7 trends driving business in 2016.

7 trends driving business in 2016.

Jan 4, 2016 | Branding, Governance, Management, Marketing, Strategy

Like everyone else who sees themselves as having a useful view of the train coming at us, I have again tried to articulate the things I see as important to businesses, particularly the smaller ones that make up my client base.

Following are the outcomes of my assorted observations and crystal ball scratching.

 

The density of digital content is becoming overwhelming.

Businesses have always generated and distributed ‘content’, but it was called ‘advertising’ or ‘collateral material’. Since we all became publishers, and the marginal  costs of access to markets approached zero, there has been a content explosion, and we are now being overwhelmed. It has become pretty clear that video will take over as the primary vehicle of messaging, and I expect that trend to consolidate over the coming year, and see a bunfight for eyeballs between social media platforms and search tools and platforms. Ad blockers will change the way the so called pay walls work, as well as ensuring that the density of content is replaced by less but better stuff, ‘tailored’ to our habits and preferences.

Ad blockers may become discriminatory, allowing through stuff that the algorithms know you have been searching for. The focus on content will be on the sales funnel and conversion metrics, much more than just pumping the stuff out, which will be a huge improvement on the mish mash currently assaulting our inboxes.

Existing digital platforms will extend themselves competitively. 

Attracting new users will become secondary to increasing the usage and ‘stickiness’ of their platforms. Linkedin’s successful extension of their blogging platform and purchase of Slideshare are one, Facebook is aggressively setting out to attract new users by making themselves attractive to developers and others, with the launch of FB techwire in an attempt to attract the really technically oriented including those writing about tech, Twitter appears to be trying to find ways of monetising their users and will probably apply controls to the currently uncontrolled stream in your feed, but there again, I thought that last year and they did not do it. Also, platforms will recognise the huge potential of the B2B advertising market, and find ways to exploit it. Many B2B businesses are reluctant to use social advertising as they see the platforms as essentially B2C and therefore  not appropriate for their products and services. This is a huge potential market for digital advertising businesses, and the social platforms will be cashing it in.

 

Rate of Technology adoption will continue to increase.

Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 TED talk on the rate of technology adoption is resonating louder now than a decade ago. Some of his observations such as the rate of cost decline of solar technology and battery technology efficiency are coming to pass. However, it is his basic thesis of the logarithmic rate of technology adoption that will engulf us over the coming short term. Think about the confluence of big data and machine learning. When you wipe away all the tech-talk and hyperbole, it comes down to a simple notion: the “friction” of information that has always existed is being removed at logarithmic rates, progressively revealing more stuff to see, and to do with the stuff we have. As we go online, and use technology throughout  the value and marketing chain, technology is reducing costs, speeding cycle time, and opening opportunities for innovation.

 

Evolution of the “marketing technology stack”.

For most small businesses this can be as simple as a good website with a series of resources available to collect email addresses, and an autoresponder series on the back. For large businesses it can be a hugely complicated stack of software running CRM, customer service and scheduling, marketing messages, integration of social channels et al.

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Big data to little data.

The opportunities presented by big data are mindboggling, but even the big companies are having trouble hooking their data together in meaningful ways let alone introducing the third dimension of big data. Small companies will have to start to use little data better, or die. Data already available to them is becoming easier to use every day, to turn into insights about their niche, local market,  and competitive claims. Simple things like pivot tables in excel will be used, and tools like Tableau which brings a structure to  data from differing sources including big data, will  become more widely recognised by small business for the value they can deliver. Big data will have machine learning applied, and the data revolution will get another shove along. From a non technologists perspective, industrial strength  data systems such as IBM’s “Watson” must drive some sort of further revolution, but my crystal ball is too cloudy for me to have much of an idea of the impact beyond making what we currently see as advanced systems look a bit like a pencil and paper look to us today.

 

Technology hardware explosion becomes over-hyped but undervalued.

The volume and type of hardware that has become available is as overwhelming as the access to and availability of information. Driverless, wearables, AI, 3D, blah, Each of the developments has its place, and may change our lives at some point, but there is just so much of it that we are becoming immune to the hype. Who needs a tweeting washing machine anyway?

