Everything you know about Marketing is wrong

14 05 2009

What is ‘Marketing’?

My (non-marketing) friends define marketing as such;

“People who use ads and other promotional tools to make a product or service profitable”.

My high school textbook defined it as:

The management of the 4Ps in such a way that it creates value for the customer and helps achieve organisational goals.

Kotler defined it as:

“A social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others”

They’re wrong. Everything you know about marketing is wrong. At its fundamentals what makes promotional tools work? The ability of it to the spread the idea of your product. What are the 4Ps but just another way to frame your idea to your market? What do people want? What is the exchange of products and value? Ideas. Ideas and stories that the idea tells.

So what is marketing?

This is Seth Godin’s take on it:

“Marketing is about the spreading of ideas”.


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R.I.P. Internet Advertising

13 05 2009

Eric Clemons wrote a clinical piece about inevitable the death of internet advertising. Seth Godin foresaw it ten years ago with his book Permission Marketing, and the rest of the marketing world are slowly catching up, albeit with a lot of kicking, screaming, kicking and screaming.

You can no longer interrupt people with unwanted ads. That’s the path to failure. Permission Marketing, the delivery of ‘personal, revelant and anticipated’ messages to the people who want them, is the winning strategy. Are you willing to drop your inertia?


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Pirating should be rewarded

8 05 2009

Let’s admit it: pirating of movies, music, comedies, whatever, can’t be stopped. You can send all the cease and desist letters you like, sue as many people as possible, pay programmers to install the most sophisticated security available… but the public will find a way. Rather quickly, in fact. Piracy is here to stay and there is nothing you can do about it.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Piracy can only help.

Consider these situations:

1. Jane pirates because she can’t afford to buy the product.
2. The product is not released/distributed any where within a reasonable distance to John, therefore he has to reporting to pirating.
3. Jill isn’t sure whether the product is worth spending money on but she still wants it, so she pirates it to test it out.
4. Jack is just cheap.

In all of those above scenarios, your customer gets to try out the product at no risk to them. Better yet, because it’s free a lot of them will give your movie or song the chance that they otherwise wouldn’t have if they had to pay for it. Then, if your art is remarkable, they might end up buying the album or the DVD when it becomes available to them. Even if your customer is like Jack, he’ll tell many of his friends if he likes it enough, and they might buy it. Or perhaps a person finds a song on his friend’s iPod, loves it, then goes out and buys a copy? Word of mouth.

Sure, there are some people who will download your product, never buy it, never tell anyone, or not like it, and hence add no value to the process. If they don’t like it, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t be all things to all people. But a few of the people who like the product but not make you any money in the short term may end up being a long term asset. Maybe she’ll buy your next release and the one after. Even if he or she never buys it, you’re still getting something extremely valuable: their attention.

Embrace piracy. Turn it into a benefit for you. Monty Python did, and they’re enjoying a 23000% sales increase for their DVDs. Even if you don’t like your art being pirated it’s not like you can stop it. You might as well take advantage of it.

EDIT: Charlie Hoehn had this to add in the comments:

“I agree that piracy has tons of benefits from an economic standpoint, but it’s a big problem when you condition people to expect free, 100% of the time. Your customers will not convert to paid customers easily when you say, “I know I’ve been giving this stuff away forever, but this time it will cost.” As with every relationship, it’s extremely important to manage expectations.

There’s something to be said for online businesses that skirt the freemium model and charge a high price for all of their services.”

He’s right of course. Free is remarkable. But like all things remarkable; too much of it renders it boring and bloats your customers expectations. Thank you, Charlie, for your ideas on the matter.

On that note, if anyone else has anything to add – ideas, questions, counter-arguments or questions – feel free to post in the comments or just email me instead.

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You don’t exist.

7 05 2009

163827__fightclub_l

Question: What does Martin Luther King, Fight Club and Nintendo have in common?

Answer: Challenge conventional wisdom.

The only thing any of them have in common is that they have nothing in common with the widely accepted norms at the time. Martin Luther King stood out for challenging the state of black civil rights, Fight Club rallied against being what society wants you to be, and Nintendo succeeded for reimagining how videogames are experienced.

In today’s hyper-cluttered world, people do not have the time to pay attention to every average joe, product, venture, company or idea. There are variations stacked on alternatives built by slight differences. Go to your local supermarket and you’ll find a hundred different soft drinks. Your nearest book store has dozens and dozens of cookbooks in stock (and hundreds more available for order). More and more products are being pumped out every day but the amount of time we have remains constant. So obviously if your offering is relatively standard with minor modifications it won’t stand out, right? Right. If it doesn’t stand out it’ll be ignored since we don’t have enough time, correct? Correct.

In that case I have another question for you:

Why do you think adding your product to the endless clutter of monotonous offerings will work?!

It seems so obvious that it won’t work yet everyday we see people putting their clutter out on top of existing clutter creating even more clutter. ‘What’s the solution then?’ I hear you ask. Here it is:

Avoid the crowds altogether.

