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Category: Ethical Marketing

  • New Trends Not Always The Most Valuable

    New Trends Not Always The Most Valuable

    As a marketing consultant, I tend to observe things critically, find parallels and patterns in everything, to try and make sense of what I see and experience, so I can apply those learnings to client problems. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes, not so much.

    This morning, my young son Alex, was playing in the livingroom. At 4, he sort of wanders around the room, and when his eye catches something bright and shiny or something he remembers from yesterday’s play session that was fun, he makes a bee-line for the new toy, dropping whatever he’s got in his hand already. Even though the “old” toy was perfectly captivating just 10 seconds ago, suddenly it’s yesterday’s news and he drops it like its hot in favor of the “new” one.

    It dawned on me that some of my clients had exhibited this same behavior regarding their marketing and outreach activities. They were rolling along, sending out e-mail, sending out letters, engaging members or customers with their website, growing steadily, when someone pipes up in a meeting “Hey, why aren’t we on Twitter?” or “Why don’t we have a Facebook page?”

    Before you know it, the whole marketing and IT department is discussing profiles, and launching pages and starting accounts and firewalls and policies and a whole host of related and relevant topics, and before long, these items are in place and being used, to what end no one knows. With all this discussion going on, and activity stemming from that discussion, often there is little or no thought given to integrating this new activity into the existing marketing plan, to setting goals and metrics for those new programs to measure their effectiveness at meeting those goals. Without those elements in place, and really solid and well-researched answer to the questions “Why are we doing this, and how is it going to help us achieve our goals, and how will we know it’s working?”, going forward blindly is a recipe for at least needless unproductive activity, at worst brand damage and reputational damage for the company or organization.

    Non-profit organizations often have a history of behaving that way, although small to mid-size commercial businesses have been known to do this as well. They look a lot like my son, tossing aside what’s in place, even though it may be working, for the shiny, new, trendy, activity, regardless of it’s efficacy or effectiveness.

    The moral of the story is that while some of the new media channels and applications may look exciting and may be experiencing a groundswell of growth and popularity, it doesn’t mean that they are the correct or appropriate types of outreach activity through which to achieve your particular goals. You can spot this type of behavior easily. Simply ask them, “What do you use your Facebook page for?” or “What do you get out of your Twitter account?” It’s not even a matter of cost/benefit analysis, it’s more about aligning the mission of the organization with the tools and public outreach mechanisms you use to achieve the set goals. Twitter can be a nice, real-time market monitor for short term buzz and brand recognition, even customer service monitoring or PR effectiveness, but that’s more about listening than posting. Facebook can be a good way to build community around a product or service, but it has to be used carefully and with some constraints in place to maintain control of the voice and the brand. It may not be appropriate for it to be used to help drive sales or leads.

    If you are contemplating using new media tools, treat them and think about them much as you would any other service purchase – assess the needs, THEN go find the best tool for the job. Don’t go looking to add tools when you don’t know what the job is. Even Handy Manny knows to use only the right tool for the right job!

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  • What Salespeople Want Prospects and Clients To Know

    What Salespeople Want Prospects and Clients To Know

    (An open letter from Salespeople the world over to clients and prospects)

     

    Dear Prospect,

    As an ethical, professional, courteous sales person, there are some things I repeatedly encounter when interacting with clients and prospects that cause me some concern, and I think with a little education we can clear them up and interact on a more effective and profitable basis.

    1) I’m not trying to trick you, steal from you, or talk you into something that you don’t want or need. I’m a professional, and as such, know that it’s much more productive and profitable for me to keep long-term clients than it is to turn and burn a host of one-time victims. I thrive on repeat business, and the last thing I want to do is pull a fast one on you or take advantage of you.

    2) The more you tell me, the better I can help you achieve your goals. You wouldn’t lie to or withhold information from your attorney, and you shouldn’t be lying to or holding out on your accountant, so why do you feel you need to be guarded in your conversations with me? Are you afraid if I learn something I’ll use it to talk you into buying more? I’d rather solve your complete problem right the first time, so you’ll refer me to your friends.

    3) I talk to people all day long for a living, often about problems similar to yours. I might have picked up a thing or two from those conversations, and that makes my knowledge more complete and recent than yours is likely to be. That knowledge deserves some respect.

    4) Just because you think you can’t afford what I have to offer at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s a waste of my time to get to know you and your challenges. Take the meeting anyway, you might be surprised at what you learn, and at how I can help you no matter what your budget. Maybe not right this second, but at some point along the way.

