marketing

Complex interdependencies

Probability is a much healthier conversation than if I was to speak about risk, as the word risk conjures up a negative picture. The first rule of mathematics and statistics is that if there is anything unrepresentative about your sample set, you’ve got to compensate for it. And with marketing we tend to look at what happened last year rather than what’s going to happen next year, or in 5 years’ time. What we deal with as marketers is the future, and the future is to some degree unknowable. In fact, the only thing you can say with any certainty is the future is going to be very different from the past.

 

The speed at which change occurs varies, in some cases last year will be very similar to this year and in other times you may for example have a pandemic or a global inflation crisis, which means the future is unrecognisably different. The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. In other words, the butterfly effect rests on the notion that the world is deeply interconnected, such that one small occurrence can influence a much larger complex system.

Just another day

Marketing isn’t advertising or hype, it’s not shortcutting, it’s not selfish, it’s not pushing people to do things they don’t want to do! I define marketing as work that matters for people who care. It’s the work of making things better, doing things that you are proud of. I think marketing isn't about selling products; it's about solving problems and creating value for your customers.

·  Do not brag about how busy you are, instead let your work speak for itself.
·  Do not brag about how much you know, instead teach others.
·  Do not brag about who you know, instead connect like-minded people.
·  Do not brag about the past, instead celebrate the present.

Old fashioned and still relevant

I’m in London for the festive season and was thinking how much difference it would make if these three words - “Word of mouth” - were in most 2023 marketing plans. Word of mouth is the process of telling people you know about a particular product or service, usually because you think it is good and want to encourage them to try it. Word of mouth is the oldest form of marketing, and I think you will materially increase your revenue by incorporating these words into your marketing strategy.

““The best form of intelligence is not artificial” ”
— Burrellism

Can you answer these three basic marketing questions?
1.      Who are you talking to?
2.      What do you do that no competitors can?
3.      Why should we believe you?
Send me your answers via e-mail and win a one hour consultation with me.

Black Friday

Yesterday was Black Friday and it showed that retail stores are no longer just distribution points for products. Bricks and mortar spaces are powerful acquisition points for customers, and I think physical shops are the most powerful way to draw customers into the brands eco-system. Once acquired, shoppers can cross any number of channels elegantly woven with branded technology. Physical stores will a become media channel and media will become the store. I think the future will be where brands drive people towards media and stores will no longer be the end of the marketing funnels; they will be the beginning.

The generation effect

George Lois (RIP) was an advertising legend and he created one of my favourite adverts of all time and a masterpiece in strategic communication. The generation effect is a phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read. In 1985, Lois positioned the then unknown designer, Tommy Hilfiger on the map when he created a billboard with missing letters and placed it in Times Square. The billboard made Hilfiger a household name by placing his name in the same bracket as established greats like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis.

Think about that

The majority of customers visit your website or your brick-and-mortar location only one time. All the marketing efforts and money that is spent on driving traffic to your business results in most customers only giving you one shot. And it can cost 5 times more to attract a new customer, than it does to retain an existing one. According to Bain & Company’s research, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. With these statistics in mind, it makes sense to focus efforts and funds to nurture your existing customers who are spending their money on your goods or services time and time again. This is not to say that you shouldn’t market to new consumers, which is a must, of course. But these statistics should be taken into consideration when budgeting how much you spend on acquiring new customers versus taking care of your existing customer base.

Sounds obvious

I think clarity comes from engagement not thought, as we learn best by action not through theory. I have observed many great marketeers throughout my career and the advise would give to anyone aspiring a career in marketing would be to study consumer psychology and focus on the following:

• Cognitive biases
• Objections
• Struggles
• Emotions
• Behavior
• Triggers
• Beliefs
• Desires

Fighting for attention

Digital marketing is an excellent way to reach a large audience. Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves endorsements and product placement. An influencer is someone who has a large following on social media and can influence what people buy or where they go. When a brand partners with an influencer, they usually receive payment, free products, or services from the brand in return for posting favourably about their experiences. Linking up with influencers that align with your brand is a relatively simple way of boosting your social media marketing strategy. And this is a wonderful way to gain exposure on platforms you may not have a huge following on.

Marketing 101

Marketing campaigns are sets of strategic activities that promote a business’s goal or objective. A marketing campaign could be used to promote a product, a service, or the brand as a whole. To achieve the most effective results, campaigns are carefully planned and the activities are varied. And I think marketing campaigns are most effective when they are the offspring of a corporate purpose rather than originating from one. Remember when you take responsibility for your beliefs and judgments this will give you the power to change them.
Now ask yourself the following questions:

1.          Why your company?
2.          Why your product (or service)?
3.          Why should they choose you?

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation”
— Arthur Ashe

Stating the obvious

I think that marketing and innovation are basically the same thing. This was confirmed after attending “The Great Wine Experience” opening event in Copenhagen, where jazz music, photography (The Uplift Sessions) and delicious wines were in focus. There are hundreds of wine bars in this city, so in reality there are only two ways where you can add value in the marketplace:
a)    You can either find out what people want and work out a clever way to make it, or
b)    You can work out what you can make and then find a clever way to make people want it.
The money you make is the same regardless of which option you choose, therefore, it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel and spend thousands of kroner on creating a new concept. Another way is to take an existing concept and this case a wine shop, and then presenting, pricing, positioning and framing it in a completely different way. Natalie and Wilfred have done a wonderful job, and this is just the beginning.

Being aware and open to change

Your brain tells you that you are safe with people who look, think and act similar, this is one of our many and various unconscious biases. These learned stereotypes are very powerful as they are so deeply ingrained into our persona, for example, the biases we all hold around race, religion, gender, power, and privilege structures. Playing on our unconscious biases and fears is the bread and butter of both political and marketing campaigns. In order to ‘judge’ without undue fear, you need to look at your own biases and the fears that sit under them. I think we can overcome our unconscious biases by becoming aware and being open to change.