So, what is next?

Seems to me that we are on the cusp of an energy disruption driven by the combination of hardware and advanced materials science . The technology surrounding renewables is in the early stages of an explosion that will change the face of everything. Highly regulated and costly infrastructure distributing energy will start to be replaced with decentralised renewable power generation, much the same as when PC’s replaced mainframe computers 30 years ago. The catalyst to this metamorphous will be the combination of governments that are broke and no longer able to fund the institutionalised and regulated energy systems and the development of a reliable “battery” system. Elon Musk has made a huge bet on his “Powerwall” battery system and manufacturing plant currently under construction, and it would be a brave person that bet against him. However, looking well ahead, it seems probable that it is the beginning of the logarithmic adoption curve of renewable power following the path of Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Moore. The politicised and subjective debate about carbon and its impact on  the environment will become irrelevant as science delivers cheaper and more accessible renewable energy. All that will remain are the problems of the carbon clean-up. (I suspect this prediction is due to be a repeating one for some time)

 

Marketing has always been about stories.

However, somehow ‘content’ got in the way of those stories, and marketing became a different beast in the last 10 years. We will go back to marketing, and start to tell stories that resonate with individual targets. Storytelling will become again the core, and we will be looking for storytellers in all mediums, written, pictorial, video, as we all absorb and recount stories in different ways.

All the good journos displaced by the disruption of traditional publishing can find great places in this new world of marketing storytelling, if they are any good. The competition is strong, and the results immediate and transparent so no longer can you get away with rubbish. Organisations will change to accommodate the fact that everyone is in marketing

We will become more aware of the permanent nature of the internet, and the manner in which our brand properties need to be managed.

In a commoditised world, where the transparency of price makes competition really aggressive, the value of a brand is increasingly important, and fragile.

These 5 extraordinarily stupid examples of how not to do it  should be a wake-up to the CEO’s who leave marketing to the junior  marketers, often a transient bunch who have no investment in the business or brand, they are just there for a good time, and usually a short time.

One day I will do a study that compares the realisable value of the tangible assets of businesses compared to their value as calculated by the market. My instinct tells me that in many stock market categories  the biggest item as calculated  by the difference between those two numbers represented as  goodwill and a realistic assessment of the realisable values, will be the biggest item on  the asset side of the balance sheet. In short, the current and future value of their brands and customer relationships expressed in dollars. Managers and boards need to deeply consider the nature of the people that have managing their brands, or risk losing them, often before breakfast, as the speed of disruption and change continues to increase.

 

As we go into 2016, the 3 questions every board and management should be asking themselves are:

  1.  “If  I was starting in this business today, what would I be doing to deliver value?”,
  2. “If a leveraged buyout happened, what would the new management be doing to unlock the value in the business?”
  3. “What do I need to do to implement the answers to the two above, today?”

 

Have a great 2016, and thanks for engaging with me.

How did I do in 2015?

How did I do in 2015?

Jan 1, 2016 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Strategy

So, it is again New Years Day. January 1, 2016.

Another year gone, but where?

I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and that 2016 is better.

For my part, I will keep on offering up my musings on the challenges facing small businesses in the hope that along the way some of them serve to help some way to make the path easier.

A fundamental part of the way I believe things  should be done is that we learn from our mistakes, so as not to repeat them. To do that we must be able to see the effects of our choices, while understanding the reasons and motivations underlying them at the time, and reflect with clarity and objectivity.

Therefore, it is only fair that my predictions made at this time last year come under scrutiny, before I venture into rubbing my crystal balls for 2016.

Following is my “predictions” post in January 2015, with some commentary added this morning.

You be the judge, score me, comment and point out what I missed, and what I may have called right.

 

Small business is at a crossroads as we move into 2015.

Either they embrace the opportunities and tools presented by the disruption of the “old ways” by digital technology, or they slowly, and in some cases, quickly, become irrelevant, obsolete and broke as customers move elsewhere.

