Search Results: one of the few
The Trouble With Positioning
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Do you remember when President Obama came to office first time round and negotiated with the secret service to keep his BlackBerry—Bush and Clinton didn’t even use email. In 2004, three years before the launch of the first iPhone, BlackBerry, who pioneered the smartphone had a market share of 47%. Four years ago Blackberry was the fastest growing company in the world.
Today it’s market share is just 2% and BlackBerry is facing obsolescence. The company had identified, occupied and dominated a product niche by developing a phone that could email. It was perfectly positioned to stay top of mind for years to come.
I think where BlackBerry came unstuck was in believing that their job as innovators was to change how people felt about their product, instead of wondering how smartphones might shape culture beyond accessing email on the go. In the end they didn’t lose out because of Apple and Google, they lost out by failing to understand how their brand would enable connection going forward.
The trouble with positioning is that it doesn’t take into account that business is symbiotic, that the relationship between brand and customer really is interdependent. That’s because positioning is less about considering what people value and more about telling people what to believe.
It’s not enough to be first to market or top of mind. The brands that we care about don’t just make innovative products, they shape our culture and make us feel like better versions of ourselves. They take account of what we believe, how we act and who we might want to become. Which is very different from riding the wave of first mover advantage.
Brands big and small connect people through a culture that’s bigger than themselves, provenance, adventure, sustainability, entrepreneurship, self expression, conscious consumption, sisterhood and real food to name a few.
So tell me, what beliefs are you connecting your customers to?
Image by Lindsay Turner.
Value And The Macaron Effect
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Let’s face it, a macaron isn’t even a bite. It’s gone before you know it and although your brain knows you’ve had one, your stomach could beg to differ. Macarons have been around for centuries, but I don’t remember seeing the dainty, coloured, every flavoured, sandwiched confections that are ubiquitous now, even a few years ago. And they’re expensive for what they are in any language, doesn’t matter if it’s $3 or €3.
A lot of people don’t ‘get’ macarons.
“This is the single most overpriced thing in the history of capitalism. It’s a single, stupid little macaroon.”
—Rory Sutherland
Macarons are not designed for Rory, they are marketed to a sensibility and dare I say it, to women. Their value is highly subjective. The thing about a macaron is that much of its value is perceived.
The real value is psychological and therefore intangible.
It’s a sweet ‘treat’ with damage limitation built in.
A macaron is mostly almonds and egg white, low in fat, gluten free (two things we’ve come to care about), and so tiny the sugar can hardly count….right? When you’re rationalising about how many minutes on the treadmill it’s going to take to work it off, a macaron feels like a bargain compared to the other available choices in the cake cabinet.
One man’s rip-off, is another woman’s indulgence.
It turns out that like most things we buy, or value when we have everything we need, macarons are not a product, they are a story we tell ourselves.
Image by Katie.
No Second Chances
The beautiful city were I live is not known for startling customer service. Sad, but true. I think it might be the side effect of a combination of distance and isolation creating monopolies that have endured, making people complacent. When you were four hours on a plane from anywhere before the Internet there weren’t many options.
A true story from last weekend.
It was a glorious Sunday afternoon by the beach. One of the local hotels has spent millions renovating their tired building and we thought we’d check it out over a coffee while admiring the ocean view. There were about six people in the bar and one bar man who doubled as a barista.
He looked really unhappy to see us and told us just as much.
“If you’re looking for coffee it will be a long wait.
I have seven coffee orders already.
There are plenty of cafes along the strip.”
I’m not paraphrasing!
Things are changing, the Internet means we don’t always have to go to the world for what we want. Now it comes to us. Including things like half decent coffee that feels like an experience.
Order a dress for tonight’s party in the morning and it’s delivered within three hours.
When everything is a tap and swipe away second chances are becoming few and far between.
It’s up to you to behave like there were no second chances, because that’s the reality.
Image by adnamayy.
Intangibles Have A Real World Value
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Once upon a time earphones were ‘functional black’, until Apple changed everything by adding a layer of meaning to what was once a commodity worth nothing more than a few dollars.
By making earphones ‘accessory white’ Apple gave iPod owners a way to be noticed and to belong.
The most famous roof line in the world brings in a billion dollars a year to the Australian economy. Those vaulted shells don’t make Sydney Opera House more functional, but they change how people feel when they stand in front of it. They deliver joy far beyond the cost of the concrete, wood and tiles used to build them. The shells enable us to attach meaning and significance to a building and give us a story to tell.
In the real world a disproportionate amount of value is placed on the tangible. Things we can easily explain, or put our finger on. Of course it’s easier to place a value on what can be weighed and measured. And yet all around us, every day we are surrounded by proof that ‘soft innovation’ and that which we can’t touch, or easily measure has a real world value.
Time and again the market proves that the value of stuff is finite, but that the meaning we attach to stuff, the experiences we create around it and the stories we tell ourselves about it has exponential value. The fortune, not the cookie is what people really care about.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
Great Marketing: Begin With The End In Mind
The owner of my local beauty salon works really hard to make people feel special once they are through the door. She’s made improvements to the business in all sorts of ways since she took it over a year ago. This week I got an email from her, along with all the other people on her database….the first in a very long time.
It went something like this. Times are hard for small business and we are struggling a little. We need to fill just a few extra appointments a week to keep going. Why not book an appointment? I’m not sure how the email was meant to make me feel, but my immediate reaction wasn’t to reach for the phone.