    5) The more you trust me, and the better and reciprocal our relationship becomes, the more value you derive from it. Salespeople are out on the streets all day learning and solving problems in creative ways. I know things that might be of help, at no cost to you, if you just give me a try. The risk is really minimal, and the return can be tremendous.

    6) I have an ethical obligation to keep your private and corporate information to myself. I also have an ulterior motive to do so. I won’t last long if I go around blabbing client info to other clients, will I? I’m a professional, in it for the long haul, and keeping quiet serves any number of purposes.

    7) You won’t hurt my feelings by calling and telling me you bought from someone else. As a professional with some experience, I’ve developed a pretty thick skin, so don’t worry about my reaction, I can assure you it will be professional and appropriate. Please have the courtesy to return follow-up calls, don’t just let them go to voicemail and ignore them, hoping I’ll get the message – it’s rude and counterproductive.

    8) We can all use a hand once in a while. If I’ve done a great job, tell me so, and then tell two colleagues who can also buy from us as well. That’s the real currency salespeople live off of, referrals. It takes thirty seconds, is painless and free, and would really make my world better.

    9) The reverse is also true: if I screw up, please tell me quickly so we can fix the problem, get a solution worked out, patch things up and move on. Don’t let those issues fester and then just stop returning calls for no apparent reason – it’s not healthy.

    10) I’m just as anxious to solve your problem as you are to get it solved. The sooner we stop dancing and start producing, the faster we’ll both get where we’re going. I’ll be happy to answer any questions for your superiors, cover your behind, make it right, do whatever is required to protect our relationship, so stop worrying about it and start fixing it sooner rather than later.

    Hope you find this helpful in our interactions in the future. I think you’ll find if you keep these things in mind, you’ll get more of what you want, at lower cost, faster, and with greater enthusiasm all around. Be the hero of your own situation, and help me help you!

    Sincerely,

     

    Joe Salesperson

     

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  • Are You Prepared for a Communications Crisis?

    Are You Prepared for a Communications Crisis?

    In the general hierarchy of life’s priority, when you think of crisis, the marketing department is probably not the place to call. But if you’re a business that’s facing a natural disaster, a tampering case involving your products, an on-the-job accident or other damaging event, that call to the marketing department is one of the first and most important. But if they aren’t prepared to handle a communications crisis, it may not help.

    Is your company prepared for a scramble drill in communicating effectively to convey the proper information, using the right tone and messaging to quell customer fears, or creditor agitation or anxiety, and deal with intrusive media inquiries? If not, now might be a good time to craft a plan, get it reviewed and vetted by all other departments for accuracy and feasibility and get it put in place – before the crisis occurs.

    This plan should include the following:

    1) List of personnel involved: Who is the designated spokesman for your company, who comes next if that person is not available? Create the hierarchy so that the job tumbles downhill logically. The person needs to be credible, well-spoken, and to understand the goals and ideals of the company thoroughly so that any statement made to the local or national media is believable and makes sense.

    2) Who internally should be contacted: List of people will vary depending upon the nature of the crisis, but at bare minimum, the CEO, CFO, VP Operations, General Manager, VP Marketing, and in-house Counsel should be included on the list. Your plant security company should be informed immediately, and if the crisis involves injury or death of staff or contractors on the site, the local police department, local first responder services if needed, and local utilities that service the site, including Hazmat services if required.

    3) What is your position on the incident? Is it an accident, was it intentional sabotage, is your company responsible in any way, what is your plan going forward? From a public relations standpoint, clarity and direct honesty is always the best policy. The media is tremendously resourceful, and they will find out their version of the truth. Better to give them yours and it turns into a non-story, than to stonewall and let them start digging on their own.

    4) Provide only the facts you’re sure of. If you don’t know for certain, simply tell the media that you’re investigating and will keep them informed as things develop in that investigation. Make sure in-house counsel or your of-counsel attorney reviews any written statements for accuracy, or anything that legally obligate your company to do anything in future.

    5) Position Your Company As Compassionate, Caring, Concerned. No matter how simple or harmless the situation appears, in today’s environment anyone can potentially be construed as a victim of something. Make sure your company is seen as one that cares about all it’s employees and contractors, or an civilians who may have inadvertently been involved in the incident. Spread the net of concern wide, but make no direct promises, express your concern for the well-being of all, and stress that no matter the cause or level of responsibility your company ultimately takes in the final analysis, they will take great pains to assist and care for anyone affected by the incident.

    The real trick is to have a speedy, comprehensive and clear position, and to release it to the media as early as possible. If media representatives sense that you’re holding back or hiding something in any way, they will see it as their duty to get to “the truth” as they see it. Fast response heads this reaction off at the pass, returns control to your hands, and makes it appear that you know the drill and are being cooperative.

