things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

Dec 22, 2015 | Branding, Change, Customers, Management, Marketing

The year has been a blur, they go faster as I get older, something I find disturbing. Rushing headlong towards the daisy bed seems illogical when there is so much left to do.

I will be 64 in a few weeks, must be a song there somewhere, but it seems that the older I get, the more I learn.

How does that work?

Perhaps that  is because I have a wide and deep foundation built up over all those years that offers many places to tuck some added knowledge in, and the connections to other parts of the foundation are that more visible.

Anyway, here are the headline  things that struck me during the year.

All that is old is new again.

The king of Mad Men, David Ogilvy said it best, something like 50 years ago.  “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”  Never before has this been so relevant, as we drown in a sea of mediocre so called ‘content”. What is an old fashioned ad if it is not content? What is an informative film made to show users how to build something, or adjust the points on my old Dodge, if not content. Just because the rules of engagement have changed, i.e., those on the other end of a communication can now tell us if it sucks, either by writing to us, responding on a site that scored whatever it s we flog, or ignoring it. The challenge remains the same. Find your market and build an emotional connection with them.

Scale is not everything.

In the pre internet days, a young academic named Michael Porter wrote the definitive book on competition. One of his 5 forces was all about scale. If you had it, you carried the hammer others could only aspire to, volume sales, negotiating power in your supply chains, power to advertise and promote, it was a huge barrier to either scale or hide behind.

No longer.

The net has destroyed much of the competitive power of scale. One of the greatest wielders of power I see every day are the two FMCG retail gorillas in Australia, who between them hold 75% of FMCG (CPG to my US friends) market share. Yesterday I went into woollies to buy the Xmas ham. My job for  years. In about 30 linear feet of chiller shelf, with many SKU’s of ham on the bone, not one was a proprietary brand. Every single SKU was Woolworths in some guise or another. Clearly buying scale at work for woollies, but I walked out hamless, and went to a small supplier who has a retail outlet about 15 k from my home and bought a ham there. Good price, good service, and probably a better ham because the margins had not been screwed to the bone by Woolies exercising their power of scale. (poor pun, sorry)

The tool relies on the tradesman.

There are so many tools around, to do just about everything, but by themselves they do nothing. All still require a skilled person to get the most out of them.

I have laid many bricks in the course of renovating two old houses, paid my way through Uni all those years ago on building sites, so I know how to do it, but look in my backyard, and you can tell the brinks I have laid, and those laid by a tradesman. If you want something done properly, only do it yourself it is what you do, not what some webinar on YouTube tells you can do.

Do not be seduced by the newest shiny thing.

Simplicity is really hard.

‘The ultimate sophistication is simplicity’.

Steve jobs said those words, and others before and after have said similar things that have been proven time and time again over the years. In todays world it holds more true than ever when it is operationally now so easy to add features few want, sacrificing simplicity and elegance in the process.

We tend to fall in love with our products, forgetting people do not care about them, only what they will do for them, what problems they solve, what value they deliver.

Dunbar’s number still rules.

We might have hundreds, even thousands of “friends” and connections, but we can only manage a limited number. We have been again seduced to believe that there is value in the breadth of many  connections, sacrificing the depth with a lesser number. I would rather have a list of 100 people who knew me well, would take a phone call from me, recognise the value I can bring to them, and are prepared to recommend me to others  based on that value, than a million friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the other houses of digital one night stands.

Customers are people.

Customers and potential customers are not “targets” or ‘target audiences’, or ‘potentials’ or ‘rusted-on’ or any of the other expressions I hear regularly. They are people , they control their pockets in ways unimaginable just a few short years ago. Treating them with distain, or even a hint of condescension, tan they are able and willing to pack up and go elsewhere.  The power is very much in their hands  now, not those of the marketer, so make your communication as personal and specific as you can. I get lots of emails with the salutation “Dear Friend”. If I was so effing dear, why not use mu name. They never get opened, and a rule gets put in my email package to dump them into the Spam file never to be seen again. Dear friend indeed, give me a break!

