn up so long as it does not rain), letters will be written to the local member, the Minister, the local council, and a few others, and the kids will run a partition around the neighborhood. Not very effective.
Under the “new” way, someone will register a domain “stopthewasteincroydon.org” and a site that will collect views, stories about how the kids use the park, signatures, disseminate information, clog up every conceivable receiver with emails, provide links to the U-tube footage of kids playing then being herded off the park by officious waste managers (actors, probably the kids dads) , and generally make a very big noise against the development. Very effective, the Anti position suddenly has real teeth, because it enabled the anti case to be developed then managed in a way that it has a geometric impact on the receivers, all because the new communication tools were used to assemble and leverage a set of views that would have otherwise been individual, and nowhere near as powerful.