Factoid, Marketing Opportunity, or Both?

On the one hand, it’s amazing that 2011 is 50% over…  On the other hand, we’ve just begun an extraordinary month:

Not just because of what I prefer to call “Interdependence Day”, but because every 823 years, the days line up in the month so as to have 5 full weekends.

So yes, this can be simply your nifty factoid for the week.

Or, you can use it as an anchor to remember that “business” and “personal” are more connected than separate (in the business-to-consumer sense).  The bigger picture is to be aware of the calendar that your customers live by, especially when targeting new customer segments.

Certain holidays or points in the weekly/monthly/yearly rhythm can be particularly good — or bad! For this month: entertainment, retail, and seasonal businesses can capitalize and post monthly sales highs.

Or consider this quintessential example:

US Federal Income tax reports are due every April 15th (unless it falls on a holiday).  So if you are selling to accountants or tax preparers, the month immediately prior is a waste of your time — whereas the month afterward is golden.

Using the “calendaring lens”, what opportunities can you identify?

Dr. Juma’s Lesson on the Danger of Being a Generalist

When I was President of the local chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants a couple years back, I would regularly hear individuals introduce themselves as a “financial consultant”. A few people down the row, there would be another “financial consultant”.

Now at first glance, these people naturally got their hackles up about competitors — but drilling down in conversation with them, it turned out that the first served publicly traded multinationals, while the second specialized in funding plans for startups! There is a reason they’d never crossed paths in daily life — they aren’t competitors but have a better chance of sending work to each other as referrals.

So the lesson is to always focus on serving the special needs of your customer constituents, unlike the following where Dr. Juma can do almost everything (in fact, s/he competes with me – “Customer Attraction”!!)  The narrower your focus, the greater the possibility you’ll be seen by a non-competitor in the industry as complementary and thus a potential referral.

Consider the following billboard and I’ll be back next time with an exercise!

Tell Customers Stories of their Future [Thought Leadership]

More and more these days, we see companies engaging with customers 1:1 via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Many companies understand the opportunity and potential with “customer engagement” — whether or not they are now doing so!

I stumbled upon this great example today demonstrating thought leadership and felt compelled to highlight it.

Sharing a lesson dating back to my anthropology professors back in the Harvard Business School executive program, we “marketers” (read: businesspersons, non-profit leaders, engineering managers, etc etc) are always most successful when we tie into the customer’s reference frame, i.e. how do they think of their world?

I leave you with the rhetorical question: are you clearly defining where your product or service “lives” in the customer’s map of their world?

What Social Media Newbies Can Learn from Web Landing Pages

It often amazes me that we humans can lose past lessons… whether it’s the Iraq/Afghan wars looking increasingly like the failed Vietnam conflict, or Western civilization recreating technologies that previous civilizations had already invented, or even World Wide Web site designers overlooking all the research that IBM et al did in the 90′s on standardization of user interfaces (imagine how difficult it would be to drive different cars whose turn signals, steering wheels, and foot pedals were in different places!)

Heck, I get frustrated when I slip on a mossy slope in my back yard that I slipped on the prior week

Against this backdrop I offer you some key learning from my decade-plus in online marketing, in order to help with social media efforts:

1. People rarely buy on the first visit/exposure (legacy data suggest 7 exposures before one extends trust to make a purchase and/or change behavior, and some have recently suggested this has increased).

2. Web sites have about 3 seconds to assure a visitor there’s a WIIFM (what’s in it for me). In other words, don’t leave — we’ve got something right up your alley!

Where’s this conversation coming from?  Well, I’ve seen a growing number of Twitter and Facebook accounts recently that introduce themselves along the lines of “ABC Cameras is the best camera store with the most fun customer service help and the best prices”. Remember the target audience? They don’t like it when people scream to promote themselves, which only sets the expectation that they’ll regularly hear about offers, specials, and generally be “advertised to”.

Am I suggesting that the problem is the account profile? Absolutely not. It’s the thinking about how to use the medium.

