Quiet for the counting in... and then... !!

Social media - Friend or Foe?

Steven Fry - King Tweet


I have recently been embroiled in several forums discussing the business use of 'Social Media'. These seem to be the new 'known unkown' of B2B and B2C copmanies marketing departments.

Opinions seems to be split 3-ways:

1) Waste of time - will dilute the core brand. One correspondent even went so far as to claim it would 'destroy' brand equity. Twitter gets the harshest criticim.... 140 characters... what's the point?... ok for riots and revolutions... no use in real business situations.

2) Wait and see.... or... don't know... or... it will be the next big thing... tomorrow.

3) Absolutely essential as part of the market research proposition... where real customers can have their say. (They're saying it anyway so why not actively engage?) Can also be used as a marketing comms channel. Great for viral campaigns.

I am firmly of the 3rd opinion. Wheren esle can you get real time feedback, communicate with whole segments of younger, web savvy, mobile consumers and customers? For free!

Companies that don't get it are missing out!

Marketing the Substance - not the Spin

Excellent article by my friend Richard Groom of the Peterborough Copywriting Bureau.

Contact details below and link to his excellent company the right... thanks Richard

Finding the substance

A year ago in the Chartered Institute of Marketing's 'Marketer'magazine, David Taylor wrote an excellent article about the needfor telling 'compelling brand stories based on substance'.

He was especially referring to the need for marketers to stay onthe right side of the 'Consumer protection from unfair tradingregulations 2007', which came into force in May 2008 andspecifically prohibit misleading consumers.

David cited some examples of brands that have relied on spin oversubstance and others have come to light since then. In April forexample, a campaign by Australian parents targeted 'CerealOffenders': producers of children's breakfast cereals usingmarketing spin that allegedly conflicted with nutritional facts.

(Kellogg's Nutri-Grain cereal was top of the list, with its claimto 'help fuel growing boys' said to be at odds with its 'lowfibre content and high levels of sugar and sodium'.)

Closer to home, earlier this month EDF Energy faced a backlashfrom consumers and competitors when it ran its 'Green Britain Day': the company was accused of spinning its green credentials.
So how can you avoiding relying on spin - or just falling back on the same old tired claims about your product's benefits - whencreating your marketing materials?

The answer is surely to reallyunderstand the product, and to do that you have to find the rightpeople.
I like meeting marketing people in my clients' companies but Ioften find that they are focused on the 'promotion' bit of themarketing mix. Even though they usually have a good understandingof the product, there are sometimes others who know more.

So I want to talk to the people who designed the product, thepeople who made it, the people who sell it and, ideally, thepeople who use it. When I do, I almost always uncover somegenuinely positive information about what the product does andhow well it does it.
If you can get a detailed understanding of the product there'susually no need to bamboozle customers with spin or flowerymarketing-speak.

Sure, well-crafted words are important. But it's the meat thatmatters, and although getting to the meat requires effort andpassion about what you are doing, it is always the bestfoundation for writing compelling marketing messages.

So who are the product experts in your organisation? Buildingrelationships with them is essential for anyone who wants tobecome an effective marketer or copywriter.

Until next time . . .
**************************************************
Peterborough Copywriting Bureau16 Mansfield Court, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 4NE,England

Video I composed and produced about PRSM

If you are interested in having a video to promote

YOUR company then just email me at:

peter.rees@gmail.com

Come to the Edge

‘Come to the edge.’
‘We might fall.’
‘Come to the edge.’
‘It’s too high!’
‘COME TO THE EDGE!’
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.

Christopher Logue (1926 - )
British Poet

Charity Project Planning Day

Very excited today as I'm off with some colleagues from my Livery Company to work with a charity to develop their marketing plan.

Lots of interesting options... watch this space for more details!!

Expert Corner - Article from author Jeff Jarvis

I am delighted to post this article kindly provided to me by award winning journalist, blogger and author - Jeff Jarvis.

If you haven't yet read his book 'What Would Google Do?' then head over to Amazon and order a copy.

Thanks Jeff!

The speech the NAA should hear

Reposted from Buzzmachine.com with the kind permission of the author

Jeff Jarvis - April 7th, 2009

The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and they’re preaching up at their own choir loft with angry, self-righteous fire and brimstone about their plight. Today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt will address them, but he’ll be polite because that’s the way he is and because there’ll be a few hundred aging but armed publishers with blunderbusses aimed at his heart. They need to hear a new message, a blunt message from the outside. Here’s the speech I think they should hear:

You blew it.