Trust is the make or break metric.

Trust is a word that gets bandied around like a novelty game at  the Easter show. Everyone agrees that trust is a key, but so few recognise that Trust comes from consistent, transparent and generous behaviour, it is hard earned and easily lost, and never given without deep consideration. Don’t let this important word pass your lips unless you really mean it, and back it up with behaviour over a long period.

The nature of assets.

Almost forever, corporate assets in enterprises of any size from micro of MNC have been one of three in some sort of ratio: people, technology, and capital.

Now there is a fourth.

Data.

The integration of data cross functionally, through the value chain, and increasingly with outside “big data” is becoming rapidly more important than the traditional three as the world digitises and competition is increasingly dependent on the availability and accuracy of data from a range of sources.

One of my mates runs a small freight business. He recently added GPS, and a simple program to route his small fleet in real time, that integrates with public traffic info. Now he is wondering if he can  do with less trucks, and maybe make a bit of a return on his investment for a change.

Recall the furore when the email addresses of Ashley Madison subscribers  were hacked and made available for download. The asset value of data has rarely been more publicly demonstrated.

Beware the seductive hiss.

Snake oil salesman have found a new well of clichés and poisonous  bullshit to throw at you.

Beware.

Next time you hear the word ‘awesome’ (my current greatest hate cliché)  run like hell, and save yourself the time and potentially money these sophisticated purveyors of snake oil will try and winkle out of you.

The ‘3rd leg’ of commercial sustainability

The ‘3rd leg’ of commercial sustainability

Nov 19, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

The “third leg” of commercial sustainability.

Most are used to looking at Revenues and Profits as the measures of commercial sustainability. However, there is a third and often overlooked leg, that is to my mind more important as it drives both revenues and margins resulting in profits.

Your brands.

The objective of every marketer is to have users that are apostles for their brand, those users who will go out and employ for you that most powerful of marketing tools, word of mouth.

There is nothing as powerful as someone you trust telling you that in situation X, use brand Y, it will never let you down.

In 40 years of observing how the best of the best do it, and being engaged in building some powerful brands for my clients and employers, there are a number of common  practices I have observed in the most successful.

Love your greatest fans.

Every successful brand has a core of users who just love the brand, and will not use anything else. This hold true from soap powder to cars, just go to Bathurst in October and try and persuade a “Ford” man that “Holden” is a better car. Identifying this small group of apostles and feeding their love will be the best investment you can make. Your ‘apostles’ will only be a very small percentage of users, but will have an inordinate influence on your success.

 

Create brand stories.

Humans relate to stories,  we remember them and the lessons contained in them. A brand story that resonates with your target audience has the potential to generate way more engagement and ultimately loyalty than a bland recitation of facts and figures.

 

Encourage customer feedback

Successful companies treat customer feedback, particularly negative feedback as an opportunity to both gather information on how to make their products better, and by addressing a problem turn a product sceptic into an apostle.

Positive feedback enables collection of data that identifies the roles your product fills in peoples lives, often uncovering factors that feed into the users emotional connections not otherwise easily discovered. My often repeated cottage cheese story is a prime example of this.

 

Anticipate needs

Market research is an enormously powerful tool, it can tell you everything you need to know about what customers are doing currently.

However, asking customers what they might want or need in the future is not a good use of market research resources.

Henry Fords quip that if he asked his potential customers  what they wanted, they would answer ‘a faster horse’ remains true. Steve Jobs did  not ask if we wanted a music player, and camera incorporated into our phones. Clearly we did not see the need, as the technical capability was there, the then dominant market leader Nokia spent fortunes on market research,  and there was no demand for it, but he just went ahead did it, and changed the market forever.

 

Books are judged by their covers.

Despite being told from a young age that we should  ‘never judge a book by its cover’, we all do, in hundreds of ways every day. People will make almost instantaneous judgements about your products by the way they look, the colours, layout, name, how it impacts their sense of order and design. For example, a predominately yellow design for a Chinese audience could be problematic, unless your service is pornographic.

