Nov 7, 2022 | Branding, Marketing
Imagine you are faced with the task of joining two pieces of wood.
What information are you likely to need before deciding how to go about the task?
How big and important are the pieces, are they structural weight bearing, is the joint going to be seen, will the choice have a knock-on effect, what is the most efficient joint?
The point is, you need that information before you can then decide how you go about the joining. Do you nail, screw, glue, combine rebate glue and screw, countersink the screw? Without the contextual information, you cannot make an informed decision that will give you the best outcome.
Sometimes this is easy, instantaneous, other times it will require more time and research to get the right answer.
Figuring out your marketing programs is no different.
How are you going to allocate your limited resources across all the possibilities that face you?
Marketing has only one purpose, to generate revenue and resulting margin. Sometimes it is revenue today. Sometimes tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade. If you cannot see a connection between the marketing activity and future revenue, stop now!
The challenge is to know enough to ask informed and intelligent questions and be able to separate the bullshit from the good answers.
This ‘marketing game’ is full of sellers of new shiny toys that are ‘guaranteed’ to be the answer to all your commercial problems, delivering you rivers of cash.
In order to help you separate the bullshit from the reality, there are four questions you can ask to do the separation, which will assist you to see the connections to revenue.
They all are interdependent, none by themselves is of great value, and together they are a powerful way of thinking about your business.
The 4 seem simple at first glance, but in reality, are very complex questions, that in combination will give you the beginnings of an answer. The rest will come with experience and domain knowledge.
- What problem can I solve for a potential customer, or put another way, how do I add value?
- Who is my ideal customer?
- How do I apply maximum marketing leverage?
- How do I make a profit?
When you have the answer to these four questions, you are ready to spend some money.
Not before.
However, once answered, it is never enough to stand still and think the answers tomorrow will be the same as today, and that the answer today is the ideal one. Business is iterative, you learn from doing, experimenting, doing it better next time. It is an evolutionary process, so long as you are careful not to bet the farm on a dud horse. These are all connected to each other, one without the other is of less value, and the impact of answering them all well is not just cumulative, it is compounding.
These four factors, and all the lesser things that hang off them, are compounding.
The twist is that they also compound in reverse, so you must be prepared to try things, but get them off the table quickly when they do not work.
Let me know when I can help.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld www.tomgauld.com
Oct 28, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency is one of the prototypes for the ‘Madmen’ of advertising, the architype of the explosion of consumer advertising that occurred in the sixties.
The agency was started by James Walter Thompson in 1896, when the ‘advertising’ function was nothing more than a brokerage service for selling space in newspapers.
Advertising in those days, well before even radio and consumer magazines, had only newspapers as their communication medium. It slowly expanded into creating the ‘advertising product’ to make selling the space easier into the expanding range of communication options, all on commission.
Simple days.
Most success relies on simple things, breaking down the complex so they are easily understood. So it was with advertising in those early days, before we were blasted by ever increasingly complex offers and intrusive psychological hooks to sell us more stuff.
It is often useful to go back to these roots, to see what made for success early, what were the simple things that worked.
The ‘Thompson T-Square’ is one such tool in copywriting.
Every successful copywriter used it, a few simple questions to focus the mind on what was really important as they wrote the copy. At J. Walter Thompson, it was pinned to the wall of every copywriters office.
What are we selling?
To whom are we selling it?
Where are we selling it?
When are we selling it?
How are we selling it?
Simplistic yes, but also effective, and leading to the ‘four P’s’ of marketing, articulated by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960.
Those simple questions lead to the consideration of the most effective articulation of value to the ideal customer, who would be receiving the messages in a manner that made them comfortable, and receptive to the idea of a purchase.
So, the simple answer to the question in the header is ‘Yes, every day”, it still works!
The header is an 1868 portrait of James Walter Thompson, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Oct 26, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
We live in complicated times, none more disturbing than the now regular breaches of data privacy and subsequent risk to the financial and personal security of individuals.
The recent spate of data breaches is probably just the beginning, but we, the general populace in the absence of any deep technical knowledge about data security, assume that those who collect our data do so for good reason.
Silly us!
This should never, but it seems always does include, ongoing marketing, and selling of personalised data, even well after we cease to be customers.
I have been a customer of Optus since their first days. I switched the day there was a competitive market born in 1993. They have all my communications business, which may be chook feed to them, but is a substantial hole in the monthly household budget.
The best Optus can do in the face of the breach, presumably enabled by minimum level investment in security, is send a form letter, full of assurances that all will be well. However, if we want to phone them, here is a number, but there might be a wait.
While the letter was addressed to me, at my residential address, the header was ‘Dear Customer’. They know my name, email, and phone numbers, and certainly can aggressively ensure bills are paid, so no detail goes unnoticed.
Surely Dear Mr. Roberts instead of Dear Customer would have been easy?
It might have been sensible for them to also list the services I hold with them, and give a risk assessment of each? Perhaps I do not deserve such a level of transparency?
Then, the signoff:
‘Sincerely. Your Optus team’.
No names, not even a duplicated signature of the cleaner, let alone anyone on a huge salary who might be taking any responsibility for this marketing clusterfuck.