“Life is too short to worry about stupid things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing and do not let people bring you down. Study, think, create and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.”
— Professor Richard Feynman

Yesterday morning, I asked a woman if she needed help in carrying her pram (a four-wheeled baby carriage) down the stairs – I have to admit that I would not have asked a man if he were in the same position. I know that my actions were not a problem, they were courteous and friendly but underneath I may have unexamined bias about the difference in roles and capabilities of men and women. Contact me via e-mail and let me know how you deal with your implicit biases.

We can do it better

I do not define marketing as hype, advertising, promotion, scamming with selfish, narcissistic short-term thinking. Marketing is telling true stories that spread stories that change people’s opinion or their actions. One key element is that there is a community of people that care about what you are doing and want to go where you are going. Essentially every successful community that I can think of needs people from a diverse background, experience, and a point of view. I think that if the people in your community are moving in the same direction, then everything is going to be alright.

 

Luck is all about the amount of work, preparation, and time you put into your craft. As a marketing professional, the more we can connect those people and amplify them, the more likely it will be that our marketing will succeed. When we are willing to take responsibility for the work we are doing, then we are bringing something to the world. If you do it better, it will work better…
Contact me via e-mail for marketing workshops.

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What do you know about your buyers?

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Psychometrics is a scientific discipline concerned with the construction of assessment tools. Being able to identify the psychometrics of B2B buyers - for example, their needs, challenges, and motivations - will help you effectively tailor marketing messages and sales strategy for what your buyers are looking for, and ultimately winning them over in the sales process. Creating buyer personas gives you an inside look into your target audience’s buying decision process, and what they hope to achieve. This will save time and overhead by allowing you to create the most efficient and concentrated marketing strategy based on your most profitable targets and how they act and behave. Contact me via e-mail for sales and marketing workshops.

Making change with marketing

The sole purpose of marketing is to make a change is a big statement. Marketing is the generous act of leading people to get them to make things better. Marketing is also when we want things to be different, for example, what we do when we want to change culture and behaviour. I think marketing is the work of telling a story that’s true to someone specific to help them see the world differently and take a different action. And in my opinion, this is a fact because if change doesn’t happen then there is no marketing.

“Our job as marketers is not to do what we did yesterday, just faster and cheaper. Our job is to figure out how to change the people in the market who want to be changed.”
— Seth Godin

To begin the marketing journey, we have to be specific and ask ourselves two questions:
1)    Who is it for? For example, target audience, and
2)    What changes are we seeking to make? For example, how would they like to receive this content?

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Avoiding the commodity trap

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What is the Commodity Trap?
When customers perceive your product or service as being identical regardless of the source, in other words, a commodity; the only differentiating factor then becomes price. Therefore, a commodity trap is a situation where products and services have slipped into purely price-based competition. And this is a bad thing because it means customers will go for the cheapest option, and this will force brands to compete on price.

 

Contact me via e-mail for a segmentation review of your marketing or branding strategy, and stop your customers asking the following questions when they see your product offering:
-       What is it?
-       How does it work?
-       How is it different?
-       And how much does it cost?

The diffusion of innovations

The diffusion of innovations is a theory that describes the pattern and speed at which new ideas, practices, or products spread through a population. The American communication theorist and sociologist, Everett Rogers’ in his book, “Diffusion of Innovations” introduced the term, early adapter. The main players in the theory are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards and the book was first published in 1962.

That's the reality

“Heuristics” are the mental shortcuts human beings take when processing information and making decisions. Marketing teams are fully aware of how to use heuristics to simplify complex and difficult questions as they are fast and accurate ways to understand and influence behaviours.

Brands use the anchoring and adjustment heuristic to strategically set a product's price point. For example, an electronic retailer in Denmark lists a television at a higher price than its fair value, and the potential buyer will use that price as an indicator that they have received a bargain when purchasing the TV at the “sale” price.

Three wise men

I think there are certain people who are meant to serve and others that are not and it is your job to work as hard as possible to find people who you are meant to serve. And I believe you will find them when you show up fully self-expressed. Most marketing books are tactical, so they focus on quick solution, for example, just do this or do that. This is OK if you are looking for a quick fix, but this does not teach you how to build trust and credibility, or how to price your products or how to have simple sales conversations which is required if you are doing pay per click advertising.

We can be heroes

How can you make the customer the hero of the story?

The short answer is through customer experience, sales, and brand loyalty initiatives. Many organisations position their marketing around benefits and features of their products and services. The customer is the hero, not the brand and I think the focus should always be on the strategic outcomes that the customer needs. In other words, shift the focus from ‘us marketing’ to ‘customer marketing’. We all have the need for someone to show us the way and consumers don’t always buy the best products and services; they usually buy the ones they can understand the fastest. What the customer has to sense is that we have stepped into their story and we care about their pain.

It’s a symptom not a tactic

Many years ago, I heard Seth Godin say, “You should always start with the minimum viable audience, and the minimum viable audience (MVA) is the smallest group of people who we can imagine serving. Once the MVA have been identified, then we can be specific and if we can be specific, we will create something worthwhile and when we create something worthwhile, it’s easy to sell because it’s worthwhile.”

 

Social media isn’t the way you become popular, it’s after you are doing something important that people talk about you on social media. I’m a big fan of “word of mouth marketing”, I know it’s old school, but nothing beats the process of actively influencing and encouraging organic word of mouth discussion about a brand, organisation, or event. So, I think that if we can change the lives of 50 people then they will tell their friends and family. Imagine being a specific, unique entity that connects with people at a really deep level, just start by being really special and then the word will spread, and you will add more people.