Three critical success factors of a newsletter.

Three critical success factors of a newsletter.

May 10, 2018 | Branding, Communication, Strategy

A colleague has a newsletter, he emails it to his list on an irregular basis as he has something he  thinks of interest to say. When I unsubscribed, he rang me, angry that I had done so, after all I am known personally, and have an interest in  the topic.

Compiling a newsletter can be a hugely valuable tool in the marketing armoury, I subscribe to several that are on my ‘must read’ list. However, my time is limited, and my inbox stuffed with rubbish, the unintended consequence of being curious in this digital age.

Apart from some basic errors, like an absolute lack of any visual attraction, and questionable editing, I pointed out he has ignored some of the marketing basics that simply have to be covered in this day of competitive tsunamis of information coming at us from all angles. So I gave him some gratuitous advice based on what makes me wait for those few newsletters I value.

Respect my Time.  Time is the only totally none renewable resource we have, I do not want to waste any of it, and the demands on it have multiplied geometrically over the last decade. Therefore, I prune from the bottom. If you want a ‘sticky’ audience for your newsletter, treat your audiences time as being way more valuable than your own, and they might stick around.

Create Value. The corollary to not wasting peoples time, is to deliver great value. If all you are doing is regurgitating other people’s stuff, how does that add value? It is also true that people value different things, so your newsletter has to be a source of value across a few domains in which your readers live, and not all of it will have a commercial value. Considering the sources of value to your primary potential reader, and being sure you can consistently deliver,  should be a foundation step before you contemplate allocating the resources necessary to build a newsletter.

Create a community.  The advice of all the pundits is to ‘Build your list’. Rubbish. If all you have are email addresses, you are no different to every other hopeful spammer out there. The value of the list you have is not in the  numbers, but in what the receivers do with the information you send them. I would rather have a community of 100, that waits for the next newsletter, consumes the content, comments, shares, and feels like their time has been well spent, than a list of a million, 90% of which get caught up in the spam folder.

None of these three are easy, in fact, they will consume considerable resources, way  more than their short term value would indicate is sensible. However, if you are in for the long term, great, a newsletter can be constructed and encouraged to evolve that will be ‘sticky’ in a sea of mundane crap.

Newsletters such as the John Deere publication  ‘The Furrow’ survive because the follow these unspoken rules. ‘The Furrow’ have been serving a their readers since the 1895, the Michelin Guide since 1900, just two examples of newsletters that have become synonymous with content  marketing success delivering brand longevity.

 

A brand is a red highlighter in your brain.

A brand is a red highlighter in your brain.

Jan 19, 2018 | Branding, Marketing

Brands have a number of useful commercial purposes. They can build margins, gain distribution, provide a base for expansion, and a whole lot more, but that is all from the perspective of the brand owner.

From the opposite perspective, that of the customer, and potential customer, a brand also has a whole lot of purposes, none of which have anything at all to do directly with your prosperity.

A brand is the end result of all the impressions and emotions individuals have experienced while coming into contact with the thing to which the ‘brand’ is attached.

Our individual responses will be marginally different, but as a group, we label those collective experiences  a ‘brand’

Our brains are just massively complex parallel computers, something the boffins in Silicon Valley are trying valiantly to replicate.  In effect, we absorb and process all sorts of things at the one time, mashing them all up to something that gets ‘remembered’ and which our brains can retrieve automatically when presented with the ‘trigger’

This is a combination of rational and emotional inputs that has its roots in evolutionary biology.  It enables all the things going on around us to be sorted quickly and efficiently without resorting to consciously making a series of choices. This applies as much to the choice of yogurt on the supermarket shelf as it does to the rustle in the bushes that last time resulted in your sidekick caveman being a tigers breakfast. You do not forget that, but at the critical point, when you hear the rustle again, your brain registers the rustle, and auto responses kicks in, and you get the hell out of Dodge.