Your choice, as much of the technology can now be relatively  easily outsourced,  and at a very reasonable cost, certainly less than most would expect. The two major challenges in outsourcing, snake oil salesmen and not knowing what you want and need,  are little different to any other category of purchased service.

So, to the trends that will influence your business in 2015 that you need to be at the very least aware of, and in most cases take some sort of pre-emptive action.

      • Marketing technology will continue its rise and rise. The thousands of small marketing technology players who are currently emerging will be forcibly integrated, as the big guys buy “Martec” real estate. Adobe, Microsoft, et al will spend money, and the little guys will be swallowed as the gorillas fill the holes in their offerings, and new segments emerge. At the other end of the scale, there will remain plenty of options for smaller businesses to step into the automated marketing space. The current rash of innovations to make life easier for small businesses   will continue and as those smaller single purpose tools gain traction, and more are launched to fill the niches that exist to service small businesses.

Comment January 2016.  Martec, has become more of a board table topic over the year as investment increases, more options open up, and the “make or break” of marketing has become increasingly recognised.  There has been some takeover and merger activity, and it will only increase in number and scale as the thousands of services merge, Bruce Henderson’s classic  rule of three and Four will continue to apply itself. IBM has also entered the fray launching “Watson”  as an integrated Martec product package.However, despite the inevitable move towards scale,  Martech  will remain a fertile field for innovation as technologists and marketers collaborate on the best ways to identify, engage and lead to a transaction the individual customer.

 

      • Peer to peer marketing  will continue to grow at “Moores law” type rates. Jerry Owyangs honeycombdiagram and data tells it all. Almost any service I can think of has the potential to be disrupted in some way by the peer to peer capabilities being delivered by technology.

Comment January 2016. Absolutely right. In December the NSW government legislated to enable ride sharing services like Uber to compete without legislative interference beyond some basic passenger safety directed rules. This is in despite of the entrenched political position of the Taxi industry and an aggressive campaign including civil actions brought against Uber drivers.  During the latter part of the year, a technically challenged mate of mine spend 3 months in Europe with his wife. Nothing pre-booked, but they easily found accommodation every night using Airbnb and several similar services. When the over 60’s whose device until a few moths ago ‘was just a phone’, is hooked, the hook is set deep and permanent across demographics. Anecdotal but powerful evidence of the penetration of the power of peer to peer markets. 

 

      • Content creation as a process. The next evolution in marketing, the move that I think “content” will start to make from being individual pieces of information produced in an ad hoc manner to being a process that is highly individualised, responsive to the specific context, and informed by the behaviour of the individual recipient scraped from the digital ecosystem. It means that content creation needs to be come an integrated  process, more than a “campaign” . The term “content” will become redundant, it is just “marketing”, focussing on the individual customer.

Comment January 2016. The evolution continues, evidenced by the number of blog posts and templates for “content calendars” that have appeared in the last few months.Over the course of the year I have instituted editorial calendars of one sort or another with several clients, and all are now seeing returns from the efforts that ensure continuation. I am sure I am  not the only consultant from the one man operations as I am to the ‘brand’ consulting services seeing this happening around them, and this trend will certainly (in my mind) continue in 2016

 

      • Marketing will evolve even more strongly as the path to the top corporate job. Functional expertise is becoming less important, what is important is the ability to connect the dots in flattened organisations that work on collaborative projects rather than to a functional tune. This trend is as true for small businesses as it is for major corporations. There will still be challenges as many marketers are really just mothers of clichés, but those relying on the cliché and appearances for credibility are becoming more obvious as the marketing expertise in the boardroom increases, and the availability of analytics quickly uncovers the charlatans. This will make the marketing landscape increasingly competitive on bases other than price.

Comment January 2016 . Anecdotally from what I have seen, this appears to be correct, but I do not have the data to be sure. It certainly makes sense as a way of putting the customer at the ‘pointy end’ of a businesses activities and priorities.As an aside, I have commented repeatedly on the qualities required for success, the primary one these days beyond the necessary functional experience and education being curiosity. Good marketing people are curious, they tend to be less likely than many others to accept the status quo, so make good all round leaders. Pity there are so few good marketing people around, ‘doing marketing’ at university these days is often a choice made in the absence of options. 

