Jim Morrison and the importance of relevance

20 September 2011 2 Comments

From my NETT blog:

What are the most important factors to consider when you’re communicating ideas to people? How do you get your message across successfully?

From my days as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines through to my current work presenting digital marketing messages or lecturing to students, a few common themes have emerged in terms of what works consistently.

Actually, I exaggerate – there is really just one fundamental rule in successful communication: make your concept relevant to your target audience.

This is expressed as a couple of acronyms:

• WIFFM – what’s in it for me?
• WSIC – why should I care?

If you can understand what matters to your audience and work out how to relate your message to their concerns, you’ll get your point across.

This principle isn’t limited to written, visual or verbal communication messages: it extends to the communication of ideas, and can include the dissemination of those ideas through a variety of media.

Take music, for example. My favourite band of all time is the Doors, led by the late great Jim Morrison. The Doors tapped into the Zeitgeist of the 1960s with music that protested against traditional mores.

Their sometimes dark messages about love, fitting in and pushing back against parental barriers struck a chord with young Baby Boomers who were just starting to flex their muscles and question the structures of the world that they were inheriting.

Read the full story

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Target those who need you most

28 July 2011 Leave a Comment

From my NETT blog:

Our politicians have shown they could learn a thing or two from small business when it comes to marketing their wares.

You can be the best at something, but if people don’t know about it, that fact won’t get you anywhere.

The federal election brought home for me the importance of positioning and promotion when you’re marketing your business. The shambolic campaign and aftermath showed that you can be running the only western economy to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis, which should be enough to get you elected a saint, but if you can’t sell your accomplishments – and you let your competitors dictate the agenda – you will be severely spanked.

Policy waffling, backstabbing and leaks didn’t help, but history tells us that Australians give a neophyte government a second chance, even if it’s made mistakes. For the government to have so many runs on the board, the election should have been a walkover. To my mind, Labor’s biggest problems were a lack of firm positioning and an inability to sell itself to its customer base – uh, I mean the electorate.

These principles also apply to running a small business. It’s not enough to be the best-in-class for service, delivery, reliability, range or innovation; if your customers and potential customers don’t know it, you won’t survive.

The first step in this process is positioning. You need to work out what you’re best at; what your salient attribute or point of difference is, and why it’s meaningful to your customers. It’s only worth focusing on a defining attribute if:

  • It’s important and valued by your target market;
  • It’s distinctive and can’t be easily copied;
  • It’s superior – you do a better job of it than your competition;
  • It’s communicable – you can make it obvious to consumers.

That last point leads into the importance of promotion.

You need to be able to use both modern and traditional communication tools to let your customer base know exactly what your points of difference are, and this starts with making it easy for your customers to find you on the internet.

Read the full article.

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The more things change…

14 January 2011 Leave a Comment

From my NETT blog:

When the iPad was released last year, there was a cacophony of ooohs and aaahs as geeks, early adopters and visionaries welcomed Apple’s shiny new thing. But if you listened carefully, you could also hear sighs and mumbles. That was from the people who were saying under their breath, “Oh s@!?# – another new technology to try and master – I give up!”

As a small business operator, it can be frustrating to try and stay on top of all of the technologies that may or may not be relevant to your business. It’s easy to question the justification for learning new things that may turn out to be a flash in the pan. Why get immersed in Facebook when it might turn out to be the next MySpace? So tablets are buzzing at the moment – didn’t the Palm Pilot have its day in the sun, to end up on a shelf gathering dust next to my Ipaq Pocket PC? Has Twitter peaked? Should I hitch my star to Foursquare, or Facebook Places – or neither? And I just signed up for a long contract with my iPhone 4 – don’t tell me that Android is the next big thing!

No one has a crystal ball that can tell you which technologies and platforms are going to be winners, or how things will evolve in the future.