 

Relationships are becoming virtual

In person, we can hold a maximum of about 150 relationships at any one time, Dunbar’s number. However,   many of us have way more digital connections than 150, and those  who have figured out how to create an online metaphor  for personal relationships, like Amazon with their  recommendation algorithms are cleaning up. Your customers are building their own versions of digital relationships, and you should be where your customers are.

 

Defenders may not lose, but they rarely win.

Brand defence is a necessary component of any successful brand, but it is not enough. To win you need to be on the offensive, take risks, big steps, shake up the status quo with innovation and remapping of markets. Apple over the last decade has had no peer at employing offensive brand building  tactics and is now the largest, most profitable company ever seen, from a basket case 20 years ago.

 

Love your employees and stakeholders.

Just like apostle customers, those with an intimate knowledge of your business because of some level of commercial engagement, have an enormous capacity to influence others.   If you knew someone who supplied a component into the Acme computer company, and you were considering a new computer, would you still consider Acme if your mate told you they were rubbish? The converse is equally true. Working with stakeholders will deliver great returns, and can be a source of great value as most businesses fail to recognise the potential so close to home.

 

Become ‘organic’ and highly adaptable.

Just as organic systems adapt to what is in front of them to maximise their chances of survival, so should your brand development activities and priorities.  Adapt, adapt, and continue to adapt.

 

7 myths of marketing automation

7 myths of marketing automation

Nov 16, 2015 | Customers, Governance, Marketing, Small business

Like most interested in this topic, I see a lot of stuff published, and have gone to my share of seminars in an attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Over 40 years marketing experience, and having seen the rise and rise of automation, along with the carpet-baggers flogging get rich quick, and “if I can do it, so can you”  schemes that would  make a gypsy blush, I am probably just a little sceptical.

Here are the myths I see most often, all flowing from the foundation “it is easy” myth

  1. Automation solves problems.

Without the basics being right, understanding the markets, your customers and competitors, how your value proposition and service levels resonate, you are still  nowhere, automation or not. An early lesson I learnt is that poor problem definition leads to poor decision making and even worse marketing. Crap marketing that is automated just generates a bigger pile of crap, quicker, with a second often larger problem that when it comes from a computer for some reason, it gains credibility, so your pile of marketing crap risks becoming a “truth” that has the potential to send you broke.

2. Automation provides the processes. 

Automating anything means that it is done automatically the same way every time. If you have process that deliver rubbish, marketing automation will only enable you to deliver more rubbish, quicker, to more people, Who wants that? Building robust, processes is essential, at every level of the marketing ‘stack’ (sorry about the jargon, the stack is the pile of various digital processes that together make up an automated system). No automation system is “Plug & Play” in isolation.

3. Automation enables a purchase mind-set.

Making a choice is certainly not something that automation can provide. Best it can do is give a rational analysis of the data to hand.  The nature  of the buying process and associated communication has been transformed in the last decade by digital tools. Buyers now accumulate information independent of sellers, and often make a final choice before a seller knows they are in the market, but the choice is human, subject to all sorts of considerations still way beyond the capability of automation to replicate.

4. Automation cannot respond other than by rote.

Consumers seek all sorts of subjective and referential information when researching even a modest purchase, switching between left and right brain without realising they are doing it. That process cannot be replicated digitally. Best we can do is define the range of personas we see in the market and tailor and continuously improve the communication strings to meet the anticipated and instinctive Q&A sessions happening in purchasers mind as they move through the “funnel” towards a decision.

5. Content is king.

I hear this all the time, “just pump out the content and they will come.” Rubbish. This may have been partially true at the beginning of the digital revolution, but no longer. There is now so much content around that the competition for potential customers attention is now far greater than it has ever been.  The challenge is now having the best, most relevant and timely content delivered in a personalised manner, as and when the buyer asks themselves a question. You need to be a marketing mind reader!

6. The number of leads counts.

This is only true when you consider the quality of the leads at the same time. It is easy to generate a lot of response to something, the key is the likelihood of a conversion to a transaction of the initial lead, not the number of leads. Quality wins out over quantity every single time.

