Monthly Archives: August 2014

August 25, 2014 · 12:07 pm

Dead Ninjas

As you might expect, I know quite a few other consultants.  One thing with which I think each of us struggles is our positioning statement:  what is it that we do and why is how we do it different (and better) and others.  My friends in the marketing agency business face the same challenge.  There are many firms chasing the same pieces of business.  How are we to stand out?

What I’ve seen over the last decade has been the rise and fall of various segments.  Consultants and agencies focus on the next shiny niche.  There were SEO specialists and then SEO changed.  There’s far less one needs to do on an on-going basis (other than create great, interesting content) to warrant an investment in SEO over time.  Paid search is a sector that continues to flourish but increasingly it’s more part of the “traditional” marketing mix.  Does one really need a specialist who may or may not understand the entirely of the marketing mix?

The ones that bother me the most (I’m not sure why, but they do) are the “ninjas” and “gurus.”  It’s amazing how they shift from new segment to new segment as marketing evolves.  Maybe they really are ninjas – they move very fast and somehow always seem to be selling the next shiny thing.  Of course, as things are evolving there is no real right or wrong and it’s hard to know what demonstrable results are expected.

You can see this today.  Content marketing seems to be the flavor of the month.  How many of the folks selling content marketing were selling SEO two years ago?  How many of the loudest voices were just as loud on another topic when that topic was emerging?  I don’t mean to single out my consulting or agency brethren.  Conferences, software vendors, and others are just as guilty.  What we all need to be doing is thinking about the fundamental principles of marketing and business.  In my 35+ years in business those things haven’t changed very much.

Self-promotion and “hot” positioning are great.  Fantastic, measurable results are even better.  I think maybe we need to kill off a few ninjas and deal with people who practice sound business. What do you think?

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August 22, 2014 · 9:49 am

What Do You Mean, BBQ?

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week is about barbecue. I mean, we’ve reached late summer and I haven’t posted anything about one of my favorite foods. Then again, I can spend the next few hundred words writing about it and we might be thinking about two completely different things since “barbecue” means different things to different people. Therein lies today’s business point as well.

English: Central Texas Style BBQ from Pearland...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, when some people hear the term (BBQ for short), they think it means food cooked on a grill, as in “fire up the BBQ and let’s get the steaks on.”  That is NOT what I mean.  The term in my mind always refers to food cooked low and slow in the smoke from a wood fire.  Notice I didn’t say “over” a fire since BBQ is indirect heat cooking at its finest.

Second, there are many different types of BBQ.  Pull into a BBQ joint in Raleigh and you’ll be getting whole hog chopped up with a vinegar and pepper sauce.  Go further west and you get just pork shoulder chopped with a tomato-based sauce.  Kentucky serves up mutton barbecue served with “dip,” a Worcestershire-based sauce, in the western part of the state but pork in the east.  An order in Tennessee will get you a Memphis style dry rub on ribs.  The whole hog in South Carolina adds mustard to the sauce while in Texas you’ll get beef brisket.  Finally, in Kansas City you might get any or all of the above.  One order, many potential results.  Which is, of course, the business point.

How many presentations have you seen in which fairly generic terms are used?  How many times have you been shopping on the web and come across a product page that has lots of flowery language that sells the product but very little specific information as to how the product is differentiated from anything else?  One mistake we all make in marketing from time to time is assuming our audience knows what we mean.  While we all know our products inside and out, the consumer might not.  Even worse, by using common terms without making sure we’re putting them into the correct context, we run the risk of having the consumer pass on ordering since they might assume something that’s not true.  Even worse, they might order and be very unhappy with what they receive.

We can’t be in the business of selling “BBQ.”  We need to sell “chopped whole hog in a vinegar and pepper sauce.”  We want to use language that puts an indelible image into the consumer’s mind while making clear what exactly it is we’re selling.  Don’t assume everyone knows what BBQ or anything else means.  Have a great weekend – that’s clear, right?

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August 21, 2014 · 10:19 am

Results, Stupid

You probably get a lot of “news” in your Facebook feed.  You know – really critical information that tends to end with “you won’t believe what happened next” which is begging you to click through to see.  If you take the bait and do so, you probably consume the content and forget about it within a minute.  The result the post was looking for was the click.

The Marketing Metrics Continuum provides a fra...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Marketers do that a lot.  They get focused on you seeing the message, maybe clicking through to see “what happens next”, but they seem to be forgetting that the result they’re after is either a direct business result such as a sale or a deepening of the ongoing relationship with the consumer.  It’s the relationship – the emotional connection – that leads, once again to a measurable result: sales.

I was sort of surprised, therefore, when I came across the results of a survey from the Korn Ferry Global Marketing Center of Expertise.  I’ll quote from their release here:

The survey indicates there’s growing pressure among marketing executives to demonstrate that their work directly contributes to bottom-line results. Fifty-seven percent of CMOs cite the inability to directly connect marketing efforts to tangible business outcomes as the top factor behind low CMO tenure…Only 27 percent of marketing executives cite connecting marketing to bottom-line results as the top concern keeping them up at night. What plagues CMOs the most is the ability to create sustainable and engaging customer relationships while improving the customer experience (34 percent). Also, 27 percent say staying ahead and taking advantage of the latest digital technology trends is a main concern.

Hmm.  It’s great to create those relationships but if nearly 3/4 of these CMO’s are focused on something other than results it’s no wonder that they’re not lasting very long in their jobs.  The last point about focusing on the latest and greatest tech concerns me a lot.  This goes against my basic mantra that the focus needs to be on the business and on measurable business outcomes, not on the tools.  A business can’t do tech (or anything else) because “it’s cool.”   Sales are cool.  Profits are cool.  Tech is a series of tools which may or may not be appropriate (or cool)  for the given situation and desired outcome.

You wouldn’t cut a board with a screwdriver.  You’d select the right tool with the desired result in mind.  If over half the CMO’s surveyed aren’t connecting with those results, their brands and businesses have a big problem.  It’s not a surprise to me that Facebook is cited as the top channel for consumer connection but I wonder if the CMO’s who use it realize how little connection is really going on between “fans” and brands?  Facebook or any other tool are neither good nor bad.  They have to be measured in the context of results, otherwise they’re just the latest shiny object.  We can’t build a long-term business on those shiny things, can we?

 

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