 

      • Recognition that marketing is the driving force of any successful enterprise will become accepted, even by the “beanies”. Seth Godin has been banging on for years about the end of the industrial/advertising model, the old school of interruption, but many enterprises have continued to deploy the old model, but  I sense that the time has come.  2015 will be the year that sees marketing finally  takes over.

Comment January 2016. I am still waiting.

 

      • Video will become bigger part of marketing, particularly advantaging the small businesses that have the drive to deploy it and the capability to manage the outsourcing of the bits that they either cannot do, or cannot do economically. The old adage of a picture telling a thousand words is coming to life in twitter streams, instagram shares, and all social media platforms. The video trend will be supported by increasing use of graphics in all forms, but particularly data visualisations as a means to communicate meaning from the mountains of data that we can now generate. The density of data on the web is now such that new ways to cut though, communicate and engage need to be found, and I suspect those will all employ visuals in some form, perhaps interactive?

Comment January 2016. It seems the big marketers poured money into made for the web video over 2015, spending not just on the creative and production, but on the marketing of the material. While video might be a  it of the newest shiny thing, we are visual animals, and there is little doubt the growth will continue.Many of the SME’s I deal with are recognising the opportunities and building their video capabilities either in house or more usually by finding someone outside with the skills, and tit is paying off. 

 

      • Pay to go ad free is a trend that will evolve suddenly, to some degree it is an evolution of subscription marketing. Free to date platforms will charge to be ad free,  whilst new platforms and models such as the Dollar Shave Club will probably evolve.

Comment January 2016. Advertising has been the engine of growth for media companies over 100 years, then came the web, and the indiscriminate bombarding of any mouse click with ads, many of them malicious, so evolved ad blockers. Ironically, looking for data to support this contention, I googled the phrase and up came an article on Forbes magazine, but since I went there last, they have put in a requirement that you disable your  adblocker to get to the article. It may not be with money, but we all recognise the value of an email address these days. Rest my case.

 

      • The death of mass and the power of triibes will become more evident. The “cat pictures ” nature of  content of social media platforms will reduce as marketers discover smart ways to package and deliver messages that resonate and motivate action. The agility of digitally capable small businesses will open up opportunities for them their bigger rivals will not see, or not be compatible with their existing business models.

Comment January 2016. There still seems to me as much if not more of the cat photo rubbish floating around, but mixed in is the increasingly targeted messages that resonate with customers and consumers in some pretty obscure niches. A small client of mine was persuaded to really “niche-down’ in 2015, and reaped significant benefits as a result. Niche marketing will continue to grow.

 

      • Local,  provenance, and  “real”. Marketing is about stories, so here is a trend made for  marketers, and you do not have too be a multinational, just have a good story, rooted in truth and humanity. ‘Hyper-local” will become a significant force. Marketing aimed at small geographies, such as is possible by estate agents, and “local” produce, such as the increasing success of “Hawkesbury Harvest” in Sydney, and the “Sydney Harvest” value chain initiative.

Comment January 2016. Little doubt this trend is alive and well. Following on from the examples from last year, the local farmers markets around Sydney have continued to grow both in number and visitors, and you cannot move at Flemington on a Friday or Saturday for the retail produce sales. The major retailers have both introduced programs that deliver produce to their shelves that just a year ago would have been scrapped because it failed the visual test. Now however, following the success of the “ugli fruit”  campaign in the US being ugly is a marketing benefit. (perhaps there is hope for me yet)

 

      • Paid social media will evolve more quickly than any of us anticipate, or would be forecast by a simple extrapolation. Twitter will go paid, travelling the route Facebook took to commercialize their vast reach. Some will hate it as it filters their feeds, others  will welcome the reduction of the stream coming at them from which they try and drink. Anyway, twitter et al will set out to make money by capitalising on their reach.

