Marketing Matters

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that lately I’ve been prepping for classes I’m teaching at NYIT on social media strategy and tactics for business.

The classes started two weeks ago and so far, I’ve only had two people fall asleep in class. To be fair, I don’t dress in anything with live Twitter feeds, so I understand completely.

Seriously, it’s been great (for me, at least), with insightful questions and good input. I’ve posted the syllabi for the two sections, the intro class and the advanced class.

What’s more interesting than the course outline, though, is the fact that they’ve begun blogging. In the intro class, there’s one class blog, Comm 350’s Blog.

Some in the advanced class are posting their entries here, but there are also some individual student blogs, like this one by Ed Speno. As more and more set up their blogs (it’s their homework this week) I’ll be adding the complete list to my blogroll. In the meantime, check them out and be sure to leave comments so this project can come alive in the best way.

“Oh yes you do so have competitors. Here I’ll help you count them as they pass you by.”

I have an alarming number of conversations that could go that way if I didn’t bite my tongue. No matter how new or established the company, everyone thinks they’re alone in their offering.

The only way to get someone, usually a salesperson and especially a start-up CEO, to name competitors is to ask the question, “Who do your potential clients think are your competitors? Who else do they talk to when they talk to you?”

I blame the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and  Renee Mauborgne. It’s a good book, but like most rational ideas, in its pure form, it sounds valid and realizable. Its reality, though, can be a harrowing tale of naïveté or worse. Like Communism.

The thing about a Blue Ocean Strategy that’s good is that you do need to find your company’s unique offering and make sure everyone knows it. For me, for instance, I’m the only marketing advisor who is 6’ 1”, has hazel eyes, big glasses and who has worked with major brands and heads of state around the world to help them hone their marketing who is sitting in the lobby of the ACE Hotel drinking way too much coffee. For you, your unique value is probably something different (unless you also have a French press full of more coffee than you typically drink in a week).

Finding your unique value is what your marketing needs to be about, but it should never lead you to say you don’t have any competitors. You do. And because they know what makes them distinct and can articulate it, they’re racing past you full steam ahead while you try to get your bearings.

Be distinct as a brand but be honest about your competitive field. If you’re not, your audience won’t notice when you capsize and you’ll discover just how wide and lonely your ocean is.

I was about to post the blog I had scheduled for today when my crappy morning was turned around by a random act of kindness at my local Starbucks here in Montclair. It may have also been a brand statement, and I’ll explain why. Here’s what happened:

It’s been a crappy morning, and when the running around to preschool, frustrating errands and what have you was done, I found myself getting a cup of coffee at the Starbucks up the street. The very cheery woman (but not cloyingly so) handed me my coffee and I handed her my Starbucks card. Or tried to. She just ignored it and said “Thank you!” Confused (remember, I was pre-coffee) I tried to hand it to her again and she just said “Thank you!” When I finally caught on, I thanked her in an equally cheery way and let the line move on.

The randomness, as well as the genuine cheeriness of the woman behind the counter are what made it so uplifting. It may only be a $2 cup of coffee, but it was a gesture that made me smile and that’s worth more than two bucks to me. It’s also worth more than that to the company.

The reason I think this might be a brand statement and not just an employee being nice (which, I’ll grant you, my Tweet-buddy @tedcoine would tell you is the same thing) is that Starbucks has been trying to regain its brand identity by going back to being the cool local place it was when it began. I remember going into a Starbucks for the first time and it looked, smelled and sounded so different. Now, they’ve become so homogeneous that you might as well be going to McDonald’s. That’s fine if brand homogeneity is Job 1, but it’s not fine if you want to stay special in your customers’ eyes.

Like politics, all Starbucks are local. I don’t think there’s anyone travelling around to all the different locations taking notes and blogging about it (unless you work at the company, perhaps). You go to the one up the street, around the corner or down the road. So local attachment is important to cultivate. Whether that’s always been an articulated brand value I don’t know, but I’m guessing it is now. After all, all the fresh paint and comfortable chairs in the world won’t change how your customers feel about you. But people walking out with a smiles on their faces or saying “hey, you know what?” will increase your local loyalty and your brand value dramatically – and for only 2 bucks.

