Feb 23, 2024 | Communication, Marketing
Blog posts live on, as does anything posted to the net.
Sometimes they come back to bite us, sometimes they merge from a long hibernation to live again.
Last thing you want is for that Facebook photo from that wild party at university to emerge a decade later when interviewing for that ‘ideal job’.
On the other hand, a simple idea in hibernation for a decade can suddenly wake up and add new value. For someone, its time has come!
It happened yesterday.
A simple blog post from 14 years ago that has hibernated without being disturbed for most of those 14 years woke up yesterday, and went ‘ballistic’.
(Ballistic is a relative term, but in the context of the billions of posts out there, and the usual readership numbers of StrategyAudit, it was ballistic)
Whoever you are that stumbled across this old post, and obviously shared it to your networks, thanks, and I hope you are able to leverage the idea to your great benefit.
Feb 15, 2024 | Branding, Marketing
There are many contenders from around the globe for the mantle of ‘GOAT”, or at least of the last 20 years.
The obvious choice might be Steve Jobs, whose single-minded pursuit of all the factors that coalesce into great, long lasting, and commercially effective marketing culture is unparalleled.
You might nominate Elon Musk. He reshaped the auto industry worldwide, made batteries sexy, and figured out how to create a reuseable rocket, before imploding by renaming Twitter ‘X’.
How about Jeff Bezos who figured we would buy books online and turned that idea into a retail behemoth that has reshaped markets.
Some might add the foul mothed Gary Vaynerchuck to the list, whose ability to promote himself while talking about himself is unmatched.
Then there is a small number of genuinely original marketing thinkers and academics: Seth Godin, Mark Ritson, Byron Sharp, Roger Martin, and Scott Galloway.
Add in a few hands-on practitioners like Angela Ahrendts, Richard Branson, Marc Pritchard, and a trio of Aussies who changed the world, Melanie Perkins, and the Atlassian duo of Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes (whose core values include ‘don’t F%@k the customer’) and you have a good list.
However, my nomination would be from outside the usual ‘who is the GOAT’ box. It is a 34-year-old musician, songwriter, entrepreneur, and publicity machine, who has added tens of billions to the GNP of the US.
Taylor Swift.
I could not identify one Taylor Swift song, and I do not know if she even has any musical talent, but she certainly is a truly great marketer!!
To have the world talking about you, (even a 72-year-old bloke in a blog post) to have massive fan clubs of ‘Swifties’ salivating over every new piece of iconography, hordes fighting to pay eyewatering amounts to get nosebleed seats in a 100,000 seat stadium, takes some talent.
What makes her so great? Indeed, what are the common characteristics of all those in the list?
- Understands who her customers are, and applies relentless focus. Swifts core market is young women and girls. She has demonstrated mastery in engaging with that audience with the music, visual extravaganza, and personal storytelling that resonates. She is also a powerful role model, encouraging independence, ambition, creativity and determination, emotions to which those in her market all aspire.
- Consistently creates value for customers, individually. It seems the ‘Swifties’ out there all see Taylor as someone they easily relate to personally, across a wide range of channels and media. She is consistently delivering experiences, based on the music and extravaganza shows, but supported by all sorts of adjacent activities, such as having Kobe Bryant, a superstar in his field, come on stage at a concert and wax lyrical about her kindness, generosity, and ‘grounded’ personal values. She tells Swifties what they want to hear, and even their parents have trouble arguing!
- Is ‘the only one’. Marketing success is an outcome of meticulous attention to detail, and the communication of all those details in a package. It requires two types of activity that is an extremely difficult mix to get right. On one hand, you need to ensure ‘activation’. The calls to action that today generate the motivation to spend money to be a part of the party. On the other, it requires that long term investment be made that build a brand, an identity that engages and creates a long-term platform from which the activation and short-term revenue generators are launched. When done well, as in this case, there will be ‘only one’. Where else can a teenage girl find the excitement, engagement, communal vibe she gets from being part of a ‘Swiftie’ fan community?
- Swift applies compounding leverage. Taylor has executed a masterful commercial strategy. Unlike almost all other entertainers, she has retained control of everything, and runs the whole shebang as the CEO of a large, volatile and very complex business entity. Her uncanny ability to generate ‘Buzz’ around everything she does, which is spread by wildfire word of mouth and unpaid media enables a continuous stream of ‘Swift-news’ which has fans hanging out for more. She provides the creativity, leadership, and alignment most CEO’s can only dream of across the diverse range of activity her business embraces.
