Apr 1, 2021 | Analytics, Marketing
So called ‘Digital Marketing’ has become an end in itself. Instead, it should be a potentially potent tool in the marketer’s toolbox when used well in the process of delivering value. I see it often spoken of and treated as if it were a separate functional discipline, then it fails. All sorts of rubbish is then wheeled out to explain the failure and move responsibility elsewhere.
It seems to me that the failure of understanding the real nature of digital marketing falls into 7 distinct buckets.
- ‘Digital marketing’ is seen as an event, a set piece, and not part of an ongoing commitment to delivering information and value to customers and potential customers.
- There is no sense of the end point, a vision, the picture on the jigsaw cover. The absence of a clear objective makes consistent production of compelling communication virtually impossible.
- There is a lack of commitment from the top. Many inhabitants of the corner office are older guys trained in accounting, engineering, and the law. Many still consider marketing to be a cost, to be managed short term, rather than an investment in the long term. Often so-called marketers do too little to address this misunderstanding. Instead, they continue to sketch out a few bits of ‘content’ to throw against the digital wall, hoping something works.
- No-one holds accountability for the work, and its results. Digital marketing tends to be a subsection of the overall marketing and sales programs, and it tends to be the least understood. As a result, it is pushed off to the juniors, after all, they know all about this technology stuff.
- All things to all people rather than highly relevant to a few. Digital is mixed up with a mistaken understanding of genuine inbound marketing activity. Inbound sounds nice, but how are we going to set ourselves up as an expert in the face of the competition. Nobody can be all things to all people. If you are a small business, be the expert in your specific niche, your geography, with those on your list of current and lapsed customers. You do not have to be the biggest in the world, just the best to a select few.
- Results are not measured properly, vanity measures are all that are collected, and they tell you nothing about cause and effect.
- The work is done quickly, without thought, passion, creativity, so does not grab a potential customer by the purse. It is just another deadline hit, then move onto the next one, tomorrow. The search for the ‘big idea’ that resonates and differentiates seems to have been replaced by many mediocre bland and ‘safe’ ideas. The big idea remains elusive, and of great value, but we seem to be no longer looking for it as we are distracted by the acceptance of the many mediocre ideas. Not a great exchange. Occasionally you find the big idea, hiding in plain sight, which is where it usually hides, but is so hard to identify.
- A final one. There is no permission, as in Seth Godin’s definition of permission marketing, as requoted in Tom Fishburnes cartoon narrative, with which I absolutely agree. This is all about the consumer, and treating them with respect, something that increasingly many so-called marketers do not do.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at www.Marketoonist.com
Mar 22, 2021 | Communication, Marketing
Several of the advertisers who bought large packages of advertising in association with the recent Australian Open did themselves a massive disservice.
The ‘Exposure Effect’ is a double-edged sword.
We are more likely to be positively impacted by things with which we are familiar and comfortable. That is how advertising works. However, the flip side is that we also become bored and potentially contemptuous of those things with which we are extremely familiar and dismiss them.
Colloquially, we refer to this as ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’.
The marketing wallies at ANZ ignored, or perhaps more likely did not understand, this flip side of the ‘exposure effect’. They were persuaded to spend up big on ad spots by channel 9 sales executives in the mistaken understanding that ‘more is better’.
Those who watched the Open were probably at least sports fans if not specifically tennis fans, and they probably watched a lot of the tennis.
The negative impact of the exposure effect can come into play as early as after 5-7 exposures to an advertisement. Most of the viewers would have got that in the first hour or so of watching, after which, the familiarity desired by the advertiser, risked becoming something else entirely.
Diminishing returns from the advertising investment.
The ANZ advertising was grossly overexposed. The use of Dylan Alcott being introduced by the hosts ‘mucking around’ with his phone, seemed to be in almost every ad break.
Clearly the ANZ made a significant investment. It would have been much better used if some of that investment had been directed towards a variety of creative executions of their brand, rather than being all the same quickly boring, becoming really annoying, execution.
Personally, I became so annoyed, had I an account with the ANZ, I might have run down to the branch and closed it, as doing business with a bank that wasted so much money does not seem to be a good idea.
Not the impact I assume their naive marketing people were hoping for.
Mar 18, 2021 | Branding, Marketing
Covid has created an unexpected brand building bonanza for big Pharma.
All around us we hear animated conversation about the relative merits of the Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Pfizer, Moderna, and other Covid ‘vaccines’.
Each has its own proponents who seem to be across the detail of the latest research emerging from around the world as we participate in the biggest drug trial in history.
Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca took most of the brand building honours at this early stage, but there are many others in the race. The Chinese and Russian versions, while cloaked in mystery were deemed ‘potentials’ but they carried little weight, at least in the ‘western’ world. The only common ground is the general dismissal of the Trumpian favourite hydroxychloroquine as a viable vaccine. Even if it was a genuine option, I suspect the celebrity endorsement of the former President would have seen it flushed down the loo.
This is a brand building opportunity the like of which I have never seen before.
The winner will have a huge position in the market for many years. The R&D has been funded and facilitated by unprecedented public funding, the usual clinical trialling time frames shattered by necessity, billions of dollars of free publicity, and an assured market into the foreseeable future, as well as the pole position in further publicly funded R&D.
Marketing nirvana.
Mar 16, 2021 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
Is it wider distribution, provocative headline on a Facebook ad, play with price, or find a celebrity to endorse it for free???
It is not any of these, or many other options that probably sprang to mind.
The answer is both simpler, and way harder than any of these, and very few do it well
It is defining the problem you are solving in a way that adds value for a customer.
Unless you define the problem, how can you propose/define a solution that someone is prepared to pay for?
People buy solutions to the problems they see and feel, but often go unrecognised before they are pointed out. Those solutions to unrecognised consumer problems are always the outcome of deep research, creativity, and usually experimentation by the marketer.
Who knew we needed a better MP3 player before Apple produced one?
Often the challenges we face as marketers are hidden deep in our psychology
There are the functional problems we solve, which is where most of us stop.
Then there are the deeper psychological needs that are met in some way by the stuff we buy, that do not receive the same consideration, but they are the real drivers.
It is in that intersection of the functional and psychological that the gold lies hidden.
Who really needs a Rolls Royce to get from point A to point B?
Nobody.
Functionally we do not need the Roller, a battered up Hyundai will do the job. However, arriving in a Roller says something about us, it sets a frame by which many others will judge us, which fulfils deep psychological needs.
Food, shelter, community, reproduction, safety, status, these things all play a role in the things we surround ourselves with.
You go out and buy a Harley Davidson, you are making a statement, not buying a bike for transport.
Does the person who joins Weight watchers join just to lose weight, to fit into last year’s dress, or to feel better about themselves, to attract a mate, impress their friends and peers with the great new bod?
Untangling this can lead you to your value proposition, but it is a tough road, and not often travelled well.
How do you define the hidden problem that has your product as the only solution?
Combine the ideal customer profiling, the typical ‘who, what, where, and why’ analysis, with a ‘Pains, Gains, Jobs to be done’ analysis.
Then work, test, research, iterate, and with patience, you may end up with the profile of a customer that when they hear your pitch immediately thinks: ‘they are talking to me’.
2 examples from my personal experience.
Meadow Lea margarine. Meadow Lea was one of many margarine brands launched after the regulations dictating what could and could not be added to vegetable oils to make a spread, and production quotas, were finally removed in 1975. Initially the brands concentrated on the obvious benefits of margarine: spread-ability, price, and a healthy low cholesterol alternative to butter, and the market expanded rapidly. Meadow Lea marketing management spent a lot of time and effort really understanding the drivers of the choice of brand, while competing with everyone else. In the mid 70’s, women were entering the workforce in large numbers for the first time, combining the paid work with the traditional roles of housewife, cook, cleaner and mother. The result was an exhausted and frustrated cohort of younger women wanting their effort to be recognised. ‘You ought to be congratulated’ expressed that psychological need exactly. It resulted in Meadow Lea rapidly going to market leadership by a very wide margin at premium prices.
Local bookkeeper. An acquaintance who ran a local bookkeeping service for small businesses was having real trouble gaining clients. He tried all sorts of tactics from local advertising, networking at every opportunity, to bashing the shoe leather door to door. Nothing worked. Over a coffee one day reflecting on this, we arrived at the conclusion that his service was not about book-keeping, but about saving the owners of small businesses the time and frustration they were expending on their books, that could be better used elsewhere. To him, this seemed like a revelation. The next time I saw him was at a local networking event, at which, when his turn came to spend 30 seconds spruiking his business, his opening line was ‘My job as a book keeper is to help my clients get more sex’. Once the laughter died down, he explained that owners of SME’s had much better things to do with their time than book-keeping, so why not let him do that for them while they spent their time in other ways. He remains successful, although, sensibly, there is no reference to sex on his website.
When you need assistance digging down to the real motivators of activity, call someone who has done it before, successfully.
Mar 11, 2021 | Change, Leadership, Marketing
Every successful strategy I have seen, heard of, read about, or imagined, has three common factors. The first is obvious, the second and third less so.