A conversation just wound up with a potential client in which the main question was “how do we cut through the chatter?”

I told them what I always tell clients, “be honest, avoid hyperbole and let’s make it sound like something you, personally, would actually say to a customer.” They protested that my approach would never work, that there’s so much noise out there, the only way to be heard was to be the noisiest kid on the block. The conversation isn’t a new one, but it’s still disheartening, both as a marketer and a consumer.

Their approach reminds me of last night’s weather report. “A snow storm is going to hit New Jersey! Get ready for a terrible commute or just work from home.’ The projection was for an inch of snow. I can understand an inch of snow being a shocking snowstorm if you live in, say, Tahiti. I don’t. I live in New Jersey, a state where between November and March it’s very likely to snow. An inch is never a storm here. It’s called weather and we have some.

It’s no news that television, particularly broadcast news, treats its audience like idiots, but you see in the overall decline in ratings what that approach is doing for them. If your company wants to build a relationships with your customers want, addressing them with hyperbole or an approach that appeals to the lowest common denominator won’t work. Respect your clients with your messaging. Treat them like the valuable (and valued) part of your business that they are and they’ll respect you back. And buy from you again.

Thanks to Chris Anderson, there’s a lot of talk lately about the true value of “free”.  Most people like the idea of “free” of course, but “free” is like most poisons – it’s ok in small doses. You can’t get carried away with free, though, because not only does it have a negative impact on the bottom line, but it’s messy, too.

As much as people like free, they don’t like messy. Messy things make it hard for us to feel at ease. There’s no peace in a mess. MySpace is pretty messy compared with Facebook, which is why MySpace is on the wane and Facebook is growing. Sure, you don’t have the ability to personalize your page, but the conversations are nice and tidy and can be followed more easily. Twitter is entirely messy – it’s hard to cut through the chatter sometimes to find the things you really want to know, so I fully expect to find it’s been replaced by something else in another year or so.

Free things are messy in the same way that Twitter is messy – there’s a certain amount of chaos in them and you need to feel at home with chaos to be able to make the most of it. The other day, some friends and I went to a restaurant’s anniversary celebration which featured free food. We got there about 5 minutes after the doors opened and found the line reached down the block. The line moved painfully slowly and once you got your food, there was no place to sit because everyone in town, it seemed, showed up for the free food. The restaurant hadn’t been prepared for the consequences of “free”. The food was delicious, but if you weren’t able to embrace the chaos, it was not a good place to be.

So before you leap on the free bandwagon, make sure you’re prepared to ride the wave of chaos it creates. It’s not for everyone. It’s messy.

The other day I was at a breakfast meeting at the Cornell Club where the topic had turned to how to use social media for business. The guy sitting next to me, who is rather successful in his field, rather abruptly announced that if he knew his insurance agent or financial advisor were “playing around at those sites” he’d get rid of them.

You can imagine the stunned silence that fell over the room for a few seconds before it got very loud. Everyone around the table had something to say about that. My response to him was very blunt: Customers are on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites – current ones, potential ones, you name it. If you have something to sell, you’d be remiss to not be where your customers are and to interact with them there. Let them talk to you, listen to what they have to say, and they’ll be more open to talking to you. Ignore them and they’ll go away and take their money with them.

Businesses exist to make money and they do that by communicating with their customers. Social media makes it easier to communicate, so it’s smart business to use it.

Personally, I’d like to think my financial advisor is smart. Wouldn’t you?

There are a lot of reasons to follow me on Twitter if you care about marketing, compelling ways to tell a corporate story, or if you want to read about me writing my book. But from the look of the landscape, there are some good reasons not to follow me on Twitter, too, that warrant mentioning. Here are the top 5.

1) I care more about the brand than the brand’s products.
When I mention a company’s great branding initiative or a way they’re using social media or some new technology to communicate with their audience, it’s not a given that I’ll be talking about the same company tomorrow. If I write about Ducati, I’m going to follow the development of their new social media ad campaign as results become available, but I won’t write about how wicked cool their new model is or what it’s like to restore a ’62 bike. Apply that example to any brand you can think of and it will hold true for me and my tweets. If you’re really into a brand’s products but don’t care about how they voice their brand, I’m not your guy.

