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Articles filed in: Marketing
Reach Is Overrated
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Kate Reid wasn’t expecting people to drive across town to wait in long lines when she first started rolling croissants in her tiny Elwood bakery. She wasn’t making pastries for everyone—just for the kind of people who believed and valued what she believes. Everything could have changed when she moved to her-state-of-the-art bakery in Fitzroy. But Kate built Lune for resonance, not reach. The success of her second store, which opens in the city next week, will be not be dependent on convincing most people to come. Kate’s croissants are not for everyone.
Many of the ideas we have grown up with only succeeded at scale. In the past businesses talked about cornering the market as if there was only one market. When production and marketing costs were prohibitive, that market had to be most people. While many businesses need millions of customers to thrive, most businesses don’t. And yet we still market as if we’re trying to reach every single person who happens to be passing by.
Reach does not always result in resonance. Resonance is what you’re aiming for.
You don’t need everyone. You just need the right people.
Who are your right people? Are you marketing to everyone or just to them?
Image by Andrew Xu
Readiness Is Underrated
Even though traditional advertising is becoming less effective, it can still teach us about timing. The best marketing messages remind the right people about something they already want to do at the right time. So the millinery advert in the fashion magazine reminds women that it’s spring racing season in November. In December we’ll see more ads for cheap flights to get us to family holiday gatherings. By January the billboard outside the gym will be advertising slimming supplements and diet drinks.
People buy products that help them to do the things they want to do and become the kind of people they want to be. Marketers often work against this truth. They try to convince people to do something they don’t want to do or be someone they’re not ready to be.
What’s uppermost in your customer’s mind today?
Image by This is Edinburgh
The Story Of Successful Ideas
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every product or service that becomes the backbone of a thriving business succeeds because it enables someone to do something they want to do, but can’t do.
Before Keep Cup, millions more disposable coffee cups ended up in landfill.
Before Stripe, it was more difficult for people and businesses to receive payments over the internet.
Before Zumba, exercising was less fun.
Before Shopify, launching an online store was costly and complicated.
Before Blue Apron, putting a home-cooked meal on the table was more time-consuming.
Before Amazon, shopping online was less convenient.
Your product should bridge the gap between your customer’s imperfect present and her imagined future. And your marketing must tell the story of how her life will be changed in the presence of your product. Who is your customer before she encounters your product, and who is she after?
Image by Jinn
Good Is The New Average
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Meeting expectations was once enough to mark a business out. If every meal was served piping hot, served in a timely fashion, with a smile—the restaurant owner won. Now, efficiency is expected. It’s the minimum requirement for operating any business.
Good is the new average. Only the exceptional will survive and thrive.
Your goal isn’t just to satisfy customers. It’s to give them a story to tell. What is that story?
Image by Frédéric Poirot
Is The Consumer The Customer?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
When the Old Spice ‘Smell Like a Man’ advertising campaign launched eight years ago, it called out an often unspoken truth about sales and marketing. The consumer and the user are not necessarily one and the same. This insight inevitably alters how you tell the story of the products you sell and the change you’re trying to create.
We don’t only buy things that are useful. We often buy things because of the story they enable us to tell ourselves about the kind of pet owner, parent or partner we are.
Successful brand stories speak to the heart and the head of the decision-maker, who may not be the person (or animal) whose needs the product was designed to satisfy.
Image by David
The Disciplined Marketer
It’s 6.30 am at the hotel gym, and the guests who are keen to get a workout in before breakfast are lining up. The receptionist is taking their room numbers before admitting them. As they turn to walk away, gym towel and bottle of water in hand, she asks if they’d like to book in for a $250 massage later that day.
There’s nothing wrong in theory with trying to upsell to existing customers. But the chances of converting someone from a free to a premium service in a single leap are slim. We have to take a more unselfish and disciplined approach.
Awareness is nothing more than an opportunity to earn trust.
Permission is a scalable asset, but only when we nurture and value it.
