Marketing Students guilty of negligence?

As a marketing graduate I read with interest David Meerman Scott’s views on how many marketing professors could be guilty of malpractice in the way they teach the subject.

Part of me agreed, I remember in a tutor group session explaining Chasm Theory to my fellow students and the lecturer. But then I thought ‘how come I knew about Chasm Theory and other students didn’t?’

The answer is simple – and this advice holds for students of any subject: read around your subject. Voraciously. Find online discussion groups (this was 1996, I was on Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries mailing list and the contact with real-life tech-savvy marketers was invaluable and inspiring to me). Nowadays there are many more forums, mailing lists and groups to get involved in. Authors, like David and Seth Godin have blogs so you can keep up with what they’re thinking about in-between books. Not that one has to wait long for something to read these days; it seems there’s a new ‘New Marketing’ or Social Media Marketing book published every week. The biggest problem is keeping on top of all this material.

For this reason I would have to disagree, marketing professors shouldn’t be sued for malpractice – they teach to a course, a curriculum set well in advance and based on a course prospectus. I get that the text books are long in the tooth, I think it’s great that David’s New Rules of Marketing & PR is on the reading list for a number of marketing programmes, it should be on more. So should Purple Cow. And How to Drive the Competition Crazy, because the marketing set texts are dry and stuffy. The practice of marketing on the other hand is not – it’s the lifeblood of an organisation. Books that encourage you to try something new, be remarkable and give recent real-world case studies prove that. Read the rest of this entry »

Quit bugging me

Keeping with the theme of email marketing (see this post about spam from a couple of days ago), this time from the customer’s perspective.

Every year or so I order a few IceBreaker and Bridgedale items from Sierra Trading Post, an outdoor clothing outlet store. Over the course of a year they email me pretty often with details of sales and special ‘we miss you’ discount codes. This is great and I’ll usually order using one of these codes, saving 25% off their already excellent prices. What bugs me is that right after I order I seem to invoke some sort of mailing avalanche. I get an email every one or two days, with another discount code, or a reminder that the discount code they sent me two days ago is about to expire.

I don’t want to unsubscribe from their list because I like receiving the codes, just not right now, plus it seems rude to unsubscribe when they’ve saved me so much over the years.

Meet me half way
What I want is an option that is somewhere between unsubscribing and having to receive then delete/ignore their emails for a while. What if there was an option for “keep me on the list, but don’t send me stuff for a couple of months, unless it’s a really impossible-to-refuse offer”.

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One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch

Email marketing is both one of the most cost effective methods of reaching your customers and the most loathed.

Email marketers have to contend with over zealous junk mail filters, spam crusaders that seek to destroy them and list subscribers who forgot they gave permission. It’s so much easier to ‘report as spam’ than it is to unsubscribe.

I’ve used email marketing myself. I also hate spam. I will only use opt-in lists for this reason. Yet that doesn’t stop recipients of emails I’ve sent replying with torrents of abuse for daring to darken their inbox, and those are the ones I’ve heard from.

Many users will just instruct whatever spam filter they use to block an email. Depending on how that spam filter works, that action gets reported and if enough people do that, the sender of the email gets blacklisted. In the case of an opt-in list this is sailing pretty close to a collective act of defamation.

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Back to School

A few weeks ago I sat an exam for the first time in many years. It was the online certification test for Inbound Marketing University, a project driven by Hubspot, providers of a web based software solution that is designed to assist SMEs with, well, inbound marketing. The ‘professors’ of Inbound Marketing are all high level practitioners in their relative fields – it reads like a who’s who of ‘new marketing’ types.

What’s Inbound Marketing anyway?

Inbound Marketing is the antithesis of many elements of traditional marketing – it’s about creating relationships and establishing a presence, making potential customers aware of you in a more natural way than interruptive tactics like TV advertising.

Course overview

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I’m inquisitive but I’m not desperate

I’m wondering when the tide is going to turn on the matter of requiring users to fill in lengthy forms in order to download a software demo, an e-book, a white paper or in some cases even a brochure.

You’ve gone to all the trouble of getting someone to your site – whether that’s by SEO, an advert or just random luck. You promise a download, often with just a click. Then you start asking for my inside leg measurement.

