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 »

Holding On – The right and wrong way in customer retention

Customer retention seems to get little thought in some companies. The fact that retention tactics only kick in when you tell them you want to terminate your contract is a significant part of the problem. Customer acquisition is an expensive business but it seems that some marketers are obsessed with it, accepting churn as a fact of life, with holding on to existing customers given only cursory attention.

Keeping customers is too important to be left to a salesperson calling the customer after they leave, you should be aiming to be so good for your customers that they never even think about leaving. Good marketers do this by making sure that all parts of the customer experience are faultless. ‘It’s not my department’ marketers on the other hand constantly have to come up with ways to retain customers that are disappointed by the service delivery.

A personal example

My dad recently decided to switch gyms. He even took the time to tell the Fitness First retention agent that called him the reasons why he was leaving.

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5 Marketing & Social Media Podcasts worth subscribing to right now

Podcasts are a great way to learn and keep your brain engaged when you’re doing something boring – exercising, housework, commuting, your day job (kidding!).

But your time doing any of these things is finite and there’s an awful lot out there to listen to. Here’s a rundown of the marketing podcasts I listen to regularly, the kind of content they cover, the average frequency and duration and why I like each of them.

Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel

Primarily covers social media/new media marketing, Mitch also writes for a couple of newspapers and is president of Twist Image, a marketing consultancy. Often alternates between a standard Six Pixels podcast and Media Hacks – though that may change, so subscribe to both, just in case. Read the rest of this entry »

Using sex to sell

I often come across advertising here in the Czech Republic that makes me think ‘wow, that’d cause a fuss in the UK/US/Middle East’.

This is one of those campaigns. It’s for a gym, advertising their ‘low prices from’. This one is ground-breaking only in that it’s the most striking of their poster campaigns so far. I’d just got back from a week in the UK and I saw the female version first and the mini culture shock of having been in the UK prompted me to think ‘um, that’s a little risqué’. Then I saw the male version and thought ‘ah well, at least they’re being even-handed’. Then I thought some more, decided it was a clever campaign (providing you see both, and on the basis of their space buy I imagine everyone will).

This provides a keen lesson in cultural differences when it comes to advertising creative. What’s perfectly acceptable in Prague will get people protesting against you in London. If you’re selling internationally, how do you handle local markets – leave it to your channel, or just play it as safe (bland?) as you can with your creative and hope you don’t trip over some other societal taboo?

Just who is the customer?

A couple of days before Mother’s Day here in the UK, I saw a TV commercial for 101 Housework Songs (UK)  - billed as The Perfect Gift for Mother’s Day.

Sure, if you want to get a smack upside the head!

When you’re marketing your products, who do you market to, the buyer or the intended end user?

Sure, this is an extreme example but this obvious marketing misstep made me think, do you start with the IT department or the accounts department if you’re selling payroll software? If you’re selling a mini-van to a 2 point 4 children family with a stay at home dad, whose needs are you addressing primarily if mom already has a roadster to drive to the office?

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Marketing (over) coffee

Here in Prague we’ve got 3 players in the ‘Starbucks style’ coffee shop market (and some pretty decent small ‘classic’ cafes, and a fair few ‘grand cafe’ type places too). Personally I’ll have a coffee anywhere that serves a decent cup, but some of the smaller places are losing out to the chains. It would be a shame to lose some of these places but inevitability is knocking at the door.

There are a number of reasons why Starbucks, Costa and Coffee Heaven are always busy and the independent are not.

Reason one: to-go

The big guys will all serve you coffee to go in a big takeaway cup. The smaller cafes don’t even have a serving size equivalent to the Venti or Massimo (extra large!). That just doesn’t fit with the image of a coffee to go that we see on TV – business person drinking from an oversized coffee cup like it’s a baby’s bottle.

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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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Successful Social Network Advertising – An Idea

So, according to Nielsen (pdf) the big problem with advertising on social media is:

“The current level of advertising activity on social networks isn’t consummate with the size–and highly engaged levels–of the audience.”

and

“standard ad models – such as contextual search and standard unit sizes – won’t cut it.”

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Marketing 1.0 still has a place

With all the buzz about social media, inbound marketing and associated fashionable terms, it is useful to remind ourselves that Marketing 1.0 still has a place. That cumbersome, promotion-heavy, old-school way of marketing your wares isn’t dead yet.

Perhaps it is best explained by the fact that ‘You are not your target’.

I’m reminded of this particularly by a company I have worked with for a few years. They sell compatible ink cartridges. Their site isn’t a virtual community, it doesn’t provide opportunities for customers to communicate with each other on forums, any testimonials on the site are vetted from submissions in emails. The site design is functional, their on-page adverts and the newspaper campaigns they’re often based on won’t be winning any advertising awards for style, yet they are massively effective.

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