2) I only tweet when I have something interesting to say.
I follow PR and social media guru @sandrafathi and she recently noted that she loses followers when she doesn’t tweet for 24 hours. That’s crazy. She constantly has great content, so if a day goes by with nothing, there are still the other 6 days each week that have compelling content. I don’t tweet as often as her and have let more than that period of time go by without tweeting. So if you’re constantly weeding your list of people who haven’t posted in 24 hours, you’re probably better off not adding me in the first place.

3) When I do other things, I usually don’t tweet.
I follow a serious business leader who shall remain nameless who recently tweeted that “peeing is great twitter time”. He wasn’t kidding. I enjoy multi-tasking as much as the next guy, but there are times to put the PDA away or to not have your laptop on your lap. If you want me to tweet while I’m “busy”, I’m not your guy.

4) I’m not in it for the numbers.
I’m not on Twitter to be Ashton Kutcher. I’m there to talk about great brands and interesting marketing ideas. Not everybody cares about that and that’s fine. Accordingly, I don’t care if I have only 2 followers, as long as they’re the 2 right followers for me. Would I rather have 2000? Sure, but only if they care about what I’m writing. It’s better to have the right audience than a big but disinterested audience.

5) I’m not going to buy your Twitter tool.
“Millions! You’ll make millions!” I hear it every day. Paid content, paid followers, spam followers, games, toys – the list keeps growing. No matter how many times you want to try to convince me to place myself at the vanguard of social media marketing by letting Dell buy my every tenth tweet, I’m not going to bite. I don’t buy crap. I buy into great ideas. If you’re shouting at me in bad grammar in bold print or all caps, I’m not going to listen.

Thankfully, that’s not most of you, but it is a large number. Twitter is a pretty interesting tool and for anyone who gets exactly what I mean with this post, I look forward to seeing you there.

I spend about an hour in the car every day taking my son to playschool and listening to Phil Schaap on WKCR talk about jazz in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Not only does Schaap play great music, but he has insights into how the greats became household names and a lot of what he says is relevant to anyone interested in building brands.

The other day, Schaap mentioned that “Lester Young was on the charts when the charts mattered.”  Who knows what the #1 record is right now? And since the demise of the single, how is that even being measured? People used to know but they don’t anymore. The charts used to matter, but that was a long time ago.

That immediately got me thinking about our “marketing charts” – independent brand valuations. What’s the #1 brand in America right now? Can you make a good guess? There are three right answers, but do any of them matter?

I recently Twittered about an article that discussed the wild fluctuations of brand value as measured by Interbrand, Millward Brown, and Brand Finance. When such seemingly similar valuations aren’t comparable, what are we left with? When no one can agree on the basics, do our metrics matter?

When I listen to CMOs talk about metrics, they always confess that part of gauging success is “gut”. I don’t think anyone would actually call that a metric. Is that how we’re measuring our brand value, too? Is it just gut?

When we have three different answers and three different perspectives of rising or falling value and no way to bring them together into a coherent view of the market, we may not have anything better to rely on than gut. Marketers either have to find a way to combine those three perspectives to make one sensible brand value or ignore them all together. It would be nice, though, if we could find a way to make the charts matter.

In the meantime, I guess we can all just listen to Phil Schaap and Lester Young.

I don’t mean to be unfaithful to my primary blog, but I’m blogging on the side, too. Writing in the Sun is about writing my first book. I’ve ghostwritten a number of published works, from op-ed pieces on up, so this project is exciting for me. What makes it worth your while is that it’s an amusing (and amused) look at the process of making an idea a book.

Since the book is supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek look at how to take your foot out of your mouth, it’s hopefully a fun read in it’s own right.

So take a look so, when it’s finally done, you can look at the book on your shelf and say “I remember when this was just a blog.”

Burger King advertising around the world is in a cycle of offense and apologies. Is this an odd plan or a symptom of a lack of global brand coordination?
Read about it in Ad Age.

By the way, are you following me on Twitter? You should be. I regularly post articles of interest regarding marketing like this as well as updates about my other blog, Writing in the Sun, about my current book project