Make a list of everything in your industry that is the norm. Something that is always done. The Standard. If you make your product following these benchmarks your product will join the crowd. That’s bad. Here’s something to think about: Take the list that you’ve made, study every point, and for your own company… do the complete opposite! Do what’s never done in your industry. To stand out from the crowd you have you avoid the crowd altogether. Create your own category.

If you don’t and you do what everyone else does, you’re invisible because you don’t stand out.

You don’t exist.

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How to market a private guitar teaching business

19 04 2009

Last week I started taking guitar lessons at Harry’s Guitar Studio and it got me thinking: how would I market a private guitar teaching business? First and foremost, I’ll actually have be to a fantastic teacher and player. Marketing always comes after quality. What then? Easy – online marketing. Online marketing is (mostly) free and supremely effective and it can only help spread the word of how remarkable a teacher I am. What would I do?

Write a blog.

I’ll post about my teaching method, thought processes, stories of the students successes (and failures), what it’s like to be in a touring band on the road, experiences of being a musician, videos of my latest gigs, and anything that else that is interesting. Then, I will reply to comments (only if it adds value to the topic) and email personally. Again, I’ll avoid constantly trying to sell my products and services. The point is to earn an audience.

What else?

Offer free online lessons, and plenty of them. Post them on Youtube with a link to my main site. I’ll make lessons aimed for all skill levels I teach. Encourage my viewers to show the videos to their friends. But I’ll resist the temptation to incessantly sell my services.

What I want is to offer tremendous value to everyone regardless of whether or not they want to take lessons with me, and do it all for free. I mean, how much does it cost me to record a video of myself then posting it on Youtube? Nothing. In return for my time,  I will have proven my expertise to my audience without them having to risk paying for a class.  Then they’ll start relying on me.

Free lessons aren’t the only way either.  A free weekly email newsletter offering tips could work. Actually,  better yet – hold an free interactive online lesson through Ustream. Or maybe even a live concert through it instead, students love to see their teachers performing. However, offer it exclusively to a limited number of your most loyal online followers and to your existing students as well. Let them interact with each other live through an online chat room, this one for example. Ask them bring a couple of their own friends. Word of mouth.

Why do all this work for free? Because free ideas spread quicker than priced ideas. The point is not to make a marketing pitch; it is to spread ideas. To get people talking. But the pleasant side effect is that some of the people who notice me will sign up for my private lessons. There will be those who just visit my site for just the free stuff. That’s fine. It’s my pleasure. They may even tell their friends about the great value I provide, and some their friends will sign up for my lessons and tell their friends who will tell their friends and so on. That leads us to another idea:

I’ll talk to my audience often – paid students or otherwise – using a forum, IM or even set up a chat room on my site. I’m tired of teachers and the like being so inaccessible so I wouldn’t do that to the people who learn from me and respect my opinions. I want to develop a connection with them. Why wouldn’t I talk to the people who support me?

Those are just some basic but effective ideas you could use to not only make your business better, but to make your products more remarkable to your customers. You’re offering incredible value for free and it costs you nothing.

What are you waiting for?

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Boring presentations; the world says no.

14 04 2009

Okay, lecturers and presenters of the world, pay attention.

boring-powerpoint-slide

No more of these sleep-inducing and text-filled bores.

1. We don’t like your dull PowerPoints

2. We don’t like the text-dumps on said PowerPoints

3. In fact, we don’t even read your text-dump slides, you’re just wasting your time. Instead, apply the Seth Godin Law: no more than 6 words on a slide. Ever.

4. Pictures are awesome on PowerPoints. Use them a lot.

5. It takes 1.5 seconds to disengage yourself from the lecturer/presenter and take notes, and another 1.5 seconds to get back on track with the talk. That’s a 3 second round trip. Just think about how many times a listener does this…

6. Which leads us to this: stop asking us to take notes. Instead, do the presentation without requesting note-taking and then give us a detailed info sheet afterwards

7. Yes, we know you’re tired, it’s your 47th presentation of the day. Guess what? We don’t care.

8. Be passionate when presentating. If you’re not energetic about your material, then why should we? For lecturers: you’re directly influencing the lives of thousands of students. Sound alive, please.

9. Be brief. Humans have short attention spans so get your point across quickly. It makes it easier for the audience to follow and helps you identify the most important points of your presentation.

10. Leave plenty of time for Q&A. For the lecturers: you should know that discussion about the material is one of the best ways to learn, so make that a priority during you lectures. For presenters: whether you’re selling an idea or a product, people often don’t buy it just by logic. We don’t decide to go on holidays because it makes logical sense, but because our emotions tell us we want one. But if we later need a reason, our emotions are it. Q&A will contribute to making an emotional connection with your audience.

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Welcome, New Marketing

12 04 2009
Just as aluminium tennis racquets replaced wooden racquets, and modern physics took over from classical physics, New Marketing is here to give our outdated marketing practices the almighty boot.

Old marketing doesn’t work as well any more. Our market is over-cluttered with too many solutions for problems that we’ve already solved. We’ve got more and more products, but less and less time to go through them. Now that our economy is in a downturn we have less money to throw around as well. The old system of the TV-industrial complex (see Purple Cow by Seth Godin) is no longer effective. Interruption media is no longer effective. We’ve gotten too damn good at ignoring every ad that comes our way.