What can you offer the visitor besides a purchase opportunity? For ABC (above) let’s say it’s “Answers to the most common camera questions our customers bring in…” Now there’s something that would grab people, if they have any inclination towards cameras! Copy writers call this a “hook”, now quickly scribble down 10-20 examples of the questions — you can fill the answers in later.

The point is that promoting this social media account “smells” like helping people — rather than blitzing them. Bottom line: people love to buy and hate to be sold. Help them do that by interesting them rather than pouncing on them

Cars Depreciate While Planes Hold Their Value

If you’ve never been in or around the private aircraft community, the headline may not make sense.  But the same can be said for the mariner community: Relative to Cars, Boats Hold Their Value.

Hopefully one of these examples clicks for you.  Presuming it does, ask yourself: Why?

I suggest that it has to do with how seriously we take them (and invite your thoughts/comments!)

People who go to sea recognize they must maintain the vessel or they may not come back alive.  Same with pilots and their planes.  Parts are categorically more expensive than automobile parts and the owners recognize the value.  An unknown whirring sound or clinking noise coming from a sea- or air-going vessel is investigated immediately, and often shows up in routine inspections.

However the same sound coming from the typical four-wheeler is much more likely to be “tolerated” and/or postponed, because the owner knows s/he can just “park it” on the side of the road and walk away.

Now think of your rolodex as this vehicular asset…

Is it more like a plane or a car?  Do you keep in touch with people you’ve met?  Do you know whether they’ve changed job titles at the same company, or even more importantly, changed companies altogether?

Because of the level of importance I attribute to networking in business, I’m doing a (complimentary) educational teleseminar to help friends and colleagues increase their effectiveness with nurturing your network.

If this calls to you (or you think of someone who can benefit) here is the URL:
http://relationshipcapital.co/dlp/nurturing-your-network-teleseminar

Though I forget the exact language, there is an old saying about boats in dry dock deteriorating faster than in the water, because… “boats belong in the water”.  By the same token, your relationships are best when maintained — not getting stale!

The Subtle Art of Price Alchemy

Many (I would even say “most”) of my clients are looking for ways to drop their prices to beat their competitors.  But time after time, I seek out ways to communiate “D&B” (different and better) and build the value — rather than reduce.

This is not just theory.  For the record, my career record — highest revenue growth in the shortest amount of time — was due in large part to revamped pricing of enterprise software licenses.

But just to demonstrate that this philosophy can work at “lower” levels than enterprise software, let’s consider garbage.

This fellow decided he might be able to sell tourists a souvenir of “fresh” garbage from the streets of New York City.  When he sold it for $10, it did well.

Then he sold for $25 and it was taken more seriously.  Then he raised it to $50 and it was considered “art”.  Now special editions go for $100!

So ask yourself: where are you selling out too cheaply?

The Result of Great Marketing: Undying Brand Character

Twenty-five years ago, I had the good fortune to join a little company in between the cornfields of downstate Illinois.  A couple of other programmers (software engineers) had “dibs” on more exciting new computers such as the Atari 68k and the Amiga — both awesome color graphics computers in their day — to develop flight simulators on.  Nobody wanted the lowly, boring “monochromatic toaster” — as the first Mac had been called — but I was willing to take it on, and got to know the Macintosh Way.

After roughly a decade on the “engineering side” of software, it was time for me to make the move over to marketing. Though they were relatively uncharted waters, I felt called to study and master the branding process as applied to consumer software products:  what can we do to engender loyalty to something intangible like software to compel them to return and buy again?

Just to put things in perspectives, this was the early era of the computer: there was no Internet (that anybody except academics and DOD knew about). CD-ROM drives were the bleeding edge, and few Americans knew about them — much less the brand “Microsoft” (whereas now, it is the 3rd most recognized brand in the world, behind only Coca Cola and McDonald’s).