There is a lot of bullshit and hyperbole around the notion of ‘brand’. However, like many things in life, we complicate it past the point of common sense. The challenge then is to dig sufficiently deeply to understand and articulate the trigger/response mechanism in the minds of those we most want to influence.

It sounds a bit creepy, but is just the way we respond to our environment.

 

 

 

 

Indifference is the killer of businesses.

Indifference is the killer of businesses.

Dec 7, 2017 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Small business

 

Successful small and medium sized businesses are always on the lookout for opportunities, which can be a problem.

All businesses, and especially small ones do not have the operational and management ‘bandwidth’ to take on too many opportunities, they lose focus and end up being mediocre in the market that made them successful in the first place, as they compromise in order to enable the coverage.

In this terrific cartoon and accompanying commentary, Tom Fishburne relates the contrasting stories of the Mini, one of the most successful cars ever designed, and the Pontiac Aztec, voted one of the worst ever, despite being in front of the demand curve at the time and therefore in a great position to be truly successful.

The problem can usually be distilled down to indifference.

People buy things to solve a problem, scratch an itch. Sometimes that is a simple thing associated with what will I eat tonight, and sometimes it is a personal thing associated with self-image. When it is the latter, creating a situation where there is indifference, where the purchase decision is not driven by a strong emotion, you will end up failing.

Strategy is all about making choices. It is not just a matter of determining what you will do, it is also a matter of determining what you will not do. It is this  latter dimension of choice that always causes the most problems in coming to a conclusion, there is always that bit of green on the other side of the fence.

‘Find a niche and own it’ should be the mantra of every business, but particularly every small business. Be very, very good at a few things rather than average at a number of things.

A former client has a dominating position in a niche servicing the underground coal market in Australia. A dying market if ever there was one. There are several strategic options: expanding into underground coal internationally, and/or expanding into adjacent hard rock mining operations leveraging some of their technology that is relevant to the challenges faced. As there are limited funds available, choices need to be made. Not easy.

One of my mates is a baker, a creative and driven bloke who has successfully built a business servicing the ‘high end’ market in a major city. His business partners now want to expand by expanding operational capacity in order to service the ‘medium’ market  where there is indeed far more volume, but also more competitors with spare capacity, so it becomes a question of price.

Over 40 years of marketing, I have never seen a situation where the dilution of the value proposition benefits the marketer. Customers are not silly, they make judgements on a range of rational and emotional considerations, and they do not consider your operational and financial priorities in those judgements.

 

Cartoon credit”: is again a wonderful Tom Fishburne production

 

What is the most common question in marketing?

What is the most common question in marketing?

Nov 27, 2017 | Branding, Strategy

How do we build  this brand?

This question leads to all sorts of strategies and tactics that are all aimed at engaging consumers in some way, to get them to prefer the brand and sometimes even buy  and recommend to their friends.

Marketers cannot decide what the term ‘brand’ means. I just googled ‘What is a brand’ and got 290 million responses.  This post by Heidi Cohen lists 30 definitions from very reputable sources, several of them with ‘gurus’ status. All are correct,(at least in my mind) in some way, but they are all different.  None of them reflect the reality that a brand is an outcome in peoples minds, not a thing. Fundamental to most of this thinking is that It is assumed that the word ‘Brand’ is a verb: To brand.

Wrong.

A brand is an outcome of a huge range of activities that impact, usually unnoticed by consumers and potential consumers, that together mix up and deliver an outcome for the individual that when all amalgamated result in what we conveniently call a ‘brand’.

If you are setting out to build a brand, have a clear view of the outcome  you want, but then align the activities so they all contribute in some  small way, incrementally, to the achievement, to the  journey towards what a customer will call a brand.

These observations by marketing professor Mark Ritson on the repositioning of Burberry is exactly on the money.  The new branding guru assumes that the Burberry brand is a thing, and asset albeit intangible that is separate to everything around it, and able to be ‘managed’ as you would a piece of machinery.

Wrong again.