Our modern interruption marketing is dead. New Marketing is the baby we need to nurture.

Seth Godin calls it being remarkable. Hugh MacLeod calls it the Social Object. But it’s just two ways of describing the same thing: the new currency for marketers is what we’ve always wanted – ‘that little somethin’ special’. That little somethin’ that gets people talking, that something’ interesting, new, different, special etc. That little somethin’ built into your product, rather than creating the common stock pig good. It’s the ‘remarkability’ of the product. It’s the ability of the product itself to get people ’socialising’ about it. New Marketing is a shampoo whose bottle’s texture feels like smooth hair (or maybe that’s just tacky).

New Marketing is the future and I’m solidly in. How about you?

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Mass de-personalisation marketing

12 04 2009

For whatever reason, companies like to de-personalise communication with their customers. From the robotic voice recording in over-the-phone customer service to marketing messages (or otherwise) meant for the masses. Everything is depersonalised.

But what if it wasn’t this way? What if all your phone calls to companies was answered diligently by other people? What if all messages was written just for you? What if instead of signing “From the Customer Service Team” in emails, the CEO or managers themselves personally sign it? What if one company treated each person as an individual and not just one of the crowd?

Well, for one, at least for me, it makes me feel treasured and respected and I would be more loyal to the company. I would be more emotionally invested in the company, then tell 10 other people about your company’s remarkable treatment of customers. Instead of sending feedback emails and essentially getting told that they’ll politely ignore me, my comments get sent directly to people in the company who makes the decisions. Again, I’ll feel like my opinions matter. From the internal workings of the business, being more connected to your customers also means you’ll get hints as to what products and services to produce for them.

And all this boils down to at its fundamentals, is treating your customers like they’re people. It’s not just a marketing and business implication. Since when has respecting your fellow human being fallen out of fashion?

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Delicious Word of Mouth

12 04 2009

I decided to do a quick search online, looking for actual cases of great word-of-mouth rather than just reading about it in the textbook and two specific instances caught my eye:

1. KFC fixes potholes

For the lazy, the article basically tells of KFC’s PR stunt to repair many of the “350 million potlholes” on US roads in 4 US cities and stamping on top of the job with a highly visible KFC logo. Just from that short explanation, the ingenuity of this idea is clear. The press for such a stunt would be off the hook, and if people somehow miss all the media about it they’ll hear about it from people they know, or they’ll see the KFC stamps on the roads themselves. I don’t know how long they’ll keep the logos on the road, but you can imagine it’ll be for a while. One expensive PR exercise in exchange for years of future word of mouth potential. Not only are they fixing a dire US national safety issue, they are doing it during the worst financial crisis since the depression. It’ll cost KFC several small fortunes to pull off, but damn me, they’ll see the return on the back end in a big way.

2. Mighty Fine (this one is about a month and a half old)

This one is pretty in-depth so I don’t need to elaborate on it, but do read it. It’s just add emphasis to your understanding (as it did to my own).

The point is that whether you spend millions on a marketing ploy or not, your company needs to do something special. They need to do something that takes the ordinary – the little aspects of our day-to-day lives we take for the status quo – and make it extraordinary. The idea doesn’t have to be big, it just has to different enough to create buzz, enough to earn the opinion of people who come across it. It just has to be different enough to make it worth talking about.

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His name is Tucker Max, and he’s a marketing genius

11 04 2009

The world knows Tucker Max as the premier irrespressible but ultimately lovable asshole. His NY Times Bestselling book I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is being adapted into a major motion picture. But what the world doesn’t know about him is that he is a remarkable internet marketer. So far, in my opinion, his marketing strategy it revolves around his production blog. I may have very little marketing experience but I see it as absolute genius. Blogs are cheap (often free), easy to run, and it generates priceless advantages. I’ll post my more in-depth thoughts later, but in general here are what simple online marketing such as blogging can do for you:

  • Build awareness. Tucker started his movie blog about 1 year prior to the estimated release date. His audience would’ve started out small, but the word would gradually spread. Get people talking about your project.
  • Build credibility. Allow for a comment section. Tucker has an extensive forum dedicated for fans to ask questions where he himself and his team vigilantly answer them. Let your audience talk to each other and to the production team. It helps create interactivity and credibility.
  • Application of permission marketing. Don’t spam everyone; it’s annoying. Let the people who want the info have it, then give them more. The blog has an RSS Feed. He talks about the movie on his Twitter. You could sign up for his mailing list. In return for them signing up for such tools, they give you permission to market to them. You do tha. Give them exclusive bonuses. Make your audience feel appreciated and treasured.
  • Online word-of-mouth. The buzz generated by the blog by itself and Tucker’s interesting post about the movie business, making of the movie, informal entertaining and personal posts give everybody plenty to talk about. Slowly, the word will spread. You may not trust Tucker’s obviously biased opinions, but if everyone else is talking about it…
    Let’s just say that online word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing in existence.

All of this from a blog. Hollywood head honchos spend millions of dollars on advertising for their movies and rarely do they manage to cultivate all of that stuff. Why is Tucker the only one who’s doing it?

Oh, right; he’s a damn good marketer.

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