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- The strategy is implemented.
- The strategy is communicated widely as a story, that draws stakeholders in, giving them an emotional stake in the outcome. It is backed by research facts and figures, speculation, and opinion, but at its core, it tells a story.
- The strategy is modular, evolved from the bottom up, not delivered intact in final form by the hand of some commercial demi-god. One section builds on, and in turn relies on other parts of the strategy, for the wider impact. Each part is interdependent of all other parts, to some extent.
This organic structure enables strategic evolution in response to the changing external environment and internal learning as the strategy implementation evolves, without losing sight of the objective. The path to the end has many possible sub paths, but the end is clear.
A successful story has a beat, a rhythm to it that responds to some sort of incident, observation, or crisis, and a resolution, all built up in a series of ‘beats’ each of which has each of these elements escalating into sequences and a climax of some sort.
The emergent strategy, like an organic structure, has a range of base materials organised as self-contained units that combine to form an ever increasingly complex and interdependent system.
Developing a strategic model that has the potential and opportunity to evolve is not something that comes easily from a template, or ‘packaged’ advice. It is extremely context sensitive, fragile in early stages, requiring constant expert attention and nurturing.
Call me when you need some of this ‘strategic gardening’ to enhance your performance.
Header cartoon is once again courtesy of Scott Adams and Dilbert
Feb 26, 2021 | Marketing, Strategy
If we ever needed more evidence that you need to have a piece of the digital landscape that is yours, where you make the rules, the response of Facebook to the then proposed ‘News Media and Digital Platforms mandatory Bargaining Code’ is it.
This piece of nonsensical legislation, now passed into law, sought to even the bargaining power of legacy media with the two giants in the space, Google and Facebook.
On the surface, a useful idea, but legislating behaviour has never worked in the past, and this attempt will be a dog.
The central claim that Google and Facebook steal content for which they have not paid, while an easy lie to tell, is nonsense. Media chooses to put their content onto Facebook, their choice. The platforms then determine where the posting goes, and who sees it via their constantly evolving algorithms.
No stealing going on there.
On the other hand, legacy media post their stuff because of the reach on offer from the platforms. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of potential views is a tasty lure.
The role played by the platforms is as middleman, a wholesaler of eyeballs, playing both sides of the equation for their own benefit.
On one side, they attract viewers by using the algorithms to deliver content that users like to see, based on their viewing history. That data is a humongous pile of personal information, freely given by us to the eyeball wholesalers to sell to advertisers who want their messages to reach those most likely to transact.
Back ‘in the day’ there was a ‘code’ of editorial independence, and factual reporting, funded by the advertising that flowed to the media owners. That source of revenue dried up as the platforms gained power, and as a result, so did the independence and fact checking dry up, replaced by ‘bait’ tailored for the individual, to chase for news, information, and entertainment. Any pretence of fact went out the window. The more extreme, salacious, and outrageous the better to attract the wandering eyeball.
The ‘bait’ was spread around by the platforms, leading back to the media that choose to ‘publish’ it using primarily Facebook to do so. The media benefited from that trail of crumbs, they got the reach, but still did not have the ability to attract the advertising dollars, that all went to the collectors of the crumbs. As a result, the media, which in this country means the Murdoch and Nine empires, stuck out their hand for help from those to whom they have given lots and lots of support. A quid quo pro for that support, the cost of which will be more junk, salacious nonsense, and sheer fabrication passing as news. Real news, the stuff that effects our lives, is unlikely to get much of a look-in: not enough views.
What of those who have availed themselves of the platforms to engage in some sort of community benefit activity, from local interest groups to really useful things like emergency warnings, information and local news. Do they get any financial assistance? No. Nada. They will now however be able to contribute their data to the algorithms that enables the ad targeting that will exclude them.
Google announced they had set up ‘News Showcase’ that would be curated out of Singapore, and for which they would charge a fee for inclusion. It is unlikely Facebook will not follow such a worthy way to skim a few more advertising dollars. So much for ‘news’. It is perhaps just coincidental that the corporate tax rate in Singapore is considerably less than this country, although that consideration has not been an obstacle in the past, as Australian tax has evolved as almost voluntary to these characters.
I could go on, but risk bursting a valve somewhere.
Suffice to observe that the Government has demonstrated again how firmly they are attached to the teat of Murdoch et al, and buggar common sense, integrity, principle, factual analysis, and the rest of us.
To state the obvious again, you must own your own piece of digital real estate.
Header credit: Huffpost Australia. A confused and surprised treasurer being eyed off by a humanoid
