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Articles filed in: Marketing
Why This And Not That?
Why do some shoppers choose to pay $3.48 for a 500g bag of Quaker oats when they can buy a kilo of supermarket own brand oats for $3.29, which works out at less than half the price?
Why do we feel better as soon as the doctor, armed with nothing more than a lolly stick asks us to ‘say aah’ and peers into our mouth?
Why is an original artwork by Banksy less valuable when we don’t know it really is a Banksy?
Why are we drinking more bottled water every year?
It turns out that our beliefs can be far more powerful than our thoughts and our customers are far less rational than we think.
Image by Young Sok Yun.
Become Part Of The Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I arranged to meet one of my Twitter friends for the first time in the little bar at the front of my hotel. He is a designer from London and as luck would have it we were visiting New York at the same time, (something we discovered through our simultaneous posts of Times Square on Instagram).
We met, we drank, we chatted.
“I’m surprised you’re staying in a hotel.” he said.
“My partner and I have scored a really cool place on Airbnb. It’s got a giant blackboard in the kitchen and it’s big enough to play frisbee indoors.”
How I chose to travel didn’t fit with the story Tom had constructed about me. The kind of people who meet on Twitter, whose work gives them freedom to travel—people with blogs, who discover that their friends are in New York by checking Instagram, don’t stay in hotels. And very, very soon they will never queue for a black taxi in London or a hail yellow cab from the sidewalk in New York, because riding with Uber will be one of the ways they signal that they belong.
We are the stories we tell ourselves and the choices we make from who we follow on Twitter, to how we experience a city, where we shop and what we buy have become as big a part of our identity as the place where we were born.
Buying is no longer about getting things we need. It’s about reinforcing a set of beliefs we hold and share. Marketing is not about finding new ways to sell more of something. It’s about affinity more than it’s about price—feelings more than facts. Marketing is about giving people frames of reference and context. And above all, marketing is about becoming part of peoples’ story.
Image by llamatofu.
Shifting The Focus From Results To Relationships
There’s a problem with how performance is measured by both ourselves and in our organisations. Typically you have a budget and targets to achieve. The purpose of the budget is to make sales go up, or waiting times go down. Our systems are designed to judge and reward us on results. If the campaign you authorised sold more t-shirts last quarter then that’s a win. But if the only way you can get sales to go up is to spend money on a campaign to make sales go up, then you’re going to have to keep spending money on campaigns to make sales go up.
I’ve seen brand mangers ride the wave of fantastic public awareness campaigns that boosted their results in the short term, only to see sales come crashing back down a couple of months later as the awareness they had engineered evaporated along with their advertising budget. And so the cycle perpetuates. They spend more to get more. While it might keep some businesses and ad agencies afloat for a little while this is not a sustainable strategy. There is no shortcut to mattering to your customers.
It’s a lot harder to justify building little by little for the long term, because we are constantly measuring and measured by short term results. If you apply for a promotion or a new post your employer wants to see the sales figures, she needs metrics as proof that you’ve done your job. And so we work hardest of all to give others (and ourselves) something to measure. We look for quick wins and easy targets which reinforce the notion that we’re doing our job. Sometimes we just end up measuring the wrong things and in doing so we subconsciously demonstrate to the people we should be serving that we’re not in it for the long haul.
When Warby Parker released it’s first fun and quirky annual report it led to their three biggest sales days at the time. Something that was designed to delight customers became an accidental marketing tool.
“It very much fit into our philosophy of being transparent. We find the more information we share, the more vulnerable we are, and that sharing the positive and the warts—the deeper relationship we build with our customers.”
—Neil Blumenthal Co-Founder Warby Parker
What if we optimised our businesses, our organisations and our cultures for relationships first and results second? What is we focused less on creating awareness and more on generating trust. What if we traded quick wins for loyalty? What if we stopped trying to be seen and learned how to see instead?
What might the real gains be then?
Image by Stavos.
There’s More Than One Way To Tell Your Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In 2004 Chanel paid $33 million for the production of a two minute film which became the most expensive advert ever made. In a post GFC economy that figure seems shocking, but Chanel is one of the most valuable global brands. They have the marketing budget and they’re not afraid to use it.
Dropbox was founded four years after the Chanel advert aired and has grown to a 300 million user base with a $10 billion valuation by using a clever referral and social sharing reward marketing strategy. Instead of paying to talk about their product Dropbox solved a problem and then rewarded happy users with extra storage when they referred friends.
In a world where social capital increasingly drives the results of companies who thoughtfully connect with their customers it’s time to ask ourselves some tough questions about how we go about influencing the people we serve.
Permission marketing and lower barriers to entry mean we have more opportunities than ever to reach people—but just because we can doesn’t mean we should. There’s a difference between having something to say and having either the opportunity or the budget to say it.
Our companies, non-profits and businesses are judged more and more not by what they sell, but by how and why they sell it. What we stand for is as much a differentiator as what we make. It turns out that there is more than one way to tell your story.
Image by Andrew Ferguson.
Pick One Thing
When you think of Apple you immediately think about great design. You are reminded that Apple chooses to lead with design even in the moments between the moments that matter to you as a customer. It’s hard not to be in awe of a company that cares so much about your experience that they make the packaging feel like a gift.