Swift is touring Australia, starting later this month, with multiple sold out shows in Sydney and Melbourne. The hype is becoming all consuming: you even have to reserve a spot in the line to pick up your merch and get to the cash register at the exit of the ‘pop-up’ merchandise stores.
Header illustration is via DALL-E, everything else is ‘organic’
Feb 12, 2024 | Branding, Communication, Customers
Last week I provided a template for a Customer Value Proposition. The template works well, but ‘Customer Value Proposition’ is a piece of marketing jargon which just means making a promise to your customers.
This presupposes that you actually know who your ideal customers are, and what sort of promise would be attractive to them.
In the January February 2024 Harvard Business Review there is an article called ‘The right way to build your brand‘ written by Roger Martin and two Co-authors. The article sets out research that proves the hypothesis that making a specific promise to customers is more attractive than a generic claim of some level of excellence. The specific promise is about the benefit a customer will receive with use of the product. A generic claim to greatness is just about the product.
It does not surprise that the first is more powerful than the second.
‘Your promise is your strategy’ is a sub headline towards the end of the article. When you think about it, the observation must be right. Strategy is a process of influencing factors over which you have no control in such a way that the subsequent behaviour of the customers benefits your enterprise rather than an alternative. Making a promise of performance in delivering an outcome desired by a customer is about the strongest driver of short-term behaviour I can think of.
Delivering on the promise, will build trust.
Right at the end the authors ask four crucial but simple questions that can be used to determine if a proposed advertising campaign is worth investing in:
- Is the campaign based on a clear unambiguous customer promise?
- Were customer insights used to identify a promise the customers value?
- Is the promise framed in a way that is truly memorable?
- Were product marketing, sales, operations, and customer service involved to ensure the promise will be consistently fulfilled?
To me, this sounds like a comprehensive framework by which to decide if a proposed communication campaign is a worthwhile investment.
Feb 9, 2024 | Branding, Marketing
Almost everyone has trouble with this most basic of marketing jobs, articulating your ‘Value Proposition’. It is a simple statement of the benefit a customer gets from using your product, rather than an alternative.
Internally it also plays a role, in aligning staff and other stakeholders to a common purpose.
For …………….. (your ideal customer)
Who……………..(define the specific need, pain point)
Name……………(of the service or product)
Provides…..…. (The key benefit)
For example, the simplified Value Proposition for StrategyAudit might be:
For small to medium manufacturing business leaders,
Who do not have the resources to hire deeply experienced management,
Allen Roberts from StrategyAudit,
Provides that deep experience across all functional areas of your business on an ad hoc, part time, project, or on-call basis that is guaranteed to lift your profitability.
This simple template works well for just about any product or service.
It forces you to articulate why your ideal customer should deal with you rather than an alternative, and the value they will derive from that choice.
Generating the best possible value proposition is an iterative process. Rarely do I see the ‘perfect’ one emerge quickly. Often there are several that look OK, which can be tested and improved.
Feb 7, 2024 | Analytics, Marketing
Every customer segmentation exercise I have ever seen is based on geography, demographics, some combination of behavioural characteristics, or all of the foregoing.
‘Young women, 25-35, single, who live in the Eastern suburbs, earn more than 80k, and eat out a lot’ sort of analysis.
Misses the point.
There are five types of customers in every business I have ever seen
Unhappy. These will often tell you and anyone else they can grab, of their unhappiness. Usually these are users, rather than the ones who make the purchase choice. This means they can be a fantastic source of improvement ideas, but can also consume lot of your time with things that cannot be changed.
Satisfied. When a customer is satisfied, they go away happy and you rarely hear from them. The more time you spend understanding the drivers of their satisfaction, and doubling down on them, the better.
Loyal. This group of people usually quite small will not go anywhere else and will generally pay premium to you in the knowledge that you will not fail them. In effect, it is in effect a risk mitigation strategy for them.
Apostles. Apostle customers these are generally small subsection of your loyal customers and occasionally just a satisfied customer when conditions are right who are prepared to aggressively push your case to others in their various networks. These people are your best salesman and also your cheapest, although there is a cost get him to getting them to the point where they will proselytise on your behalf
Cheapskates. The fifth type, the one you can probably do without, is the one who dips in and out of your product, chasing the cheapest price irrespective of other considerations. It also seems to me from experience, that they are also the ones who complain a lot.
Think about it.
I am prepared to bet there will be nuggets of value hiding in plain sight you can use.
Header credit: My thanks to the exiled Scott Adams, and sidekick, Dilbert.
