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The Real Job Of A Marketer
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
When a mother of two stands browsing the birthday cake supplies at the local Cook & Dine store she’s not imagining how well the piping bags will work. She’s imagining how she will feel when her little girl’s face lights up at the party on Sunday afternoon.
We think our job is to change how people feel about what we do.
Our job is to change how they feel about themselves.
Image by edenpictures.
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Paying Attention To The Clues Your Customers Leave
“People tell us who they are, but we ignore it because we want
them to be who we want them to be.” — Donald Draper
Have you ever watched someone shopping? People touch things that catch their eye. They buy things that are not on their list because something changed how they feel in the moment. And as Paco Underhill discovered, they will even stop shopping if the aisles are too narrow and they are “brushed” by other customers.
Your customers are leaving clues about how they feel on Instagram and Twitter, on Facebook and in forums. I’ve seen a woman tell the story of a date night with her husband. An evening in the car watching the sun set by the ocean with a bar of their favourite indulgent chocolate, with single Instagram image. That’s solid gold to the chocolate maker.
We’re so busy trying to convince our customers that we forget to really see who they are and who they want to be. The good news is that it’s never too late to pay attention to the clues your customers leave.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
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It’s Business. It’s Personal
When did business stop being personal and become an activity we engage in?
It wasn’t always this way. In 12000 BC when Obsidian was used for trades, business was about making fair exchanges of value based on trust. When pioneer farmers traded labour with their neighbours to make harvesting more efficient, business was about working for the collective good.
When did business become about a balance of power? About adding distance. Drawing lines. Setting boundaries. Vendors and consumers. Them and us. I don’t think we can use the introduction of currency as an excuse.
When did people stop being people and become, traffic, customers, users, members, followers or a target audience?
The people you want to do business with, the ones you want to reach out to and who you are hoping will respond are not just labels in your vocabulary or walking wallets to be transacted with. They deserve to be treated like it’s personal. It is to them it should be to you.
The businesses that make it personal are the ones that are winning now.
Image by Rob Stradling.
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10 Ways To Make People Fall In Love With Your Brand Without Having Donald Draper On The Payroll
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In the 60s there was no distinction between advertising and marketing. Everything has changed.
1. Create something that’s not for everyone.
If you’re speaking to everyone you’re getting through to no one.
Sanuk, shoes that are not shoes. Dollar Shave Club, shave tech for the enlightened.
2. Make a better product.
Create things that look good, taste great and work well.
Josh uses just two ingredients in his handmade stoneground chocolate. The Sydney Opera House brings in a billion dollars a year to the Australian economy.
3. Give people a story to tell.
Vanessa and Mat install beehives on the rooftops businesses in Melbourne. The restaurants then get to use or sell their very own honey.
4. Cherish and reward the customers you’ve got. Love begets loyalty.
Jamie Oliver created a free pizza giveaway on Instagram by writing the details on a plate and posting the photo. The side effect was a positive brand building vibe amongst the people who couldn’t take advantage of the offer that day. No billboard required.
5. Change how people feel.
charity:water built transparency and trust into their non-profit business model with the 100% model and GPS showing donors where their money was making a difference. Apple made black earbuds passe.
6. Create valuable content people want to share and come back for.
Boots ‘n All gives indie travellers great information. The Iconic online store didn’t just advertise in magazines they launched their own. You don’t need to have that kind of budget though blogs and manifestos work well too.
7. Be smarter and targeted with your advertising spend.
Sponsor a community event. Run a competition that benefits customers. Perform random acts of kindness. One of our local cafes which backs onto the beach sponsored a surfing competition last weekend.
8. Frame your scarcity.
Limited editions. Small group offerings. Something that makes you least like the competition.
If I’m wearing a pair of Christian Loboutin red soled shoes the world knows.
9. Deliver value beyond the functionality of your products and services.
Snakes and Lattes doesn’t just sell coffee and cake. This board game cafe helps customers to connect. Alessi teapots and Smeg fridges are style statements not just functional products.
10. Give your customers a better experience.
If you give people a reason to come back they will.
You don’t need a billboard to reach out to people.
Image by Robert Wade.
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What People Want Then And Now
In the 70s and 80s you didn’t download music you owned it. If you cared enough about an artist or a song you had to wait for the vinyl to be pressed. Sometimes you waited in line hoping that EMI or Sony had sent enough copies to your local store. There you met other fans, just like you.
Along with a copy of the record you bought the artwork on the sleeve, a tangible reminder of the music you cared about. Buying a single or an album was an event, a layered experience. Taking the record from the sleeve, blowing the dust off. Being careful not to scratch the vinyl each time you played a song. Owning the music and the feeling meant having the album.