I guess I will have to bite the bullet and change, be a part of the great communications customer churn. These nignogs spend tens of millions tapping into this churn, rather than shoring up the customer base they already have and reducing the churn. As an advisor to SME’s my advice is to cherish your existing customers, particularly those who are unlikely to change, even if just for the avoiding of the inconvenience involved.
When your business faces a crisis brought about by external factors that will impact customers, rule number one is be up front, take responsibility, accept the shortcomings that led to the crisis, articulate a recovery plan, and most importantly, personalise it to those affected.
Optus has done none of those things.
I am glad my super fund that also hides behind barriers I struggle to breach, does not hold any Optus shares. Presumably it is unable to given Optus is 100% owned by a Singaporean billionaire. Is this ownership, and the key place Optus holds in the communication infrastructure of this country a part of the problem?
Oct 24, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
Following on from a previous post about the value of information, it seems relevant to ask how long any value created lasts.
We are all familiar with the notion of the ‘1/2 life’. The time it takes for radioactivity of an element to decay by 1/2. Uranium 238 has a 1/2 life of several billion years.
What about the 1/2 life of information?
The 1/2 life of a daily newspaper is arguably 1 day, today’s news is ‘tomorrows fish wrapper’, and for 99.9% of blog posts, and most other so called ‘content’, it is about 2 seconds. This seems odd in what is supposedly the ‘Information age’. Why is the life so short, in most cases, and what make the difference for the 0.1%?.
The answer seems to be: It depends on the value of the information, and the ‘friction’ or resistance which is applied to its transmission.
Businesses, and most institutions are structured to be top down, in functional silos. This is a system that evolved before digitisation of information, which enabled the scaling of effort and the most efficient allocation of resources. A 20th century solution to the challenge of information transfer and leverage.
In the 21st century, with digitisation, the structures of the 20th century are redundant. They are simply too slow to be competitive in an environment where the action happens at digital speed on the ‘front lines’ of customer interaction. It takes too long for the siloed decision making processes to work, the customer has moved on to someone who is able to satisfy their need on the spot.
This change requires a wholesale change in the way our organisations are structured and the tactical actions that take place every day are managed.
What happens on the ‘front lines’ evolves quicker than the siloed information and instruction exchanges that worked well last century. We must turn our power structures upside down, and give the front lines the authority to make on the spot customer focussed decisions within a much broader remit than was previously the case. The risk if we do not is that customers will simply go down the road to someone more responsive.
This creates huge complications for organisations, as the status quo is upset. The power people at the top have worked for all their lives is diluted, and for those at the bottom, suddenly they are being tasked to take decisions that last week were being referred up the chain.
There is a driver of activity, always present, but to date well in the background for most, being the ‘operating rhythm’ of the market in which they compete. When their decision cycles are slower than the operating rhythm of the market, the market will go elsewhere, or at the very least, opportunities will be lost.
Getting ‘inside’ the operating rhythm of your competitors and the market more broadly, being able to respond quicker, is an emerging key to strategic success.
The 1/2 life of information is now in the hands of others, those who really count, by being customers.
Oct 17, 2022 | Marketing, Sales
There are many things needed to start and scale a business, the ones I bang on about all the time are cash and commitment.
There is however another.
Trial.
Without trial, there is no business.
Whether you are starting a business in a well understood and competitively supplied market, or a completely new product in a new field, the challenge is the same.
You must generate trial.
The strategies necessary are entirely different for every business, as the challenges are entirely different. However, the common feature is that you must make the value proposition attractive enough to bust the power of the status quo, and often the barriers to exit for the current customers of incumbent competitors, before you will generate trial.
Then, and only then, if the product performs, and the barriers to adoption post trial are breached in sufficient numbers, you have a chance at survival.
It seems pretty obvious, but we do not usually think about trial as the single and first essential barrier to success. Rather, we tend to think about it as just the first step in a process, not giving trial the weight it deserves.
Oct 12, 2022 | Communication, Marketing
‘Content is king’ is an expression that is widely accepted as a basic truth.
Pity it is wrong.
Creating content has become commoditised, everyone is doing it, you can now buy AI programs that will do it for you. (Let me know how that goes)
The value of any content is magnified geometrically when it comes to the receiver in the appropriate context. It is the context that connects first, before the content has a chance to make an impression.
Remember what happened when you were considering buying a new car?
Suddenly, you see the car you favour almost everywhere, even if they are relatively unusual.
It is the same with ‘content’.
When thinking about a new car purchase, you will rarely see content produced by an architect, no matter how good it may be. However, if you have decided your house needs a reno, will probably see an ad that highlights renovation architects.
Context.
Most search results have ads running down the RHS, which we mostly do not see. However, from time to time, we do ‘see’ an ad, and mostly it is because our subconscious has latched onto a photo or headline that reflects something that has been on our conscious mind.
In other words, the message intrudes on our brain because it hooked into a context, then if the content is any good, we may take it further.
This balance between context and content more than anything else is why you must understand the behavioural drivers of your ideal customer, to ensure not only does the right content get to them, but it does so in a context that it will be seen, and understood.
Header cartood credit: Tom Gauld from new Scientist magazine.