    Each crisis is different, and each calls for a custom-tailored response. But if you have a plan of action, centralized contact information, a chain of command and a prepared spokesman, you can contain most incidents and concentrate on damage control to preserve your company’s reputation and good name.

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  • The Illusion of Control

    The Illusion of Control

    I think we can agree that most top marketing professionals are what used to be called a “Type A” personality – high speed, high motivation, attention to detail, internally driven, goal oriented, strong need for control. Sound about right? If so, you’re likely in the right role if you’re a marketer, but are all of these traits actually helping you succeed? Sometimes less is more, and I think as a race, most of us labor under the misconception that we can control much more than we can in reality.

    That control issue can lead to problems. We can plan for just about any scenario, we can be prepared for the worst outcome, we can remove or stabilize as many variables as possible, but there is always a large element of the unknown involved in our work. That’s not to say that we can give up responsibility for the outcome of any of it, but there is only so much we can control about the results of our efforts. We can’t go to people’s homes and force them to buy what we have to offer at gunpoint. We can only use history, research, or self-proclamation to divine the likelihood of each one buying a product, lump them all together, and put forth our best pitch based on common characteristics among the group.

    We can test, but we can’t control. Test results, be it focus group, direct response test, concept survey, or other method, can only give us a snapshot of the most obvious feelings and actions of the given group at that moment. If you got the same group together again the following month, you might get different results to the same test, based on circumstances beyond our, and their, control. All you can really do is play to the odds, decrease your chances of missing as much as you’re able, and hope to catch potential buyers under favorable circumstances. That’s not control.

    On a larger scale, our lives contain the illusion of control as well. Anyone who’s planned an outdoor wedding knows, you can’t control everything. You can have the best vendors, the most elegant choices, the best caterer and decorator and a force-of-nature coordinator, and none of that makes up for the fact that it could rain buckets that day. You can increase your odds by considering timing, location, and site protection, but those are not control, just contingency planning – it’s still raining, you just made it tolerable for the guests by ordering a tent.

    That’s not to say that such events don’t have a cause somewhere that can be eliminated, deferred or altered – the Butterfly Effect is a theoretical conceptual diagram designed to show the rippling and far-reaching impact of actions in a closed system that highlights this – but at the end of the chain it is simply a set of unalterable circumstances.

    Lack of control can cause us to make errors – lack of recognition of loss of control can lead to disaster. Take a direct marketing test grid. We can’t control those buyers, but we can test that group of uncontrollable people’s preferences as a group, and control for wide differences within the group. When we read the test results, there may be a set of data that appears inconsistent with what we know in history, with what we feel, with what we “think” we know. That data may be discounted as an anomaly, an aberration, some irrelevant variable that isn’t affecting the overall program. But what if that piece of data, when expanded upon and tested further by itself, is critical to a strong response – that the audience needs that portion of the mailing needs to be there as a catalyst to response, and by ignoring it, we negatively affect response to a great degree going forward? Our own sense of control has effectively overwhelmed the data in front of us and reduced our effectiveness and our impact on profits with that mailing mistake.

    We can’t control everything, but we can control how we react to things. If your first reaction when faced with an uncontrolled situation is to hide or ignore it, or worse, try to control the uncontrollable, failure is a likely outcome. As marketers we would be better served by our flexibility, our ability to “roll with it” in our reaction to the situation, to make the best of what might be a less than desirable outcome. Plan for the worst, hope for the best, be ready for anything.

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  • Does Your Latest Campaign Pass the “Sniff Test?”

    Does Your Latest Campaign Pass the “Sniff Test?”

    I’ve been working with business clients to assist them in their marketing efforts for nearly 3 decades, and in that time, there have been very few rules that I haven’t broken, bent or ignored altogether. There is one, however, that no matter what your industry or line of business, needs to be present somewhere in the mix – The Sniff Test.

    Human beings evolved over millions of years, surviving due to an over-sized brain and an ability to use that brain power to adapt his environment to suit his needs. One of those adaptations is a facet of the primitive, limbic portion of the brain that senses danger. Things like the hair on the back of your neck standing up, or a queasy feeling in your gut, or a general uneasiness in the back of your mind that tells you there’s someone in the house or that you’re being watched.

    That’s instinct, it’s your subconscious processing what you see and feel and hear and smell, and putting out a primitive nervous signal that there’s something your conscious brain is missing, because it’s too busy working on what’s coming . . .That instinct was developed to keep you alive.