Comment January 2016. This had better remain a forecast as I have seen no evidence that it has evolved much from a year ago beyond the continuing  squeeze being exerted on organic reach by Facebook and others. Twitter remains an uncurated torrent of posts, where use of the management tools is in the hands of the user.

 

      • Social will grab more of the market  in 2015 than it has had, even though the growth has been huge over the last few years. Small businesses will either embrace social and content marketing, in which case their agility and flexibility will put them in a competitively strong position, or if they fail to do so, they will fall further behind, and become casualties.

Comment January 2016. Again, plenty of anecdotal evidence, but little objective evidence I have seen, although plenty of the sort published by those with an interest in the success of social media trumpeting their own success.

 

      • The customer should always be the focal point of any organisation, but often they fail to get a mention. It is becoming more important than ever that you have a “360 degree” view of your customers, as the rapid evolution of social media and data generation and mining is enabling an ever more detailed understanding of the behaviour drivers of consumers. The density of highly targeted marketing, both organic and paid is increasing almost exponentially, so if you do not have this 360 degree view, your marketing will miss the mark.

Comment 2016. Wise thoughts from a year ago,  but hardly original. There would not be a management book anywhere that did not somewhere suggest that customers are what keep you in business, not the beauty of your product, and not  the efficiency of your processes, but the value you deliver.

 

      • Treat with caution all the predictions you read, keep an absolutely open mind, as the only thing we know for sure about them is that they will be wrong, as with this ripper from Bloomberg who predicted the failure of the iphone. However, as with statistical models, quoting George E.P. Box who said “Essentially, all models are wrong, it is just that some are useful” perhaps some of the predictions you find around this time of the year will be useful, by adding perspective and an alternative view to your deliberations for 2015.

Comment  January 2016  Still good advice.

As a final thought, if you think your kid may be good at marketing, be sure they learn maths and statistics. “Maths & Stats”  will increasingly be the basis of marketing, and the source of highly paid jobs and service business start-ups.

Have a great 2015.

Comment January 2016. I still think this is a great idea.

 

 

Can the government’s innovation initiative innovate us out of the funk?

Can the government’s innovation initiative innovate us out of the funk?

Dec 18, 2015 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership, Strategy

Peter Drucker said something like “innovation is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage”.

Having just re-read his 1985 musings on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, after 20 or so years, the degree of his foresight is truly astonishing. It is great to finally have a Prime Minister who actually understands how to make a buck, and the strategic, commercial and competitive challenges of bringing new products to market. He may be one of the few in Canberra who do, but at least it is a fair start.

With much fanfare the Government on December 3 tabled in parliament a Senate  report on ‘Australia’s innovation System‘  However, with the exception of Professor  Roy Greens valuable contribution as an appendix, I see little of real  value in the report beyond a few worthwhile observations and some useful changes to the tax treatment of entrepreneurial endeavours.

Our venerable Senators have had summarized for them documents (I wonder how much consideration these busy important people actually gave to the detail of the submissions) that may have started with some valuable ideas but which have been sanitised into a document long on rhetoric and disturbingly short on anything of value, which can only be delivered when someone asks the question “What now”?

As someone who has run an agency outsourced from the Federal bureaucracy charged with identifying and delivering innovation to a specific sector, I can attest from first hand just how powerful the cultural forces are against anything with even a hint of risk, change, or long term thinking in the now politicised public sector.

Successful innovation takes all three, plus a clear definition of the problems to be addressed.

There is little evidence of anything in the report that encourages me to think that the status quo will be truly challenged.

It is useful to look to successful models, and there are none more successful than the US since the second war. Most will now assume I am jumping to Google, Apple et al, but no. if you look deep enough you will see the hand of government at a deep level making very long term investments in basic science, building knowledge that the private sector then leverages with innovation into commercial products delivering new value.