7. Automation solves the “don’t know what you do not know” problem.

This goes back too my original point. Experienced, informed and creative  marketing thinking cannot be replaced by automation, no matter how much many who call themselves “marketers” would like it to be so.

 

Automation can be a hugely valuable investment, but it is not easy, not cheap, and does not replace the  skills, domain wisdom and experience of those who have been there, done that!

When a dose of ‘fair dinkum’ is required, call me.

3 Foundations for small business marketing success.

Nov 11, 2015 | Marketing, Small business

foundations of marketing

marketing foundations

Marketing now is as different to marketing just 20 years ago as car manufacturing was before and after Henry.

However, the basics remain unchanged, just as happened with the manufacturing disruption Henry brought to building cars.

I find myself spending lots of time  talking to small businesses about the things necessary for success, particularly in digital marketing.

They tend to be different conversations, but always coming down to a small number of common factors. It does not matter much if their focus is on a social platform, email marketing, video, webinars, podcasts, or any of the other techniques that have evolved recently, the 3 foundations remain.

  1. Positioning.

Positioning is one of the oldest notions in marketing, defining how your customers or prospects see you, what they think you might be able to deliver to them. In other words it is the unique story they recall when they think of you.

In the brand building process, researchers often seek the human characteristics of the brand that are present to be built on, removed or modified, and always seek the favourable characteristics. Reliable, detail driven, fun, creative, and so on.

In digital marketing it is no different, but just needs to be even more focussed. For most small businesses, it is way better to be really, really good at a small number of tings that are of value to your target market, than pretty good at a whole range of things. In the former you are the expert, someone worth considering, in the latter you are just another of the generalists.  This is often a challenging choice for small businesses to make as the instinct is never to turn away a potential customer, but the fact is that there is so much competition out there that unless you are distinctive, and deliver some sort of value that cannot be obtained elsewhere, any customer relationship will be tenuous, or price driven.

Positioning can be most easily thought about on two parameters.

First, the niche you occupy

Second the persona of the ideal customer you are seeking. These are mutually reinforcing, and the more focussed on each the better.

One of my mates is a terrific, creative landscape designer. However, she occupies a very specific niche. Do not ask her to design a landscape for a block of units, or a park, both jobs she can do really well, but so can many others. Her expertise is in personal outdoor spaces with a “Japanese garden” flavour. If her particular style is not what you are looking for she will recommend several others in the area who can help, but she will not do it for you.  But if the “tranquillity” of her speciality is what you are looking for, there is absolutely no one better.

Her ideal customer is equally specifically drawn. They are successful, middle aged couples with no children at home, working in the relatively small spaces of the near city suburbs, seeking an easily maintained space for quiet times and contemplation. If you have kids, or want a broad entertaining area, your needs  will rarely overlap her special design skills,   and again, she will recommend someone who will do a great job for you.

2. Communicating.

There are all sorts of ways to communicate, both digitally and offline. The sum of the combination of the options is almost always greater than the sum of the individual pieces of communication by themselves.

The key is to ensure that every piece of communication has a purpose that serves the overall objective, plays a role in the jigsaw of communication.

Having an objective is paramount. For some people that objective will be a personal meeting with a prospect who has been ‘warmed’ by a series of communication pieces that each has an objective and call to action as a part of the communication. It could be an email with a download, video with an invitation to subscribe to the channel, or an ad designed to gain attention and build, awareness of the product.

The key these days is to appropriately mix and sequence the communications in response to the signal coming from the prospect as they move around, and hopefully through the sales funnel.

3. Automating.

The days of one piece broadcast communication, with little hope of identifying the recipient are gone, technology has turned the communication process on its head. It is now the case that a piece of communication has not been of any value unless an intended recipient actually does something with it. In order to know, you need to be able to track the actions, then respond appropriately to the signal the receiver gives you.

Without automation, this is virtually impossible  on any commercial scale. You need t build repeatable and predicable processes that respond cross the marketing and sales processes, so you have to also ensure that the right people are in place, and that the product offering is relevant to the target market.

