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About Me

I am heavy into marketing, and even more heavily into technology. You also might see some blog posts about modern art spring up here and there - so don't freak out.

I also blog at The Direct Marketing Voice, and throw around ideas as a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital.

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The Secret to Apple's Marketing Genius is not Marketing

This is probably the most insightful article on the brand of Apple that I've read thusfar. What it means for marketers, however, is that they need alot of help from the rest of their company to help to create a product that is in keeping with whatever their vision of a brand is. Great work from the Atlantic.:
When you hear some marketers talk about Apple, you hear about emotive benefits associated with the brand: the cool design aesthetic, the imagery in the advertising, and the sense of community evoked by seeing people you respect with Apple products. This glosses over the product's most important trait: functionality. Using an Apple product feels so natural, so intuitive, so transparent, that sometimes, even people paid to know what makes products great completely miss the cause of their addiction to Apple products. It's the natural, intuitive transparency of the technology. The superlative product experience comes from an unusual combination of human and technical understanding, and it creates the foundation of all the other positive aspects of the brand.
via theatlantic.com  

More about:  Database Marketing  Design Apple  Marketing Direct mail postcards Aesthetic

Filed under  //  aesthetic   apple   database marketing   design   emotion   marketing  
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Customer Feedback Providers & the new Art of Stories

A good article on Conversation Agent outlined some very important trends that are both around stories: one an internal story needed to shape your own business' strategy, and the other a need to grasp the old art of storytelling.

 

Looking at emerging trends:
Customer experience will be more important than ever -- we outlined a few areas to consider above. To those, I'll add the importance of the role of the community manager to represent brand experience.

Storytelling will evolve - location will become a key component; the speed at which stories are developed is crucial; and above all, emotional connections matter -- you cannot fabricate, push, or coerce emotional connection.

While most may know that we should be focusing on a customer's experience, few companies have adopted this into their internal processes to the extent that they should.  Customer's experiences should fuel the development of products, processes and communication. Many of us have been in meeting after meeting where opinions are levied, but no customer sentiment is aggregated.

 

Fortunately, there are a few tools that are emerging that will help us deal with these challenges.  Among the new tools, Get Satisfaction (focuses on providing an idea/suggestion aggregation tool), is one of the most attractive in crowd sourcing your companies' future direction.  On the web/usability side, there's  UserTesting.com , Userfly, or the IT favorite, Silverback.  All allow you to get first hand accounts at what the average user thinks about your website or web order process. Some of these even have extremely low cost payment structures.

 

The hard part will be getting people to agree that you should be designing around customers - oddly, enough.

 

The second bullet point addresses an interesting shift in the marketing landscape.  "Broadcast" and "Communications Plan" has been replaced by an idea of Storytelling. An age old artform that needs new stars.  In the age of twitter and facebook, the art of the story may be somewhere in between "the hook" (why someone should tune in - in 140 characters or less) and "the shocker" - content that was created citizen journalist style, that has information that no one else has. Intelligence is a natural resource. It's scarce, but present. Now it's time to mine it.

Filed under  //  advertising   emotion   marketing  
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Humor as an icebreaker

Marketing teams all around think about social media and sales as a series of tools.  But this banner by kinko's reminds us that sales is just an opportunity. It's an opportunity to impress a customer and reveal that companies are made up of more than just a brand.  They are made of people - and sometimes - people with a sense of humor.

 
When it comes down to it, who would you rather buy from?  A "negotiator" or a friend who knows how to crack a few jokes?

Photo

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Filed under  //  b2c   emotion   marketing  
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6 different ways to attract customers

Credit where due, I was browsing http://www.notorious-rob.com/ and came across this graphic that Rob found in @issue: the online journal of business & design (why had I not found this magazine before!).  Turns out they're citing it from a book that's coming out by Marty Neumeier, who has delivered some very interesting presentations before. 

 
Anyhow, this graphic seeks to compare the different disciplines of "wooing a customer". Hilarious:
 

Outlook

 

Besides this, I did happen upon a great video that encompasses many of the strategic marketing shifts, a' la Marty Neumeier:

 

Filed under  //  advertising   b2c   emotion   marketing  
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