Jul 23, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
The “sales funnel” is a pretty familiar diagram, it has been around for a long time, simply because it makes sense, at least it did to sales people. To their customer prospects, there is a level of antipathy to the notion of being just a part of some “funnel”
It is time for an alternative view, one taken from the perspective of the consumer who now has all the knowledge necessary to make their own informed decisions, and they are exercising that power aggressively.
The world has changed, so too should our representations of the manner in which our marketing activities are managed, and the nature of customers and potential customers reaction to our efforts to meet their needs.
Seems to me that we would be better off thinking about the process in two funnels, one that represents our e-marketing activities, the other the way in which those messages are received.
The first is the marketing funnel, which has replaced the sales funnel, an obsolete metaphor in a digital world.
Below is my way of illustrating the new Customer purchase process.
- Need awareness. This can be either explicit, one that emerges when the consumer recognises that a purchase is necessary, such as when your printer dies, you need a new one, today! The other type of need is implicit, which is generally uncovered by a sales process, rather than by the consumer in isolation.
- Information search. Google has revolutionised this part of the process, by taking the power of information from the seller where it has been for all of human history, and giving it to the buyer. It is this point at which the marketing process now kicks in.
- Value comparison. The value equation is different for every person, in every situation, but the components are unchanged. Features, availability, warranty, design, capacity, and many others all feature in varying degrees, the means by which we communicate the bundle that makes up the value, so is common to every situation, is price.
- Purchase decision. “Yes, I will buy” thinks the consumer
- Short list. Which options meet the need, operational requirement, and value outcome needed, from which a finance decision can be made
- Transaction. The transaction can take many forms, from a simple exchange of cash for product, to all sorts of arrangements and trade-offs made between sellers, buyers and various middlemen
Whilst the whole process is usually depicted as an ordered, sequential one, in which the various marketing automation software options can provide order and flow, in reality is is usually a chaotic, messy, and iterative process.
Jul 21, 2014 | Branding, Change, Marketing, retail
It is fascinating to watch the evolution of the marketing of the two retail gorillas, Coles and Woolworths.
It is clear what they are doing, setting out to engage consumers with the freshness, range and provenance of their produce, and selling consumers all the packaged goods they need on the way through the stores. Their strategies are working, but more importantly, they highlight the depth of the opportunity for those few independent retailers left alive, and points to the way the more fragmented food service, ingredient, and emerging home delivery and farmers markets should be marketing themselves.
Coles and Woolies remain mass retailers, vulnerable on the edges.
A few years ago Woolies were undisputed heavweight champ, Coles the belted contender with no hope, but how things can change with a new trainer. Coles has been rejuvenated, and whilst their financial results have been hugely improved, they have a way to go to catch Woolies, but in the marketing stakes, they have taken the lead.
The sponsorship of “Masterchef” was a masterstroke, and they have followed up and leveraged the success extraordinarily well, with Woolies just starting to respond by buying Jamie Oliver to shape up to Heston, Curtis, and Status Quo (I was young in the 70’s) and a massive and very well co-ordinated marketing budget. Bit of an uneven contest.
From a consumers perspective, increasingly their choices are limited to brands the retailers control. Wether they be Coles new “Heston Blumenthal” brand, Woolies “Jamie Oliver” brand, or one of the various other housebrand versions at differing price-points, and pack configurations, they are all housebrands.
Suppliers of packaged proprietary brands have been progressively squeezed out, and those left are mostly sourced via global supply chains rather than manufacturing domestically, where almost nobody is left standing.
Change always starts at the fringes, as we have seen time and again over our history. Change is happening now in the food value chain, but at the fringes. Organics, local produce, micro suppliers of almost personalised products, restaurants differentiating on the basis of seasons and local supply, “pick your own” farmers markets, food tourism, various home delivery services, all happening outside the supermarket, some pretty basic marketing communicating the differentiated offer.
Jamie and Heston can take their money to beat each other up in the ad breaks of the nightly news. The increasing number of us who really care about what we eat, will go to the local blokes who genuinely care about what they deliver to us, and buy from them.
Jul 18, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
As a young marketing graduate in the 70’s I was given a scholarship to attend an intensive marketing management program in Boston, run by Harvard professor Jim Hagler.
He changed my life.
One of the many things he rumbled to me (he spoke, but it came out as a rumble) was:
“Son, find out how they intend to stay in front of the curve”
Sage advice.
Marketing is all about staying in front of the curve, the challenge most businesses have is defining the curve.
Most businesses have a choice of curves, but you cannot be all things to all people, so choices are made.
The price curve
The cost curve
The innovation curve
The Value curve.
It is just this last one that really matters to customers worth keeping. They want value, however they choose to define it.
Whatever else you do, for your chosen group, niche, cohort, or however you choose to define your ideal target customers, stay in front of the value curve.
Look around you, there is no successful enterprise that is behind the curve.
Jul 16, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Prospecting, lead qualification and nurturing, prospect management and the transaction itself have all changed forever.
The salesman with a bag has been relegated, at best, to the transaction end of the prospect to transaction continuum. In the process, we have lost some of the humanity, some of the eyeball closeness that good sales people brought to the table, the insights and instinct gathered from the context and body language that underpinned all the conversations they had.
All gone, but most would agree that body language holds a significant place in the sales process, so how have we replaced it?
Is there such a thing as “Digital body language”?
Can we score metaphors of the physical reaction from digital interactions?