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviours of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

And now you’re angry. Well, gentlemen - and that’s pretty much all I see before me: angry, old, white men - you have no right to anger. Instead, you are the proper objects of anger. The public should be angry with you for the poor stewardship you have exercised over the press and its service to society. Your journalists are angry at you for losing their jobs. Your pressmen and drivers and classified-ad takers are angry at you for the same reason (and at the journalists for paying attention only to their own plight). Your advertisers were angry at you for using your monopolistic power to overcharge them and for providing inefficient platforms and bad service for so long. But they’re not angry anymore because they left you for better advertising vehicles and better prices in a competitive marketplace.

But you’re the ones who are acting angry.

Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? Oh, I so want Eric Schmidt to tell you today that you’re getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you’d lose half your traffic. On most of your sites, only 20 percent of the audience in a day ever sees your homepage and its careful packaging; 4 of 5 readers instead come in through search and links. In the link economy - instead of the outmoded content economy in which you operate - Google and aggregators and bloggers are bringing value to you; they should be charging you for the value they bring. You should rise up today and give Mr. Schmidt a big thank you for not charging you. But you won’t, because you’ve refused to understand this new business reality.

You blew it.

Your Google snits don’t even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers. You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Let’s say it together: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.

You blew it.

You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little. I by all means include myself in that indictment because I spent my career in our industry: Guilty. I didn’t raise loud enough alarms (it felt as if they were too loud already) or accomplish enough change (not nearly enough). I blew it, too. But no last-minute hail-Mary passes will make up for our failings. Having not taken advantage of the last two decades to reinvent the news business, you’re not going to manage a rescue in two months, before the creditors come calling. That was your worst hail Mary: stoking up on debt and hoping to milk these cows for years to come. Mad cash-cow disease, that’s what too many of you had. Your other desperate moves: suddenly fantasizing that you can fix everything by going behind a wall (to tell with Google and its billions of readers!) and charging us because you think we “should” pay. Since when is a business plan built on “should?”

I haven’t seen a sensible P&L justifying this dream from any of you. If you have one, please stand up show us now….. I thought so. Other desperation moves: fantasies of white knights from foundations buying you and letting you stay just the way you are…. government subsidies (do we even have to discuss the danger?)…. switching to not-for-profit, as if that suddenly takes away the need to sustain the business still… misguided, self-righteousness thinking that Google or cable companies owe you money, as if you have a God-given right to the revenue and customers you lost….. No, none of this will save newspapers and in your subconscious, at least, you know it. You know the truth.

You blew it.

So what can you do? Two years, even a year ago, I would have said that you had time to build the networks and frameworks and platforms that would support the ecosystem of news that will come next. I would have said you could retrain your staff to take on new responsibilities: organizing and supporting that ecosystem, curating the best, training people to be the best. I would have advised you to offer your staff members the opportunity to join that ecosystem, setting them up in business. I would have told you to take advantage of the efficiencies the web allows (do what you do best, link to the rest, I used to say).

I would have argued that we need to invent new forms of marketing help for an entire new population of businesses-formerly-known-as-advertisers. I did say that. But the financial crisis only accelerated your fall. It didn’t cause the fall, it accelerated it. So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there, for them.

You blew it.

: LATER: When Eric Schmidt did take the podium at NAA, as reported by PaidContent’s Staci Kramer, he expressed some nicely ironic befuddlement at the AP going after them when Google has “a multimillion-dollar deal with the Associated Press not only to distribute their content but also to host it on our servers.” Then he did chasten the publishers:
But Schmidt came down harder on concerns about intellectual property and fair use: “From our perspective, we look at this pretty thoroughly and there is always a tension around fair use … I would encourage everybody, think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.”

Right, pissing off customers is not a business model. Not anymore.

Marketing Matters

In both senses!

If you have any ideas, thoughts or comments on marketing matters then please email them to me at:

peter.rees@gmail.com

I am thinking of opening an 'expert corner' on this Blog. If you would like to be considered just let me know.

3 More C's, Mick Jagger and the Archbishop of Canterbury

All too often, in my experience, marketing departments and company's General Management don’t spend enough time really understanding the markets in which they operate.

Marketplace assessments and market research can often be seen as once-a-year activities, to be completed quickly, often as a (subsidiary) part of the annual budgeting process. Worse still, the research budget is often seen as an easy target for tactical cost-cutting. This is short-termism and marketing myopia at its most blinkered.