Burberry like every other brand is an outcome of a host of activities that impact on the way customers, and non-customers see the brand, and describe it in the terms Clayton Christianson refers to it in the context of  the Job to be done.

Brand building is a strategic exercise, taking resources, wisdom, and the power to make long term decisions that stick. It is not a task to be undertaken by the junior brand manager, their job is to execute tactically and contribute data, ideas, and competitive intelligence, not play games with the biggest asset most companies own.

Harley Davidson is one of the best known, most deeply seated brands around. While there have been some hiccups along the way, Harley has been utterly consistent in its promise to riders since the beginning. The promise and its delivery continues to evolve, but in a way that recognises that its huge value is the primary asset of the business.

 

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

Nov 8, 2017 | Branding, Change, Customers, Marketing

The tools of Marketing have changed, not just a bit, but totally, since the century clock ticked over.

The scary thing is that it seems to me that we have seen nothing yet. It is becoming more unpredictable than riding a wild bull every day!

While the tools have changed, and will continue to do so, the foundations remain intact. The successful marketer in the rest of the 21st century must reconcile the complexity and technology of the tools, with the simple and unchanged foundations of marketing success.

Following are the nine macro forces I see that businesses, and their marketing leaders should be considering:

The power of information.

Technology has put the power of information into the hands of the consumer, wherever they are. The tools that have achieved this, social platforms, mobile, the ubiquity of the net, have interacted to destroy  all the rules of marketing beyond the basic principals. We used to say information is power, and that remains true, it is just that the power is now in different hands, and they are not afraid to use it.

Brand building.

Building a brand is not what it used to be.  C19 marketing relied on scale, large ad dollars placed by large companies who could scale distribution, supported by the scale of capital intensive manufacturing. The brand powerhouses of the C19 are in trouble as options pop up everywhere, supported by direct to interested consumer marketing.

However, all is not lost, access direct to consumers has enabled a whole new group of brands to emerge based on the direct digital access.

Advertising in crisis.

Advertising as an industry is in real trouble. This is  not  the divide between the analogue TV, radio and magazine Vs the Gooface digital advertising duopoly, but the opportunity that consumers have to remove advertising from their environment by a combination of ad blockers and subscription based streaming services.   The communication challenge will become harder as consumers avoid more and more advertising to minimise the disruption, in the process, removing the opportunity for advertising serendipity.

Bureaucracies no longer work.

The pace of change has been so fast that the siloed and bureaucratic organisation and management structures of the past no longer move  quickly enough to respond in real time to the requirements of the market place. The businesses that succeed into the future will be those that enable the decision making to be decentralised in meaningful ways such that those in direct contact with the market and customers have the power to make often substantial decisions, This is a really challenging prospect to everything that has been true about organisations for the last 150 years. I see it as an external extension of the Lean manufacturing notion of Takt time, but instead of companies using the rhythms of demand to drive their operational responses, they need to reverse it to be able to be in advance of the market Takt time, to understand and respond to the drivers of demand, to remain competitive.

Consumer power.

The locus of power has moved from those doing the selling to those doing the buying. No longer do sellers have the information needed to make a purchase decision that they can dole out to potential customers in any way that best suits their sales strategies. Now, in most cases, a seller does not know of a buyers interest in a market until their decision is made, or almost made. In these circumstances, getting on customers radar early is essential as a means to be on the short list, which offers the opportunity to at least have a conversation.

Brands are no longer the authorities they once were, that role has been taken by individuals who have managed to build a profile, usually digitally, that attracts attention and offers credibility. There are however some exceptions, and these exceptions are mostly brands that have emerged in the C21

Buyer journey.

The journey of  a buyer is a minefield. Back in the old days, last century, it was pretty simple, there were few choices realistically available, mostly serviced  from the local area, and the sellers had the power. Now  there are a huge range of choices, and often confronted by the range consumers either filter out all but the very few, or decide not to decide, becoming hypnotised by the array of choice, with all the competing claims. Therefore, the first battle is the one for attention. In this situation, you would think that brands have a real role to play, but largely, that hole remains to be filled, which will be I believe the challenge for the 21st century marketer.