When I see a form like this, I immediately wonder: ‘Do I get what I asked for immediately? Are my details vetted before I get it? Are my details getting added to a mailing list?’

When are site owners (or their retarded designers/developers/consultants who say ‘and we can gather names by getting people to register for this’) going to get it? What’s important to you, getting your information/product/idea into people’s hands, hearts and minds, or building a list that is ultimately worthless junk? Are you that worried about counting the number of downloads and think the only way to do it is to require someone’s details? And once you’ve given someone access to it, who is to say they won’t spread it round ‘virally’ anyway? Or do you wish you could stop that too?

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Five Must read marketing/internet/social media blog posts from this week

I’ve had my head down working and absorbing information this week, reading books and blogs. Here are five helpful/useful/relevant and informative posts from the past week that I recommend – much more worthwhile than anything I would have written this week!

Christopher S. Penn: How powerful is your social media?
A warning not to drink too deeply from the pitcher of social media kool-aid

David Meerman Scoot: What we all really want is ATTENTION
The various ways to beg borrow, steal or earn attention

Search Engine Land: Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points
Great overview of the current state of play with Google and the ways it’s claiming not to be a monopoly.

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Get outside your comfort zone

We’re all guilty of sticking to what we know; whether it’s in our choice of where to eat, or which brand of breakfast cereal we buy, and the way jobs and careers go we often find ourselves ploughing a very similar furrow. I’m all for specialisation – that’s how you get to be the best in your field. A deep network of contacts and domain knowledge are excellent reasons to hire someone.

But what if you were to get outside of your chosen vertical for a while? Whether that’s giving some marketing advice to a friend or family member, helping out at a non-profit or a small local business that you use. Doing this gives you the opportunity to test out your marketing abilities in a completely different direction.

In our day-job we (should) know the customer inside out. Things are a little different when you’re presented with the challenge of marketing to a customer base you don’t know so well — even if you’re one of them. It’s then that you can strip away the accumulated domain knowledge and get back to applying basic principles, testing your assumptions and truly stretching yourself. You might be the world’s best marketer of widgets but that’s almost irrelevant when you’re marketing a gourmet deli. It’s time to apply what you’ve learnt to a completely different niche and see just how universal your skill-set is.

Whilst I’m in transition between jobs I’m using some of the time to reach out to small businesses which can’t afford big-shot marketing consultants and don’t have all the skills in-house required to shift their marketing up a gear. Both of the business owners I’m working with have agreed to me posting details of my work for them here and I look forward to chronicling the development of their marketing and (hopefully) the lift this gives their businesses.

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Helping out your competition

Sparked by a comment on twitter recently by Justin Levy, co-owner of a restaurant and social media proponent.

I own a restaurant and we’re doing great due to SM. But I see a lot of restaurants closing which sucks to see happen

he was replying to this question by Dave Ferrick:

Last few local restaurants I visited in the past 3 months said they’re closing down despite excellent service. SM Gurus where are you?!

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Loyalty Cards – How Many is Too Many?

We all like to be treated well by companies we use frequently and the loyalty card is the simplest tool at a marketer’s disposal to identify your best customers. Used well they’re very effective – they keep a customer using your airline, even when the others are more expensive, they allow you to track customer behaviour and target your marketing efforts more effectively.

There’s just one problem – they’re a huge pain to carry around. In this image there are cards for a restaurant, a cinema, a coffee chain, a drugstore, an airline, a hotel chain… It’s all very well for marketers to assume that a customer will only have their airline’s loyalty card in their wallet, but what about all the other companies? Supermarkets, petrol (gas) stations and every other loyalty card scheme are all vying for space in your already over stuffed wallet/purse/pocketbook.

Some supermarkets have figured this out, they give you a different piece of plastic with a number on – a small card to go on your keyring, so of course you can’t leave home without it – that works fine until you end up with 10 of them on your keyring and your bunch of keys won’t fit in a pocket any more.

As Guy Kawasaki says ‘never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself’. Loyalty marketers need to consider this: would you carry around a wallet full of plastic just for the, at best, 10% benefit the card earns you, if you remember to show it?

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