Today you don’t have to own the music to experience the feeling. And while there is trend away from ownership the experience and those feelings of connection and belonging will always be the currency of now.
What people want might change but how they want to feel stays the same. The feeling not the thing is what you need to focus on delivering.
Image by Rob Lambert.
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The Real Job Of The Genius
On a recent trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store I discovered the real job of the Genius.
While you might think that the role of the Genius is to fix things, it’s not.
The first job of the Genius is to acknowledge your problem and to change how you feel.
Chad told me that he can tell how the appointment will go in the first few seconds. He said appointments go badly when the customer believes that he won’t be able to help them. Apparently Apple Geniuses get twice as much training in changing how the customer feels as they do in solving tech problems. I lost count of the number of times I overheard a blue-shirted Genius saying “don’t worry I am going to….” that day.
The only thing that the Genius has to do is make people walk out feeling better than when they walked in. And when waiters, doctors, librarians, leaders of all stripes and you do this every day it’s a kind of genius too.
Image by Steve McFarland.
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What’s Wrong With Business Communication And How To Fix It
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
Business has got a problem. It’s pervasive, eats away at human connection and strips meaning from our interactions. While trying to be professional and sound more knowledgeable we’re sanitising and jargonising our conversations. This is killing our ability to communicate.
So how do we transition from meaningless communication to creating meaningful impact?
If you ever find yourself typing a word you wouldn’t use when you’re talking to your mum.
Delete it.
When you hear words that would make your kids stare at you incredulously falling from your lips.
Stop using them.
If you start saying “apologies” instead of just being “sorry”.
Think hard about the person at the other end of that conversation.
When your words make you sound like you don’t really mean what they are saying.
Then don’t say them.
Your customers want to communicate with the real you. Your colleagues want to truly understand who you are.
Why not let them?
Image credit.
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10 Things That Work Better Than SEO In The Connection Economy
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
A decade ago if you owned the URL wineseller.com and stuffed your website full of keywords you’d won. You can’t earn loyalty in a category today simply by gaming Google because your customers are searching for relevance not just keywords.
Ten things to think about beyond SEO.
1. Build a brand not just a business.
Attach meaning to everything you do. Think beyond the utility of the products and services you sell. Apple did this with “1000 songs in your pocket,” when others were selling 32MGB music players.
2. Make things that people love.
Bahen & Co. chocolate, Chobani Yogurt and Airbnb.
3. Create valuable content that people want to share.
Educate, inform and entertain with blog posts, articles, digital magazines, images and video. Problogger, TED.com and 99u.
4. Connect people to each other.
When like minded people find you, create opportunities for them to belong and to come together.
Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit nails it.
5. Be generous.
Give something away.
The Holstee Manifesto has been shared and linked to tens of thousands of times. Mailchimp gives away a great library of free email marketing resources.
6. Get permission to have the next interaction.
Daily Candy, Philippa Stanton and your newsletter list.
7. Practice patience. Play the long game by building loyalty.
Logo Design Love, Etsy and Zappos.
8. Spend more time serving your audience and less time working out how to get search engine spiders to notice you.
By The Way Bakery, TED.com and The Good Life Project.
9. Earn trust, don’t just own keywords. Change how people feel not what they search for.
Wieden & Kennedy, Brain Pickings and IDEO.
10. Be the brand people seek out, not the one they stumble upon.
Tattly, Seth Godin, Evernote and Moleskine.
The brands that win now make their customer’s lives better first and worry about search rankings later. They work hard to get their message believed not just to be noticed.
Image by Zetalab.
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Using What You Don’t Do To Tell The Story Of What You Do Well
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
So a customer walks into an artisan bakery and says…
“Hey your bread looks great and smells divine, but do you know how hard it is to make a sandwich for my kid’s lunch using those unevenly shaped unsliced loaves? Why don’t you make them in square loaf pans like everyone else?”
But since you bake free formed loaves (no pan required), that take up to three days to make from start to finish you understand the virtues of the unsliced loaf. And you make a stand. You choose to tell the story to the people who want to hear it. You decide to make the best loaves, not the squarest loaves.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a butcher, baker or candlestick maker, what you won’t compromise on and what you don’t do could just be your most priceless asset.
It’s your story and only you can decide how to tell it.
Image by Andrea Kirkby.
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The Cycle Of Persuasion Vs The Cycle Of Loyalty
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
Shout.
Your agenda.
Short term gain.
50% off. Buy now pay later.
Big funnel gathering the most prospects.
Or….
Talk in whispers.
Your customer’s agenda.
Building trust over time.
Products and services people can’t help talking about.
“A few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.”—Amanda Palmer
Image by bwaters23.