A scientist named Vannevar Bush (no relation to the Bush pollies) was commissioned by President Roosevelt just before he died to report on what needed to be done to promote research and development and the commercial innovation it drives, just as this senate inquiry has done. Bush reported to president Truman in 1945, delivering his report, “Science, the Endless Frontier” which laid out the proposition:

“Basic research leads to new technology. It provides scientific capital. It creates a fund from which the practical application of knowledge must be drawn”.

Directly resulting from this report was the National Science Foundation. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA  and several other institutes charged with the charter to do basic science, of discovering new knowledge.

When you look at all the products disrupting industries up to today, and changing our lives, many if not most of them have their roots in the various agencies spawned by Bush’s farsighted ideas, and the ability of the scientific agencies concerned to outlive the political cycle.

Now compare that to Australia’s situation.

CSIRO used to be a great agency, capable of developing technology like the wireless technology in the 90’s now in every mobile phone after years on the shelf until a commercial use with smartphones was found. Scientific Capital at work.

Now CSIRO is a politicised dysfunctional rump of its former self, with a little of the funding ripped out over the last 20 years of hubris restored via this latest in a long line of Innovation “initiatives” to the sounds of grateful clapping. I see few practical remedies for the past 20 years of innovation vandalism being actually addressed, although at least a real start may have been made.

As I always say in workshops, “the best time to start an innovation initiative was 10 years ago, the second best time is now”.

Lets hope it is not too late for Australian manufacturing.

Self-induced brand catastrophe

Jul 9, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy

 

All those brand stories: gone.

All those brand stories: gone.

 

Every now and again I see something so stupid, so irrational, and so destructive of a valuable brand, that I think that perhaps the loonies really do have the keys to the asylum.

One of them happened yesterday.

There was a radio news report that Akubra would cease to buy any of the raw material required for their hats, rabbit skins, from Australian suppliers.

From here on they would be using 100% imported skins.

One of the honchos from Akubra was interviewed, and he was blathering about looking after all stakeholders, that sacrificing 4-5 jobs in Kempsey where the hats are made was worth it to ensure the business remained viable, and that the 5,000 retailers around Australia needed to be assured of continuous supply, or they would be in trouble.

Blimey, stone the crows, 5,000 retailers rioting because there is uncertainty about the viability of a supplier of .00000001% of their sales.

Then it turned out that just 10% of current skin supplies were local anyway, as the khaleesi virus has cut a swathe through rabbit numbers, for which we are all thankful. Then a supplier was interviewed. He breeds rabbits for the table, the skins to Akubra are a very useful addition to his cash flow, important even, but not make or break, so now the skins will go to landfill.

How much better it would have been to set about supporting the Australian industry, modernising their equipment, working with their suppliers, so that this Australian icon could continue  to grow, particularly as wild rabbit numbers seem to be increasing as the virus becomes less effective.

What a positive brand story they could have created and spread, reinforcing the existing position, telling the stories that are the foundation of their brand, but instead they chose to trash their brand, built up over 100 years plus.

Your brand is an amalgam of all the stories told about you, your products, the situations encountered, and the experiences users have with the products. The stories Akubra could tell are legion, but instead they choose to self-destruct their most valuable asset.

Next thing you know, a global brand like Coke will replace itself. Oh, poop, they already did.

Sigh.

Let the loonies go free.

 

6 essential questions underpinning digital strategy development

Jul 2, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy

communication_george_bernard_shaw

I find myself writing a proposal for the development and  implementation of a digital marketing strategy for a bunch who know they need it, because I suspect their kids told them, but have no idea what it is.

Part of the challenge is to figure out how to balance the digital and social media education against the tough realities of marketing which have not changed despite all the new tools. The entrenched view that marketing is about putting out a monthly newsletter full of general bluster and crap and discounting as and when deemed necessary, usually from an inflated starting point pervades the thinking, and has contributed to ensuring the previous efforts in the digital space have failed.

Perhaps I am wasting my time?

Some of the essential early questions are proving to be challenging for them. Questions like:

1. Who is your audience? We need much more than generalised demographics, we need specific behavioural information informed by the demographics to the point of being able to give prospects individual personalities which we can address in communications.