Classic examples I use with my marketing students include the VHS vs. Beta wars of the 1980s, or the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD stoush this past decade. Many people – and retailers – who invested in Betamax players and tapes or HD-DVD collections were left with expensive but useless equipment when they lost the marketing battle with their technologically inferior rivals.

It’s an understandable human reaction to say “Enough!” and refuse to adopt a technology until they work out the bugs, or until the winning format becomes clear. When I was a kid, my older brother installed a state-of-the-art 8-track player in his first car. When that technology collapsed soon after, he was so annoyed that he refused to buy a cassette player in case that technology became superceded, too. It did eventually get replaced by CDs, but in the meantime he spent more than 10 years in the music wilderness.

Read the rest of the article

- Ray Welling

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Target those who need you most – NETT blog

17 November 2010 Leave a Comment

Our politicians have shown they could learn a thing or two from small business when it comes to marketing their wares.
You can be the best at something, but if people don’t know about it, that fact won’t get you anywhere.
The federal election brought home for me the importance of positioning and promotion when you’re marketing your business. The shambolic campaign and aftermath showed that you can be running the only western economy to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis, which should be enough to get you elected a saint, but if you can’t sell your accomplishments – and you let your competitors dictate the agenda – you will be severely spanked.

Policy waffling, backstabbing and leaks didn’t help, but history tells us that Australians give a neophyte government a second chance, even if it’s made mistakes. For the government to have so many runs on the board, the election should have been a walkover. To my mind, Labor’s biggest problems were a lack of firm positioning and an inability to sell itself to its customer base – uh, I mean the electorate.

These principles also apply to running a small business. It’s not enough to be the best-in-class for service, delivery, reliability, range or innovation; if your customers and potential customers don’t know it, you won’t survive.

The first step in this process is positioning. You need to work out what you’re best at; what your salient attribute or point of difference is, and why it’s meaningful to your customers. It’s only worth focusing on a defining attribute if:

Read the rest of Ray’s column here: http://nett.com.au/blogs/target-those-who-need-you-most/162.html

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Online technology and the 8th P of marketing

18 August 2010 Leave a Comment

(Excerpted from this month’s column in Nett magazine)

We all know that online technology has irrevocably changed the way we do business. It’s high time that it changed marketing theory, too.

If you’ve read up on marketing theory, you’ve no doubt heard of the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. They form the elements you need to consider when planning your marketing strategy, and were recently joined by three more Ps: people, process and physical evidence.

I’d argue that because of technology changes of the past 40 years, particularly the rise of online, an eighth P needs to be added: partnership.

The technology-fuelled exponential increase in information sharing has fundamentally changed the relationship between businesses and their customers. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, businesses have been firmly at the centre of the universe, with information from the business (advertising, product information, product development, etc.) travelling in one direction to customers, with little or no information travelling back.

But the net changed all that. Businesses are no longer at the centre of the universe; the customer is now firmly at the centre, with the power to choose from a huge number of businesses and information sources. This has been described as a Copernican shift, because in business terms it’s as radical as the shift in thinking from believing the Earth was at the centre of the universe to the realisation that it was just another planet revolving around a huge and powerful sun.

There has also been a shift from one-way communication flow (business to customer) to two-way flow. Customers can and do tell you what they think of you, your products and your customer service.
As a businessperson, the simplest way to understand this new situation is that it’s not about you, it’s about them. The master-servant style of relationship doesn’t work any more.

Read the rest of the column here: http://nett.com.au/blogs/online-tech-and-the-8th-p-of-marketing/152.html

Ray Welling

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We are all publishers

6 January 2009 1 Comment

From the Zazoo blog:

In the digital age, if you’re a marketer you’re also a publisher. Rebecca Lieb has written a great piece in ClickZ which was republished the other day, and is well worth a read.

She argues that “Marketers have been creating content in all sorts of media in all kinds of channels since the beginning. But now that virtually every brand, manufacturer, service, and product you can think of is online (and likely runs its own Web site), content has blown wide open. Almost anyone involved in any type of online business can no longer hope to survive without a solid content strategy.”