In my opinion, much of Microsoft was created in the likeness of Bill Gates (with help from people like Rowland Hanson, with whom I worked) — just as much of Apple was created in the likeness of Steve Jobs (with help from people like Guy Kawasaki and many others).

Some people do not realize that, after decades of Microsoft overshadowing Apple in the marketplace, Apple products (including the Mac, iPod, and iPhone) are now in 1 in every 4 homes.

Furthermore, in the past few months, the value of Apple in the marketplace (stock price times number of shares outstanding) is now greater than the value of Microsoft.

So it is with some fascination that I came across and share this video — because the brand Steve envisioned years ago is what I think he’s created.

Key insight for you: is your brand defined by current circumstance?  Or is it so big (like a great mission statement) that you can work on it for your lifetime?

Crowdsource Your Advertising

If you don’t believe that social media is changing the way people perceive brand messages and vet them through their peers…

If you don’t see how social media is creating entire new businesses based around user-generated content (a huge piece of the Web 2.0 step forward)…

If you haven’t used a social network to discover long-lost colleagues from schools or companies…

Then perhaps at least you can see some value in social techniques to get your customers to do your ads for you!

Hmmm, now that cost savings thang gets some interest

Besides some of the things that you may have seen with global brands, here is a tee-up for what Seattle startup game manufacturer Cranium (acquired not too long ago by Hasbro, but clearly still thinking “guerilla”) did recently.

Unless you’re a youngster with a carrot addiction, you’ll probably want to click & enlarge to read more easily.

What other examples have you seen?

Invitation Letter for Cranium owners to star in commercial

U.S. Senator Patti Murray “hugs” Social Media bigtime

Today I received a notice that Washington Senator Patti Murray, up for re-election, is following me on Twitter...

When I clicked through to inspect the degree to which the campaign (more precisely, her social media manager) was paddling in the social media waters, I was impressed to find “they” are doing swimmingly!

It’s not just about using “a tool” but understanding which tools work well for what, and using them in concert.  As the old adage goes, when the only tool we’ve got is a hammer, everything in life begins to look like a nail…

Here’s one of the first tweets I saw in her/their Twitterstream:

Reasons your friends should follow @PattyMurray:
#1 – Two tix to lunch w/@BarackObama www.bit.ly/aWiWzL

Whoa — that caught my attention!  It makes me smile to see a clear “call to action” in light of the mass psychological pain the lower and middle class is experiencing [Pew Research Center recently reported that a staggering 55% of adult American workers have suffered unemployment or other work-related losses due to the "credit crunch" ripple effect].  It’s like selling raffle tickets for a sports car — without the price.

“Of course I’ll take a ticket!  Times are tough, but the president will be in town and I could get to see him by entering Senator Murray’s contest.  It’s free — all I have to do is give some contact info — and there’s a chance I could get an experience unlike 99.99% of the country.”

I am honestly so frustrated with our current level of political gridlock that I haven’t looked around to see which other politicians are embracing social media, and which are noticably absent from the scene.

Please feel free to comment if you have insights, though I would certainly understand if people didn’t want to touch the three “hot potato” topics in western society: sex, religion, and politics!

“Sitting in the Seat” of Your Customer

What does a phone service have to do with gas pumps?

The answer is “nothing” if you believe you’re in the fuel business.  But it’s “everything” if you’re in the great car ride business.

The 76 brand is clearly speaking to its “parent segment” by creating the “Why Stopper” phone service — designed for mom or dad to outsource the answering of questions by handing the phone to the kids (see ad below). 

Kudos to 76 for thinking like their customers think, and not coming up with another gremlin to show how their gas is different…

This reminds me of the classic story of how the powerful railroad empires lost their stronghold by insisting they were in the train business — where they probably could have thrived had they embraced being in the transportation business.

A client last year saw itself in the accessory business which relegated it to an “option” in the eyes of the channel and consumer. I worked with the team to adopt a perspective that we were in the technology business to focus on OEM sales.

How have you changed the way you think about your core business, or seen others do so — either successfully or unsuccessfully?