Big data oxymoron.

The oxymoron of big data is coming. We have all  this data sourced from an array of places, and cobbled together by algorithms to give us insights and detail never dreamed of just a few years ago. However, big data is all really about going to the level of the individual, so it is in some ways, small data. Market segmentation is moving from broad demographic descriptors that had little to do with actual behaviour, to a segment of one. The implications of this are profound, in that customers can choose to do business not just on an ‘algorithmic’ basis, but on a personal one as well.

Marketing is data driven: with a twist.

Marketing used to be all about people, emotion, supposition, instinct, and experience, mixed with often lethal doses of bullshit. Suddenly all the imformation we marketers had ever dreamed of turned up on our desks as data, and we dove in trying to become data nerds, a role entirely unsuited to most, so the new shiny thing, the tools, became the obsession, rather than the insights that the tools could  deliver. The pendulum swung too far, and it is still swinging, but in my assessment, the pace of  the swing is slowing, and slowly the realisation will again emerge that people really do matter, and you cannot learn that from data, you have to go out to where the people are, and actually talk to them, face to face, one to one, to get a grasp of the humanity behind all  the data.,

Marketers in the C-Suite.

Marketers have never been held in high esteem by the ‘C-Suite’  as the Americans love to call it. To a significant extend to my mind this is for two reasons: first, marketers have not often been the smartest people in the room, as measured by the normal things that are all about the optimisation and continuation of the status quo, they have been flaky. Second, they are the future tellers, talking and speculating about what might happen, and then having a number of bets on the table depending on the variables that show up, so holding marketers to a data driven world has been hard. By contrast, the other functions in the c-suite are all about what has happened, the past, so it is relatively easier to produce hard facts and data to describe it. This difference makes the marketers look by contrast they are having each way bets, and perhaps do not know what they are doing, and neither is healthy.  This has to change, and I believe the change is starting, as what has happened is an increasingly bad indicator of what will happen, and it is the informed, creative but analytically capable flakey ones who can demonstrate value are usually best placed to place the bets on the future.

There are several items above that will generate discussion, which I look forward to hearing.

 

Image credit: Tom Driggers via Flikr

Will Apples ad barrier slow down Gooface?

Will Apples ad barrier slow down Gooface?

Oct 25, 2017 | Branding, Communication, Governance

In September last year (2016), Facebook conceded publicly that they had over-estimated the average  time viewers spent on video on their site by 60-80%. They did not tell us how long they had known of this ‘error’ but I suspect it was for  quite a while, as they aggressively pushed the ‘video first’ bandwagon.

It does not seem to have dented the volume of money going into the coffers of the GooFace (Google/Facebook) digital advertising duopoly, although it may have slowed a little after Mark Pritchard, the CMO of Procter and Gamble with an ad budget in the billions fired both barrels at the stupidity, complicity and fraud that underpins the digital advertising industry.

Digital advertising has been blighted not just by hype, hyperbole, fraud, but by tracking, and we know it is a blight, because something like 700 million devises now have ad blockers installed, and the big platforms are increasingly removing the ‘skip ad’ option that was initially in place.

GooFace make almost all their money from ads, and cross site tracking is a fundamental part of their arsenal, which they will protect at all costs. Making all sorts of claims supported by flimsy data, and more hyperbolic assertions (I suspect they will make tobacco companies look like beginners when they get a bit more practice) is to be expected. Apple  by contrast make almost no money out of advertising, so has loudly rattled the cage by announcing a new feature on an upgrade of Safari that  prevents cross site tracking.

Brilliant.

I wonder who will follow suit, as the march of subscription services without ads together with the blockers, must be biting deeply into advertising effectiveness, assuming we could see and analyse the data objectively.

Follow up Nov. 8, 2017.  Has the charm offensive stated?  This article in Marketing Week would suggest it has.