In the 21st century equivalent of custom publishing, big brands such as Budweiser in the US even have their own online TV channel. Lieb writes: “Think of it as the online equivalent of a Disney or Warner Bros. theme park. You know the rides and merchandise are selling you something, but few people care about the church-and-state divide on branded territory.

“….Strong, well thought-out and executed content strategies create rewards for marketers. They go viral. They attract community. They can blow out SEO (search engine optimisation) to epic proportions. Rather than a company’s Web page showing up in organic results, content can generate page after page of relevant results.”

She concludes: “As an editor/marketer hybrid, I may have some bias here, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of a marketing problem that couldn’t be tackled head-on with a solid content strategy.”

Couldn’t agree more.

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Pharma marketing in the toilet?

24 December 2008 Leave a Comment

Pharma Marketing reports:

“Whenever I hear or read about pharmaceutical executives bragging about their product “pipelines” to Wall Street investors I think of the Alaska oil pipeline – a huge and imposing structure, carefully engineered to bring me a product I need and desire.

“I don’t think about bathroom drain pipes discharging waste that I want to get rid of. But that’s apparently how the editors of Pharmaceutical Executive Magazine see drug pipelines if the cover image of the latest, December 2008, issue is any guide.

“PE has chosen to represent a drug pipeline by the type of PVC drain pipes commonly seen under our bathroom sinks, complete with the U-shaped “sludge” trap and all.

“PE shows money flowing into its “pipeline” at one end and pills coming out the other.

“But we all know that with bathroom drains, it’s always garbage in, garbage out!

“Is there some kind of subliminal message that PE is sending here? ‘Money down the drain’ comes to mind!”

Filed under Advertising, Business/corporate, Healthcare, Media/journalism, Pharmaceuticals Tagged with , ,

Will digital escape the crisis?

8 October 2008 1 Comment

A study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in the US by marketing and direct services firm Epsilon shows that while traditional marketing and advertising spend is down, partly due to the current economic crisis, digital marketing spend is still strongly on the increase this year.

The results, based on a survey of 175 CMOs, indicated that more than 60% of companies are increasing their spend on digital marketing and advertising this year, while nearly 60% are reducing their overall spend on marketing and advertising.

Other interesting results include:

  • Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
  • Blogs were the second most popular emerging channel: 35% of marketing executives want to pursue blogs and 19% already use blogs
  • Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned Podcasting as an area of interest: 31% are interested in adding Podcasting to their marketing mix and 18% already have.
  • Mobile devices also elicited interest: 29% are interested in Mobile Devices (Phones/PDAs) and 22% have added them to their marketing mix.

One thing to note is that the survey was conducted in August, before the US$700 billion Wall Street bailout and all the attendant stock market fall-out occurred. It will be interesting to see what the results would be if the survey was conducted this month.

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Stop – marketing crossing

25 August 2008 Leave a Comment

 A little off topic, but so funny I had to put this up here. Thanks to Peter Shankman at helpareporter.com, who brought this to my attention.

http://view.break.com/542649 – Watch more free videos

Filed under Business/corporate, e-marketing Tagged with ,

Web 1.0 still rules

28 May 2008 Leave a Comment

With all the development of flashy new technologies to connect and do business over the past five years, the most popular online tool is – wait for it – email. eMarketer reports that a survey conducted last month for email management company Habeas revealed that 75% of adult email users said they used it every day. Nearly 70% prefer email for communicating with businesses, and the same amount said they expected to still prefer email five years from now.

OK, OK, so this report was commissioned by a company that has a vested interest in email marketing. But common sense still dictates that something as simple and effective as email is going to continue to have a crucial role in online communication, especially since the alternatives are getting increasingly sophisticated and complicated. While a few specialised people will live on the bleeding edge and undertake the work required to stay that way, many people will just go for the simple option.

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