2. Why and where do they spend their time online? The prospective audience all have digital lives, and if we are serious about becoming a part of those lives, we need to be serious about understanding how it works on an individual basis now, or we risk alienation.

3. What do you have to say? Unless  what you have to say is of interest to them, sufficient to engage and over time lead them to a transaction, there is no future. Speaking to a prospect in their words, explaining why should they care about what you have to say is now essential.

4. How does what you have to say add value to their lives? It is one thing to be noticed, and hopefully gain some interest, but unless we can tell them specifically how the item being promised will add value to their lives, they will not engage. Long gone are the days of broadcasting generalised features and standing back with an order book. Now we have to specifically target benefits and articulate  them unambiguously and with sensitivity to the aspirations, situation and needs of the prospect.

5. Why are you reaching out to them? The initial and quite reasonable and logical reaction to digital communication is that you are just trying to  reach them to flog them something, and nobody likes to be a target. Describing the payoff to them in their terms is essential.

6. What results are you expecting? Knowing the end you are seeking is pretty important. This is not just the end point of the whole process, but the end points in all the building blocks in the engagement to transaction process. The practise of marketing has been revolutionised by the ability to collect and analyse data. For the first time we can now identify which half will be wasted and eliminate it.

Todays digital consumers are pretty savvy, cynical and can smell a con a mile away. However, they are also able to see the intention behind the tools and the benefits that can be delivered to them by the tools, and are comfortable with the trade-off if it is of benefit to them.

Marketing’s great dilemma: Too much choice.

Jun 12, 2015 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

apologies to Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com

apologies to Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com

Faced with so much choice of technology and platform options to reach and engage consumers, many marketers are paralysed. On the other hand, many are tempted to be all things to all people, simply because the tools are there to reach them, and they hope that they strike a hot prospect somewhere.

“It’s a numbers game” dominates many conversations, and it seems limiting your options  is silly.

However, the customer has extraordinarily well developed bullshit meters to filter out the digital noise, so unless you are very specific with the offer, it will not pass the filter, it will not be seen.

It seems to me there is way too little being done to consider the people we are trying to reach. It is ironic that the tools have given us access to their lives,  but often we choose to ignore the individual and chase the usually poorly defined “triibe”. A great description coined by Seth Godin, now misused by many.

We need to stop obsessing about the tools and ask ourselves three basic questions:

What is it we are trying to do?,

Why should anyone care?

How do we use these tools now available to make a difference?.

It seems to me there are four strategies

  1. Establish your “Why“. Simon Sinek in his seminal TED talk compellingly makes the argument that this is the core of marketing, to quote, “people do not get what you do, they get why you do it”.
  2. Build relationships. This sounds a bit yukkie, but when done with a genuine desire  to help, and add value to others, it delivers to both parties. The twin brothers of C21 marketing, “Social media marketing” and “content marketing”  have between them led us astray. Everyone is working feverishly at the tools trying to be different, the face in the crowd that stands out, but mostly failing, there are just too many faces, and too few asking the follow up question of “what am I going to do with them when I have their attention”. For the faces, they are attracted from time to time and let down somehow, and have become even more reluctant to give anything easily.
  3. Bridge the gap between what you say, and the customer experience. Too many marketers are there for the money, not for  the joy of delivering on the “why”, and do not really care about the challenge of getting their customers to say “that was amazing?” Marketing is emerging as the difference between success and failure in this commoditised and transparent world, so you better get some of the rare good stuff.
  4. Choose your tools based on the behavior of the individual consumer. There are so many tools, and combinations of tools available, that making the choices becomes a task of considerable proportion. Choosing the right combination can be the difference, so make sure you choose on the basis of the best way to match your messages to the behavior of  the consumer, not by what is available. No good having a hammer when you need a screwdriver. When you are building a deck at the back of  the house, the choice is obvious, but when building a bridge to the consumer, the discriminating factor is their behavior in any given set of circumstances, and this is really hard to predict, you really need to understand them in great detail. There is too much technology, it has become the end, rather than the means.

When you are stuck, give me a call.