None of this is easy, particularly for small businesses, and the cost can be a barrier, but think of the cost of doing it wrong.

Get the foundations right, and the building will stay up, get them wrong……….

Social intercourse: A definition.

Oct 30, 2015 | Communication, Social Media

 

social intercourse.

“Self indulgent nonsense that passes as digital marketing strategy”.

That is what it often is, perhaps usually, but it can also be the road to success when leveraged by a truly expert marketer.

But everybody is a marketing expert, it is easy, just common sense, surely?

Why is it then that I see so much crap, so much waste of time and money, often lots of it.

Big businesses are the worst, the marketing people spend money like it is not their own.

Hang on, it isn’t.

By contrast, small business is intimidated by the jargon, the smoke and mirrors that has been so prevalent over the last 100 years, joined recently by the mystery of digital. They shy away and often do not take advantage if the greatest single marketing opportunity that has ever opened up for them .

The ability to not just send a personalised message to an individual, but to see what they do with that message, respond appropriately, and to enter into a ‘conversation’ with them.

I know there are lots of self styled gurus out there blathering on about people becoming engaged with brands, wanting to carry on a conversation with their favourite brand, and promising to deliver such an outcome, when common sense says it is crap.

Look at your own behaviour.

Do you crave the attention of a ‘brand’ do you actively seek a ‘brand experience’ crave digital interaction with your brand?

I thought not.

Most people are  not thinking about interacting with their favourite brand of yogurt except when they are in the supermarket, or their head in in the ‘fridge looking for some brekkie, despite the protestations of digital marketing bag men whose job it is to flog a digital inventory of some sort.

Be careful, and ensure that you build the foundations of great marketing, get the fundamentals in place, then you can go ahead and win.

Re: Social marketing. 3 easy to ask but hard to answer questions.

Oct 23, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media

Social marketing is not a miracle

Courtesy: “First dog on the moon”

I am getting pretty annoyed with the enthusiastic panting of the toothy self appointed social media guru brigade extolling the ‘awesomeness’ (my current second most hated word) of social media.

They give the serious advisors amongst us a bad name.

It happened again during the week. At a casual SME meetup, there was one of these types there flogging the line that all you had to do was give him some money, and you would make it back 10X (actual claim) because he was able to focus his specialist and exclusive Social Media expertise on your objective and ‘Abra Cadabra’ money would appear.

The loaves & fish story  have nothing on this lot.

Social media is just a fragment of the challenge of Social Marketing enabled by the technology that not just encourages, but demands that your ‘targets’ (will have to think of another word) have the opportunity and means to communicate with the marketer.

As I have heard it said, ‘it is not communication until the intended message is received, understood and has elicited a response’.

Seems to me there are a few questions you should ask yourself about your message:

  • To what extent does it assist the prospect move along the journey to a transaction?. We do not engage in social marketing for our health, it is for a commercial outcome. Therefore measure it against the progress towards that outcome, recognising there are probably many other things in your message  mix, from deliberate marketing communication aimed at the prospect, to random stuff like how clean was the company  delivery truck was when it passed your prospect at the lights last week.
  • How does the communication add value to the prospect?. If you cannot add value in some way, why should the message assist the journey to a transaction?
  • What do they do next as a result of seeing your message?. If they do nothing, it is just another of the 95 gazillion messages they might see today, if they do something as a result of seeing it, whole new ball-game? It is great to have someone take action as a result of your message, greater if that action not just moves them down the transaction path, but if they also share it with their networks. In effect they are not only acknowledging the value of your message, they are endorsing it to their networks. This is the gold at the end of the social marketing rainbow.

Social marketing is pretty easy to write and talk about in a superficial way, but very hard to put into meaningful practice. It takes careful and creative analysis of your prospects  and your own value proposition, as well as the construction,  content and nature of the messages sent. This is not an exercise conducted with a fairy wand and pixie dust, it takes serious marketing thinking and experience.

If it sounds almost too good to be true, grab your wallet and get out, because it almost certainly is.