Patagonia leads with transparency. It’s not always easy to tell your customers the truth, but once you make that decision every subsequent decision becomes easier.
Zappos chooses to lead with service. This choice underpins everything they do, from who they hire to how they treat their staff and customers.
Peter and Anca lead with love. They don’t make the most candles and they hug their customers every day.
The secret of all great companies (big and small) is that they choose. They understand how they create value and they do it on purpose, with intention.
What are you choosing to lead with?
Image by Amanda Tipton.
Who Is Your Customer?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Joan works as a personal trainer at the local gym. She looks old enough to be someone’s grandma, but I don’t think she is. Unlike most women her age who live around here Joan doesn’t wear a wedding ring. She visits the same cafe for breakfast every day, but not at the same time because some days she has a client at 5.30am. On those days she goes straight to the cafe afterwards. She always eats alone, drinks a skinny latte and normally has toast. When she decides to ‘mix it up a bit’ she tells the staff she’s in the mood for a change today. She seems to struggle with her weight and wrestles with herself over whether to spread butter on her toast—some days she doesn’t.
All of the staff at the cafe know her by name and they don’t seem to mind when she reminds them that they have forgotten to turn the music down, or the lights on. Joan doesn’t sit at the same table every day like some of the other regular customers. That tiny decision is her way of telling herself she’s not stuck in a rut. She lives close by because it’s not the kind of place people visit every day unless they have a reason to come and the cafe is not the kind of place people drive across town to experience. But then Joan is not really here for coffee and toast.
If I were the cafe owner I’d be working harder to make Joan feel like I cared that she showed up every day. I’d want to show her that she mattered.
Tell me about your customer. Not just her age, income and postcode—but tell me who she really is.
What keeps her awake at night? Where does she spend her time both online and offline? What does she care about? Tell me about her fears, hopes and dreams. What matters to her?
Tell me everything you know. Find out what you don’t.
If we don’t take the time to really see our customers and get to know their story, how can we create the things and experiences they want and need? They are giving us clues every day, we just need to open our eyes and more importantly our hearts.
Image by Charles Roffey.
How To Be Great
Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine don’t make great headphones because they know the most about headphones. They make great headphones because they understand how music should sound and more importantly, they know that people want to feel, not just hear when they listen to it.
“The right song at the right time will give you a chill. Make you pull someone close. Nod your head. Sing in the mirror. Roll down the car window and crank the volume to the right.”
—Ian Rogers, CEO Beats Music
Our best ideas and innovations are not born from simply wanting to make them great.
We make them great by understanding who they are for and why they should matter.
Understanding what makes people tick and why is far more valuable than we think.
No Business Is In A Market Of One
When dance partners compete they know the other couples are there on the dance floor with them, but they never focus on what the competition is doing. Instead they relentlessly hone each move and perform it for the audience as if it were their only chance to dance the dance. They don’t allow the fact that they are competing to stop them dancing.
It’s our competition’s job to compete and yet we’re often surprised when they do. We complain when ideas are stolen or replicated. We spend at least as much time looking over our shoulder at the competition as we do on practicing our steps in readiness for the performance.
What would the world look like if you focused on doing the work as if today was the last time you would get to do it?
You can allow the noise from the competition to fade into the background. You can chose to act as if you were the market of one for the people you want to serve.
Image by Wigwam Jones.
The First And Last Question Your Customers Subconsciously Ask
And the one you must spend a great deal of your time answering….
Why should I care?
Why should I care about your new app?
Why should I care that your innovation pioneers the latest technology?
Why should I care about your fundraising campaign and not that one?
Why should I care about the time you’ve invested in elegant design?
Why should I care that you showed up today to play that tune?
In a world of finite time and infinite choices it’s easier to rationalise walking past than ever before.
The only way to matter is to work out what matters first. You need to give people a reason to stop and listen to your song.
Image by Alfonso.
Stop Selling Stuff, Start Selling Stories
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
David is a genius who happens to sell for a living. I watched him sell a $150 pair of Ugg boots to a woman who had been killing time wandering through his souvenir shop with no big agenda one wet Friday afternoon.
He began, not as many salespeople would, by asking what she was looking for and instead he asked, who she was looking for. From there questions and answers easily flowed. The age of the woman’s granddaughter. The story about how she was always asking her grandma to buy her a pair of ‘expensive fake Ugg boots back home’. The grandma’s concerns about how they might damage her feet or make them smell.
David rearranged each of her responses effortlessly, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into a solution. One by one he dispelled the woman’s fears and gained her trust. Then—and only then, did he reflect the story of the moment when grandma would hand the boots over to her granddaughter, in their special reusable bag that would be ‘shown off to friends at school’, back to her.
“I might even get a hug for these.” she said, as she handed over three fifty dollar notes.
And there, expressed in that single sentence was what David had already known.
The best salespeople, marketers and brands don’t actually sell us stuff they’ve made in factories or built with lines of code. They don’t even sell us things we want or need. They simply sell the story we want to live and believe back to us.
Image by Gary Jarvis.