    That same instinct is useful in business, when reviewing partners, business arrangements, marketing strategy, new product development, and other areas where it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and the hysteria, and execute strategies that do not have a strong foundation in logic and data. That is the instinct I call the “sniff test”, and it’s really a jaded, realistic way of looking at a worst-case scenario by stripping away all the “possibles” and “maybes” in the scenario planning, leaving just the facts.

    Say the marketing manager comes to you with a campaign idea that involves the buyer or customer to follow five or six steps in order to redeem an coupon in a product offer, and when you do the math on the offer, the numbers don’t really offer any advantage to the buyer after all the rebates, savings certificates and all the rest is computed.

    Take a step back, pretend your in the grocery store and have two products side by side, yours and your competitor’s. Now read the offer slowly and carefully, and add weight to your competitor’s product for every step you have to take, in order to get the savings the coupon represents. Now subtract weight for every ten cents’ worth of different in price you offer over your competitor’s product. If you product price doesn’t outweigh all the work needed to get it, the offer doesn’t pass the sniff test.

    Despite how it works on paper, in the real world, it just won’t smell good to the consumer. Even if it’s explicitly spelled out that the savings are significant, it will send up a flag for the consumer if it’s too hard to do – too many places for error to creep in, too much work, too many conditions, it will just feel like you’re trying to put one over on them, and they’ll pick the “safe” option – instinct at work.

    Unconsciously, you use the sniff test every day, to evaluate deals, employee performance, new hires, as a lie detector in presentations or meetings – anywhere you place a value judgement not strictly based in logic. If someone asked you after one of those decisions why you went the way you did, you couldn’t give them a solid, concrete, logical answer, you’ll likely think to yourself “it just doesn’t smell right” – you just implemented the sniff test, and whatever your were evaluating didn’t pass.

    Food for thought for the day – tell me your stories of instances where your business dealings didn’t pass the sniff test, and what was ultimately the real reason it was a good decision to pass on it. Enjoy!

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  • Economy Down, Scammers Up

    Economy Down, Scammers Up

    Over the last few years I’ve seen quite a bit of questionable e-mail come through my in-box, and most of it goes right back out to the Recycle bin. The pleas from various quarters of the globe to “give me millions in exchange for your help in parking this money in your account for a few months” type, the “I’m the ousted prime minister of a small nation and have gotten out of the country with millions but need your help to get it into the US” type, the I’ve inherited millions from my Irish uncle but need your help to get it into the US” type, and a host of other scams, including so-called “phishing” sites, e-mail that drives you to sites that look like a bank, and they ask you for your account information to “verify” your account – actually a bogus site set up to capture your banking info.

    It all sucks, and plays to our greed. One business I know of got their event registration system gamed and hacked by some folks in Nigeria, who registered for events using a fake card number, and then registered for a refund, which would be paid for with a real check out of the company’s account – small change one at a time, but as a block, it adds up to some real money. That company had to go so far as to set up a special escrow account for all Nigerian registrations, that would be sequestered from the rest of the funds until all the credit cards cleared, and refunds issued only from that account.

    As the economy goes through it’s ups and downs, scams like these seem to proliferate when things are just starting to get a little brighter. They seem to work best when there’s a little glimmer of hope for those who receive them. They play on our “get rich quick” mentality, one that pervades the lower income brackets, where one big score can break you into a new lifestyle very quickly, so if there’s a tiny fraction of a chance of it being legitimate and paying off, folks will take the risk.

    It may seem a little Pollyanna-ish of me, but what if those Nigerians used that insight into the human psyche, their ability to manipulate emotion with words ( in a non-native language, no less) and their skill at finding lists that respond, for good rather than evil? What if those guys applied those skills to some of the languishing products or brands out there dying for a boost in sales, how effective could they be? What if they took the time used to concoct these schemes and set up the infrastructure to run them, and used it to brainstorm a way out of the housing crisis, solve the oil spill problem, or the employment problem?

    America is the land of opportunity, and someone ought to provide these folks an opportunity to put their skills to good use for the good of the country in general. They of course would have to be monitored and supervised very closely, but so do half the employees I’ve ever worked with. Maybe a government marketing and scheming think tank ought to be set up, to harness the brain power currently residing in our prisons. With roughly 5% of our adult male population currently incarcerated, there’s much to be learned and shared behind those walls, and we’re wasting a resource that our nation could be using to advance our position in the world. If those folks are smart enough to figure out a way to game a system the size of the banking system, or the stock market, then problems like renewable energy, low-income housing, tax reform and national debt ought to be a piece of cake.

    Write and tell me your best idea for fixing a problem you’ve recognized that would need government backing to carry out, and I’ll collect them and publish the most likely one’s here for all to see.

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