Image by ILO
Show Your Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In the early 1960s, a Brooklyn tax clerk, named Jean Nidetch discovered a powerful and underutilised marketing technique. When Jean, who had been overweight for years, lost thirty kilos her friends asked her how she’d done it. She began sharing her diet secrets with half a dozen friends in her apartment. Jean’s diet club soon outgrew the apartment. The before and after transformations of successful members were all the marketing that was required to convince people to join. It was from these humble beginnings that Weight Watchers was born.
The before and after photo has been used to market diet and beauty products for decades. And even though transformation stories would work in the marketing of services, we don’t use them often.
There is no better way to tell your story than to show people who they will become in the presence of your product. What was your customer’s life like before he used your product or service?
What’s his new reality?
That’s your story.
Image by Social Traders
Transactions Vs. Experiences
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The hotel was nothing to write home about. You couldn’t really fault it either. The facilities, which matched the hotel’s star rating were as described. The room was clean. The bed was comfortable. The staff were efficient and polite. But—you knew there was a ‘but’ coming. The place lacked a spirit of generosity. It had no soul. There was no magic. It was as if the management had deliberately planned to deliver the minimum required to meet spec and no more. I got a room, and the hotel got my credit card details. A transaction took place.
Every business has a story to tell about how discerning, disgruntled and sometimes downright demanding customers have become. It’s as if peoples’ expectations know no bounds. There’s another side to this story though. Our side. The story about what’s at stake for us as leaders, entrepreneurs and marketers. When we deliver the minimum required and deal only in transactions, we’re not only disappointing customers—we’re selling ourselves short in all kinds of ways that can’t be measured on a balance sheet at the end of the quarter.
Our customers subconsciously mirror our attitudes and behaviour. When we deal in transactions, we become transactional brands. When we go above and beyond, people know. When we are generous, they respond.
My friend James runs a thriving cafe in Fitzroy Gardens called KereKere. The cafe gets its name from the Fijian custom of giving without expecting anything in return. KereKere customers leave feeling that they got more than they paid for because James has intentionally built a business that creates experiences. James doesn’t believe in simply processing transactions.
The inadequacy of the adequate isn’t just that it leaves customers feeling flat, it’s that it denies us the opportunity to do our best, most meaningful work.
Image by Linh Nguyen
Marketing Efficacy And Expectations
When ‘meal replacement’ shakes first came to market they seemed like the answer to a dieter’s prayers. Replacing one or two regular meals with a calorie counted milkshake meant ingesting fewer calories, resulting in rapid weight loss. Meal replacements worked for some people for a little while. Those first few pounds often ‘fell off’. But monotony soon overcame motivation. Dieters gained weight as soon as they went back to eating real food.
The efficacy of the product failed to meet expectations. It’s not that the product didn’t work.
It’s just that it didn’t do everything the customer hoped it would do.
We have a similar problem when it comes to marketing. We sometimes expect our marketing messages to do too much heavy lifting and are disappointed with the results. It’s almost impossible for a marketing message to take a customer from awareness to action in a single leap. And yet, becoming the outlier is the holy grail of marketing. We dream of being the bestseller, the blockbuster, the breakthrough. Mostly we’re disappointed by our results.
Often the problem isn’t the efficacy of our marketing—it’s our expectations about the kind of change it’s possible to create, with the resources we have, in the time we’ve allowed. Two questions worth asking at the outset then—what are we asking this marketing message to do and is it reasonable to expect the result we want in the time we have?
Image by Paul Kelly
Being Seen And Heard
The numbers vary, but the trend is unmistakable. The average consumer is subjected to more marketing messages every day. In a world where it’s harder to get noticed marketers have responded by trying to be more visible. Being noticed is the goal of most marketing.
The irony is five seconds in the spotlight doesn’t make or break a career or a company. It’s the five years of work that preceded those five seconds that make all the difference.
Our goal isn’t simply to been seen and heard—it is to do work that’s worthy of being seen and heard.
Image by Blahu