Oct 16, 2012 | Communication, Marketing
The way most of us see things is dependent on what we expect to see, and how it affects us. If you were a farmer with a just planted crop, rain is a great day, but if you are about to go on a picnic, rain sucks.
Similarly, marketing is about setting the context in the way we want our customers, and potential customers to see out product.
The iphone is widely understood to be a disruption of the phone industry, but as John Gruber of daringfireball points out with great insight, it is not. Rather, the iphone is a redefinition of the mobile computer, it just happens to have as one of its capabilities, the ability to make and receive phone calls, but that has almost become a minor item. What is really important is that it put the net into out pockets at all times.
Those phone makers left high and dry by the iphone, RIM, (Blackberry) Nokia, Motorola, at al, all tried to outdo the iphone by addressing the disruption, and building a better phone, but failed. It took those with the capabilities in software and computer hardware to get it at least partly right, Samsung, Google, and perhaps more recently Microsoft (although yet to be successful in the market) to make headway. These guys had little to do with phones, they built computers and the software required and evolving, and are flourishing.
Much is made of the “sameness” of the iphone 5, it is outperformed by Samsung’s galaxy on most objective parameters, but is still making all the money, so which is the more successful? Depends on your context doesn’t it.
Oct 5, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
My 28 year old son recently tried to get a mobile phone on a plan, and couldn’t, he did not have a credit rating. A bit unusual perhaps, but this is a young bloke who has been a self-funded student for a long time, always paid his bills, always met all his commitments, financial and otherwise, a far better bet than most that his mobile bill would be paid. Now graduated, he wanted to start being “normal” as he put it.
“Personal brand” is a term increasingly bandied around as we build an identity underpinned by on-line behavior. Headhunters are increasingly using it as they seek to find the best fit for roles they are filling, so are looking to social media as a behavioral metaphor for actual behavior in a workplace.
But it is going much further, much quicker than anyone anticipated.
The reputation you build in one place will be increasingly transferrable to another. Why shouldn’t your hard earned EBay and Amazon rating be considered when you want to rent a car or flat, borrow some money, or even take on a simple phone plan?
Collaborative consumption is a term coined by Rachael Botsman to describe the evolution of behavior made possible by the removal of the transactional friction we are used to by the collaborative capacity of the internet. We can now rent someone’s home on airbnb, raise venture capital on Kickstarter, share a car on GoGet, get the chores done by taskrabbit, and find thousands of other potential partners in peer to peer transactions that were impossible just a few years ago. In these circumstances, your reputation, your brand, is as good as money, just different, it has a value that others will consider in an exchange, and decide if they will proceed.
In this emerging digital economy trust is everything, trust between strangers a necessity for these types of collaborative consumption transactions. It follows then that we need a mechanism to replace the face to face interaction that through human history has built trust because you can see the whites of the other parties eyes, and make a very personal judgement about them.
Your reputation, the sum of all your behavior, will increasingly become manageable and transferable across platforms, and act as currency.
Oct 2, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
SME’s cannot afford to spend money on traditional media, and after all, it is now far from the only option, so why would they?
Facebook is the first stop of most, predictable I guess with almost a billion users, but the environment is all wrong for many, as it enables a social digi-conversation not a commercial one.
If you need a commercial conversation, Linkedin is way better, with 150 million users, 50% of whom are businesses. So, if you have a B2B service, Linkedin is a real option, often overlooked.
In this terrific post, Shelley Kramer gives some very useful “how to” tips.
Sep 28, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Working with a client recently, I realised my language had changed. The word “Pitch” had been substituted for the more usual “Present” as I encouraged them to get out and engage with their markets in a very focused way to build sales, rather than taking a more passive approach, and presenting their credentials, hoping to strike a nerve.
Any presentation, as I have argued before is an opportunity to sell something, a product, an idea, a course of action, but it seems to offer three alternatives to an audience, buy in, leave it alone, or remain on the fence. By contrast, a Pitch seems to offer less options, you either buy in, or not. No middle course, no fence, yes or no.
Before he was famous outside advertising, Bryce Courtney used to write a weekly column for one of the Australian newspapers called “The Pitch.” Looking back at a dog-eared copy of a compilation of columns published afterwards, and decoding the great stories for the message, it is unashamedly, “Pitch” as a call to action, leave no middle ground, and manage a conversation for a “Yes or No” outcome.
A more recent publication is Oren Klaff’s great little book, “Pitch Anything” which offers a framework for making a pitch successful, and whilst the focus is on capital raising, the lessons are applicable everywhere.
So stop presenting, and start pitching when you want a clear outcome.
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 13, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
In a chook-house, there are both chickens and eggs, all mixed up, and hard to tell which chicken laid which eggs. It is a bit like the web, full of sites that could belong to any number of businesses.
As a part of a project a while ago looked at the sites of a range of operators competing in the market category in which this particular client operates. Most spruiked the features of their products and brands, what they did, rather than talking about the benefits that usage delivered, what problem the product solved, and why that solution was superior.
Why is it that the designers of sites seem to think that the most important thing to be said is what their product does, rather than designing the site to offer information that relates to the reasons why a customer may be seeking a product?
The old habits of printing a brochure and shoving it into every letterbox in reach die hard, and are being replicated on the web. A real pity, when the real opportunity is to target the offer to the individual who is attracted to look at the detail of your proposition because it engages them with something they want to know
