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Articles filed in: Strategy
Marketing Is Not A Department
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It’s 9pm on Sunday night and a line of eager customers with cash in hand snakes down Victoria Street and around the corner. Not one customer who joins is surprised by the line and nobody gives up and leaves it. The effort it seems is clearly worth the reward.
Gelato Messina is a Sydney institution. How they make, serve and sell their product is their marketing. No full-page adverts required.
Marketing is not a department, it’s the story of how you create difference for your customers.
Image by Nicholas Tang.
Is Getting More Blog Traffic Really Your Goal?
As traditional marketing (read advertising) becomes less and less effective businesses are turning to content marketing. The metric of many content marketers, as it was of advertisers is still more. How can I get more traffic to my blog? How can we turn our unique visitors into pageviews?
How can we get more Facebook likes, tweets and pins? But more doesn’t tell the whole story.
More doesn’t tell how your post changed someone.
More isn’t always how you create the most difference.
More is not the shortcut to mattering.
Viewing your blog or business purely through a data lens is like assessing the development of a child by simply looking at a growth chart.
What would happen if we stopped obsessing about how to make our content king and made people king instead? I think the message on the little guy’s t-shirt in the photo says it all.
Image by Jennifer Lamb.
6 Strategies That Work Better Than Trying To Predict The Future
filed in Strategy
1. Focus on doing the best work you can do today.
2. Learn how to see the truth and the opportunity in what’s right here, right now.
3. Listen to what’s going on around you instead of to the voice in your head.
4. Be grateful for who and what you have in your life at this moment.
5. Decide what matters, then make that happen.
6. Stop worrying about where you’ll be this time next year.
The seventh of course is to have a happy New Year.
Image by Lucca Rossato.
Hope Is Not A Marketing Strategy
There’s a tiny market in Potts Point every Sunday. Each week the stallholders show up and hope. They hope that someone who might be their customer will show up too. The stallholders sell things that a passer-by might want, usually things that they could get somewhere else if they weren’t going to buy it on impulse between 8am and 4pm on a lazy Sunday.
The guy selling jewellery made from LEGO has a different strategy. He understands the worldview of the grandmas who come to buy LEGO earrings and necklaces. They don’t want to look more stylish or glamorous, they want to feel more connected to their grandchildren. A LEGO earring-wearing grandma definitely has a cool factor.
The earring maker knows his customers and what makes them tick before he sets up his stall, and he creates things just for them. It turns out that understanding your customers is a better strategy than hope.
Image by Becca Nelson.
Your Customers Don’t Shop To Shop…..
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
…..they shop to dream. They don’t want stuff. They want to imagine a better version of themselves.
What dream are you selling?
Image by Maple’s Mamma.
Do It Like You Mean It
I’m not sure if it was the fact that she was reading a hardback book that made me notice the woman at the back of the cafe. When was the last time you saw someone reading a hardback book? When I asked her what she was reading, she flipped it over. Self help—2014 was going to be “her year”.
We chatted while we waited for the coffees to arrive. She wanted to do something that mattered and to write. We got talking about blogging and platforms and self-hosted WordPress. She wondered about the cost of getting up and running on her own .com, and then without even realising it she signaled her intention for her project and for herself.
“Sounds like that would be a good investment if you’re serious about it.”
What alternative is there? If you’re not serious what’s the point of starting?
Every day you’re crafting your intention for your business. That intention is felt in even the tiniest detail and the story you tell yourself is perhaps the most important story of all.
Be serious. Intend to succeed.
Do it like you mean it.
Image by Emyan.
How To Be The Best In The World
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
LEGO® bricks are the best in the world. Competitors have tried to copy them over the years, but nothing comes close to a real LEGO® brick. So what’s the secret?
To make a product that good you’ve got to continually obsess about design and production lines and quality control. But what makes LEGO® the best in the world is how and where they begin the process. LEGO® design doesn’t begin with the brick. It begins with the people who will use it.
The LEGO® designer doesn’t work hard to make the perfect brick or the best brick in the world. She obsesses about how it feels to put two bricks together and then to pull them apart, with five-year-old hands. She spends her days understanding how it feels to sit on the floor for hours making a model that won’t fall to pieces when you pick it up. Then she designs the product that makes it possible to experience those feelings.
If you want to be the best in the world don’t start by trying to create the best product or service. Start by working out how people want to feel.
Image by Bart.
The Secret Power Of Promises
Have you noticed that about a month out from Christmas people begin not to be able to promise you anything?
“We’ll try to fit you in, but…you know how it is at this time of year. We can’t promise you anything.”
Promises are the reason we trust the brands that we trust. Promises are the reason we care about the companies we care about.
The ability to make and keep promises is one of the last differentiators we’ve got.
Image by Timothy K. Hamilton.
The Question Your Competitors Forgot To Ask
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The foundation of many businesses is a simple what.
What do we serve and sell, for how much, at what profit margin?
Getting stuck in ‘the what’ puts you squarely in the commodities business. If the value you create is purely tangible then you’re not giving people a reason to care about your brand, or ways to form a connection that makes them remain loyal to your business. Someone somewhere can produce shorts or bake a loaf of bread cheaper than you can. And the consultant across town can offer four coaching sessions for the price of your three.
If you want to build a brand that creates difference and one that people feel connected to, the better question to begin with is the one your competitors most likely forgot to ask.
How are we creating value for our customers?
Because when you begin by understanding the truth about what really matters to your customers and take action on that, you can’t help but become the competition.
If you need to be convinced that meaning scales this video from Patagonia should do the trick.
Image by Jorge Quinteros.
The Real Reason The Microsoft Store Is Empty
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Clues about what matters to people and how their emotions drive their choices are all around us and there’s no better time to see evidence of this in action than during the festive season.
Slate recently posted two images that tell two very different brand stories. Both photos were taken on what should have been a busy Sunday afternoon during the peak-shopping season. One shows an empty Microsoft Store, the other a packed Apple Store.
No big surprise there you might say. Everyone knows that people use Microsoft products, but few are in love with the brand. Contrast that with how people feel about Apple products. We know that when Steve Jobs and his design team were working on the iPhone he charged them with designing the first phone people would fall in love with, but innovation and marketing at Apple goes one step beyond that. While Microsoft have been building utilitarian products for years, Apple has been creating products that people not only love, but the kind of products that help people to fall just a little bit more in love with themselves.
Businesses that have thrived in a Business 3.0 world have succeeded at some level in helping people to feel better about themselves.
The same opportunity is open to you…..and Microsoft.
Image by Joe Wilcox.