Two marketing takeaways for you:
1. Don’t wait until you’re desperate to build connections with your clients.
A list of names and emails is just that.
It’s what you do with it that builds a sense of loyalty and belonging. It’s a lot easier to get bums on seats, when more bums on seats ‘this minute’ isn’t your only option.
2. Begin with the end in mind.
By that I don’t mean your end, which might be ‘more’…customers, revenue or appointments booked. Start by asking yourself these three questions.
“How do I want Sarah Jane to feel when she opens this email?”
“How does she want to feel?”
“How will I get her there?”
The ability to stand in your customer’s shoes is seriously underrated.
Image by David Martin.
Offers Vs. Offerings
Every July, (winter here in Australia, maybe summer where you are) and six months out from Christmas the big chain stores have an all caps ‘TOY SALE’. The toys are unremarkable, and they are marketed in an unremarkable, 20% off, when they’re gone they’re gone kind of way. The lesson is don’t miss out. Next July the retailers will mount exactly the same campaign with fliers and shouting adverts, because the offer is the only way they have to get customers into their store.
Customers understand that a special offer isn’t really all about saving them money. And although they are tempted by the feeling of making a smart purchase, they know in their hearts that offers are how businesses try to shift more stuff. Offers then are a short term tactic that will probably help you to sell more this week, but sales and discounts are not how the world’s most loved brands keep customers coming back.
Offerings on the other hand are strategic and generous. They layer one tiny connection upon another, helping to create meaning and significance bit by bit and changing how people feel about themselves when they are close to your brand. Offerings require patience for the long haul and they don’t necessarily have an immediate return on investment.
Offers might make the cash register ring today, but offerings build something that will sustain your business tomorrow.
And the flip side is that when you make more offerings, you’ll need fewer offers.
Image by Jason Short.
Why Starbucks Wins
You could have made a cup of instant coffee at home for a few cents this morning. Or you could even have splashed out on a flavoured Nespresso, brewed in your kitchen at 60 cents a shot.
So why did you go to Starbucks and pay eight times that price for a commodity?
A marketer would say that what you paid extra for was ‘the experience’.
The simple truth is you did it because it felt good.
That’s the reason your customers do what they do too.
Everything that Starbucks does, from naming their drinks to the music they play in the cafe is designed to make you feel good. It’s intentional, they do it on purpose.
That’s why it works.
What are you doing on purpose to make your customers feel good?
Image by Ronald Felton.
Is It Time To Stop Advertising?
Last week I passed a moving kid at the side of the road, where cars sped by at 80km per hour. He was wearing a red sandwich board that screamed, “BUY ONE GET ONE FREE,” and had clearly been given instructions to dance about to attract more attention. I was 200 metres past him when I realised he was advertising the unremarkable pizza place on the other side of the road. The dancing sandwich board guy made me question the value of advertising once again.
Advertising by definition was never designed to deliver either value or joy.
advertise (verb)
1. to announce or praise (a product, service, etc.) in some public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use it: to advertise a new brand of toothpaste.
2. to give information to the public about; announce publicly in a newspaper, on radio or television, etc.: to advertise a reward.
3. to call attention to.
Perhaps that’s why we’ve grown to resent it and how it interrupts us so much, not because we are more intolerant than past generations but because we have a choice to pay attention or not. How does it make you feel when a popup appears on a website’s landing page as soon as you arrive? Or when you answer the cold caller as you are stir-frying vegetables at 6pm?
Probably not how you want your customers to feel.
Fourteen years after Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing it’s still okay to interrupt people without any context, for one reason only.
Because we can.
That was never a good enough reason to make people care. Today if we want to survive in a world with unlimited choices we’ve got no option but to work harder to make the right people care more.
I once had a client who came to me having spent $6,000 on an advert in a glossy magazine. She knew the magazine’s circulation numbers, but she didn’t know who she’d reached. The phone didn’t ring once afterwards. I think she chose to advertise because it felt safe. Because if you’re in business that’s what you do to get customers and survive. Maybe that’s why the worst kind of advertising still exists, because businesses are scared that the phone won’t ring today?
I’m sure the dancing billboard sold a few more pizzas that evening, but we didn’t miss not seeing him on the side of the road the next day. And we only care about his pizzas (or those of the three other takeaways within a 5km radius) when they are 2-for-1.
Image by bcline.
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.
Rethinking The Sales Process
The food halls and nail bars were humming last Thursday evening. Apparently when they have a few extra shopping hours people want to do one of two things, grab a bite to eat or have their nails done. The designer clothes boutiques were dead. Not a soul in sight in any of them, apart from one, where the sales assistants were run off their feet for a reason.
That reason was permission.
The suits, shirts and shoes they stock are just as good as those in the store two doors down, not better. What this store has is something even more valuable than the stock that lines their shelves. They have my phone number, my email address and the permission to let me know when there is a genuine sale that I might be interested in. And they know how to use it.
Back in the day you just had to open the door and put stuff in the window. All you needed was a ‘come in we’re open’ sign. Because the customer had fewer choices a store owner didn’t need to give them a reason to walk in.
Thirteen years after Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing retailers are lamenting the death of the old sales process, and only now realising their mistake.
Online or offline, you need to give people a reason to come now.
And you need to know who to give that reason to.
Image by Jill G.