Jun 28, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media
How many times have you heard from marketers “my job is to create the brands”, (often followed by the “yours is to sell it” when they happen to be talking to sales people)
Many marketers use it as the rationale for their existence. Pity it is nonsense.
Customer experience with a product creates a brand, not any amount of advertising, promotion, engaging games, and all the rest. At best, marketing creates the environment in which a customer will try, come back to, or stick with a product, but ultimately, it is the experience that creates the loyalty of an individual consumer, and that relationship multiplied many times, becomes the brand.
This simple insight has the potential to change the nature of your marketing significantly, and also enables some sensible measurement of the impact of marketing activity.
Jun 22, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Operations, Strategy
Why are we so hung up about ethical sourcing of coffee??
What about the electronics industry, and shoes, rare earth minerals, and many others?
Who bears the responsibility for the conditions of workers in the supply chains of successful businesses.?
Apple is the biggest, most profitable company the planet has seen, but the depredations in the supply chain at Foxxcon are well known.
If the labour cost of an iPad is, as has been calculated, less than $15, adding a few dollars onto the price to lift wages would do little to damp the demand, or indeed, Apple could make a few dollars less, reducing its whopping billions in cash flow by a miniscule amount, but would it be a few dollars less?.
A significant number, albeit a small percentage, of coffee drinkers appear willing to pay a bit extra for the “ethical” badge, surely the same would be the case with an iPad, fancy shoes girls cannot walk in, and many other product categories where differentiation is a key challenge. Benneton does, why not others?.
Jun 20, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The oldest market research technique in the world is to ask a group “imagine brand X is walking through the door, tell me about him/her”. This enables respondents to describe the brand with human terms, words that reflect the human characteristics to which we all relate, and understand.
Why is it then that we do not think about our brands presence in social media as the Social Life of the brand?
Wander around the net, Twitter, Google+, 4 square, YouTube, Pinterest, and all the rest, and you find a few sensible, brand relevant comments and posts amongst the inane updates and dross. It is understandable that brand owners want to appear human, so they often talk drivel on the social media, as this is what happens in life, but if the brand is worth anything, it will opt out of the rubbish and be relevant.
Think about it as a social gathering. When you meet someone who talks rubbish, you cannot wait to get away, by contrast meet someone who has something interesting to say, and you stick around.
Jun 19, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy
The current Australian government has a marketing problem.
Their other problems, trouble with the hung parliament, zealous credit card expenditure by MP’s, inability to out-communicate the drivel of the opposition, a rebellious electorate, a failed “moral Imperative” and others, are just the symptoms.
Every useful marketer knows that success depends on a relentless focus on clearly articulated longer term goals. When focus is allowed to shift to the crisis of the day, from the “main-game”, whatever that may be in your circumstances, to responding to the day to day, the marketing effort fragments and stumbles for lack of a solid foundation.
The problem with this Government, and the Opposition as well, is a lack of any long term goal the electorate understands beyond their selfish objective of retaining/gaining power, and if the electorate cannot buy into the government of the day’s priorities for various reasons, they at least understand the “why”, as a process of explanation has occurred.
Generally the pundits say the Government has a communication problem, but it is much deeper than that, they have no idea of what it is they wish to communicate beyond the press release of the day that they hope will dose the fire started yesterday. They have a fundamental strategic marketing problem, not just a communication problem.
Jun 18, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant, Sales
I have been having trouble with bloody Optus, again, my exclusive supplier of communication services. They simply cannot seem to get anything right, clearly the left hand has no idea, and I suspect do not care what the right hand is doing. Their customer service does not talk to their accounts who will not talk to their technical service, who do not talk to their retailers, a real dogs breakfast. Frustrating in the extreme.
Yesterday, I got another call from some young bloke in their call centre, reading from a script telling me how he had a great deal for me because I was such a loyal customer. Pity they are not a loyal supplier!
How good would it be if they actually did care, and showed it by any one of a number of means at their disposal to make my digital life simpler, cheaper, better integrated, more transparent, and easier to manage. Allocating obviously anglo names on their call sheet to those in their call cantre whose first language was English seems a pretty logical step.
Loyalty runs both ways, and those very few businesses that make the effort to act in their customers interests, rather than just their own, usually do pretty well. There are the big ones we all know about, but there are also small businesses around that make it easy, pleasant, and “human” to conduct a transaction, so you come back for another one, again, and again.
Customers are always looking for a better deal because that is all that these dills have left them. If any of the telcos reduced the customer churn by 0.5%, a seemingly modest target, they would be way in front, because they could reduce advertising and re-contract costs, cross sell more easily, and reduce their “service” costs by doing something right first time.
Genuinely caring about the customer experience, being a bit loyal to their customers seems a pretty good way to start, a customers loyalty to a brand needs to be earned, it will not be given away to those who do not deserve or value it.