Logically the answer has to be ‘Yes”, as we now have access to a huge body of data that reflects the sum of behaviour of all who come into contact with whatever platform or tool we have working for us. However, access to data is a very long way from leveraging the insights that are hidden within the data, a fairly advanced level of analytic capability along with a tool with some grunt is required, although simpler tools with manual intervention can be made to work.
Consider the process:
- Somebody reads a blog post and “likes” it, better yet, shares it,
- They subscribe to the blog to make receiving it automatic,
- They respond to an offer, webinar, e-book download, surveys, or combination of these, perhaps several times, and all the while your system is recording and responding to their actions, delivering the next step to them.
- The system is constantly being improved as more data points are collected, and A/B testing provides finer grained insights
The data collected can be sliced and diced, weighted and resliced in all sorts of ways that can provide an almost visceral insight into the behaviour of groups and subgroups to various content stimuli at differing levels of engagement. The relative effectiveness of differing pieces of content at each point in the sales continuum can be calculated with good levels of accuracy.
Surely this is the equivalent of the sum of the body language cues of those in the database, if not necessarily that of any individual within it, and so is a very effective guide when well used. Data will never replace the one on one human responses, but the value of the digital picture built up is a source of enormous value, immeasurably widening the net of prospects beyond what can be achieved with boots on the ground.
Jul 14, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Small business
kmjantz.wordpress.com
“Content marketing ” is no more than a new buzzword to try and build interest in the stuff we marketers have always been doing, telling stories, and creating a context in which the stories we tell will be meaningful, and be a catalyst to an action we want.
It is also fundamentally important that the bag of stuff called content is understood, well organised and communicated.
Cave paintings were perhaps the first, they told stories about the lives of those living in those days, passing on messages to those that followed, next week, month, millennium.
I have argued previously that Martins Luthers church door was just facebook in beta form, but perhaps the first recognised piece of content marketing as we now know it emerged in 1895 with the first publication of the John Deere farm machinery magazine “The Furrow“, still going strong.
The Michelin brothers first published the “Guide Michelin” a motoring guide in 1900, with the objective of telling the few motorists then around where they could find petrol, accommodation, meals and repairs in France.
In what may have been the first modern cookbook, Frank Woodward saved his $350 investment in the rights to “Jello” at the last moment by publishing a recipe book, the first step in creating a dessert tradition that still exists in the US, and perhaps taking the first step towards our obsession with cookbooks, or “Cooking Content Books”.
Burns & McDonnell engineering first published their “Benchmark” magazine in 1913, and Procter & gamble did more than bring us our daily cleansing products, they gave the name “soap opera” to the daily dose of what we still call “soaps” on TV, by sponsoring radio programs in the ’30’s.
Lego has been the king, with their magazine, and now the Lego movie, how great is that, to have Hollywood make a movie about your product? Wonder where the funding came from?
The examples of so called “Content Marketing” exploded after 2000, any scan of the web will give hundreds of thousands of examples, opinions, and infographics. Curata’s list of content marketing e-books is a great assembly of information, and more evidence, if any more is needed of the interest in the area.
Point is, “Content” is not new, neither is the notion of engaging by communicating stories offering advice, and managing context, it is just that we now have some pretty potent additions to the toolbox.
PS. August 2014. This article on “The Furrow” magazine appeared on the Contently website in August, and offers added insight into this venerable, and far-sighted publication.
Jul 11, 2014 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy
Water will become the frontier of conflict and innovation in the C21
Few things are more important than how we feed ourselves, and get access to clean water. Without these, our species will not survive, our numbers are increasing rapidly, as the resources of the planet, particularly available water, are being consumed faster than replacement rates.
According to the UN, 6-8 million people die every year due to water related disease or disaster, 2.5 billion do not have access to sanitation, and nearly a billion do not have clean drinking water. I suspect water will be the root cause of much of the international power plays over the next 50 years.
During this last week, there was an international Peri Urban conference in Sydney. Much earnest discussion amongst the disappointingly low number of attendees went on, but there were some lessons that need to be learned beyond the gravity of the emerging crisis on water management:
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- For the message to get out beyond those in the room, the facts need to be told as stories to which the public can relate, and engage, creating pressure on decision makers to allocate some priority to the questions raised. Dry academic papers read by Professors with limited story-telling skills, accompanied by PowerPoint slides as comprehensible as the Rosetta stone will not cut the mustard. The presentations I saw reminded of Sir Ken Robinsons classic line that “the only purpose of academic bodies is to get their heads to meetings”.
- Marketing is not just useful, but required. Twitter is now routinely used by conference organisers to get their message out, and there was a handle for the conference, #periurban14, which attracted 1 tweet. Enough said.
- For Peri Urban agriculture to be a reality, it is required to be economically sustainable, as well as ecologically sustainable. Discussion of the barriers and challenges to economic sustainability would appear to me to be of vital interest to the topic, but beyond some minor consideration of the evolving organic market, little was said, the vital role of consumer demand ignored.
I presented at a workshop breakout session. A short presentation that set out to make the point that whatever happens in the growing part of the agricultural process, you still need a customer to make the whole thing commercially sustainable. There were so few people there that clearly the issue of commercial sustainability being a vital foundation of change has not yet resonated.
Conferences are a vital part of the process of creating and disseminating Intellectual capital. The presentations are just a small part of the mix, the relationships built with other conference attendees, and the opportunity to leverage the messages to wider audiences via social media are the real reasons conferences are worth the time and expense.