It completely misses the point. In today’s economic climate, and with the sheer scale of Internet business growth rapid, regular and realistic understanding of the marketplace is vital to business growth.

Marketing tools like the SWOT and SLEPTC analyses when properly used can be a great help, but more fundamentally I think marketers need to consider the 3 basic building blocks in any market.

Enter 3 more C’s – (and Mick Jagger and the Archbishop of Canterbury)

(You didn’t think I could really write for very long without alliterating… did you?)

‘C’ is for Customers – Traditionally customers have been treated as segments, large aggregations of consumers with common wants and needs, who are likely to be amenable and interested in a common marketing mix.

Recently however I read an article ‘Crash Diets Don’t Work’ by my friend Professor Malcolm McDonald who questioned the efficacy of this approach, and I quote:

‘I am not talking about the a priori rubbish that passes for segmentation, such as socio-economics – Mick Jagger and the Archbishop of Canterbury are both A’s, but they don’t behave the same. Thee there are demographics. All women between the ages of 18 and 24 do not behave the same. Geo-demographics are equally useless, unless used at a very high strategic level Everyone who lives in my street does not drive the same car, read the same newspaper…………..companies who properly segment their markets never have traded – nor ever will trade – principally on price.’

In my opinion customer expect, and have a right to be treated as individuals, markets of one, with an appropriate marketing mix. The Internet makes this possible.

‘C’ is for Competition – Many companies that I now deal with (and several I’ve worked for) haven’t typically done enough research on their competitors. Many will blindly explain their USP – saying things like ‘our products are better’, ‘we offer better value’ or worst of all ‘we are cheaper’ – without really being able to justify these statements.

Unless you have an in-depth knowledge of your competitors offer you are unlikely to be able to deliver a truly UNIQUE sales proposition, which provides value in the mind of the customer and which can’t be easily copied by the enemy.

‘C’ is for Company – Last, but not least, we should not overlook the data that is contained within our own organisations. We get day by day feed back as the customers money (hopefully) rolls in. We know the performance and margin of every product.

Smart companies also have an ongoing programme of New Product Development and research based on the wants and needs of the marketplace, competitor activity and the internal capacity of the organisation.

Looking Outside-In

Linking these C’s together we need effective competitor and customer feedback – many companies have a field salesforce and almost all have a website which can be used to collect market data and measure customer satisfaction, in real-time.

A good market information system is critical to success - is yours fit for purpose?

The Death of the Marketing Mix

At a recent Chartered Institute of Marketing workshop I saw a presentation by Andy Parker of Sandborne Marketing who offered a new interpretation of the Marketing Mix – traditionally known to all us alliteration loving marketers – as the 4 P’s.

The 4P’s really take an inward looking and company-centric view of the world. It is far better (always) to look at things from the point of view of customers and markets.

To this end he proposed replacing the 4P’s with 4C’s, as follows:

Customer value (to replace "product")
We often get carried away with the features of our products and services – it is always far better to look at these through the clients’ eyes and think of the customer value that we offer.

Cost (to replace "price")
Again, particularly in the current economic climate, think of the cost (benefit) to the customer. It IS still possible to sell high value, premium products. But as always it is now even more important to understand and justify the perceived cost to the customer.

Having a real, solid USP (in the customers eyes) will make this easier to justify.

Convenience (to replace "place")
When looking at our routes to market – salesforce, retail outlet or web we should always think about how convenient, easy and usable they are for clients. In my consulting work, even today, I am still often shocked by the lack of thought that has been given to the usability of web-based services and products.

In addition, a company’s routes to market and infrastructure are usually expensive to operate, and there is often room to develop these channels to offer greater customer convenience, and at the same time reduce overheads.

Communication (to replace "promotion")
Marketing communications is, and should have always been, a two way channel. It is no longer a case of who shouts loudest in the market. It is now more necessary that ever to properly segment the market and engage in communication with clients rather than promotion and broadcast of our sales and advertising messages.

Today, there is no longer one market of a million customers – but a million markets of one!


Thank you Andy for your thought provoking presentation!

(For more info or to contact PRSM visit http://www.prstrategic.com/ )

PR Strategic Marketing - Video Introduction

Here's a short intro video I made for PRSM. If you would like to discuss the production of something similar for your company - just email me at:

peter.rees@gmail.com