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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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A search engine that's both personal & social

Outlook
 

The above is a peek into the future of search engines.  Everyone uses google, and their mothers use Yahoo.  But increasingly we may see some advanced users using search engines like blekko who have found a great niche in making advanced and custom searching easy.  It's been a unacknowledged need of mine for a while that when doing deep research in a very obscure topic, it's hard to find the information that you need. This is because not many people are linking to relevant articles, for one reason or another.  Or because many of the links are sponsored or overly targeted by seo firms (overlinked?).  Blekko allows you to easily filter and sort results like things like date, or SEO rank.  More interestingly, you can search pre-defined slices of the web using "slash tags".  So /tech will give you technology related websites and /techblogs will give you ... yes, blogs related to technology. 

 

It also changes the game a bit in a few essential ways:

 

Searches become personal

 

After a few minutes on blekko you start migrating websites that you find yourself visiting time and time again to lookup information.  This creates of list of favorites that is difficult to replace by the standard google, yahoo, bing offering. These engines have not made it clear that their algorithm's are better than blekko's, so we assume they are comparable.  As a heavy internet user & search maniac, I appreciate the customization and anything that reduces my time to information.

 

blekko increases the stickiness of the search experience

 

Personalization is king here.  Also, they allow teams of people to edit any particular tag.  So for example, the tag of "marketing" is claimed by 3 people at this point in their beta existence, but any number of people can contact the owners thusfar and request to be a editor as well.  Those with the largest following, I'm assuming will be elevated at some point to be a preferred tag.  Possibly be the default tag of the blekko-sphere.  Yes, google is attractive because of the sheer pervasive nature of their set of apps, and the fact that I can talk search into my Android phone. For quick things, Google still works best.  But for difficult things, other search engines like Wolfram and Blekko may be increasingly tapped.

 

Searches become more social

 

I can follow other users' set of searches. While this would be possibly a liability for google because of the omnipresent attention on how much personal information they're collecting on all of us, it's not a problem for a new entrant like blekko.  I can follow other users with interesting tags and take their ideas for sets of websites (which comprise a tag search), and build upon it, or create variants. 

 

All in all, it's one of the best new web tools I've seen out there, and it'll be great to see where they go from here.

Filed under  //  marketing   search   social media  
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People should be replying to your marketing emails

A company called SendGrid has a great idea that they may be able to monopolize to increase their marketshare in the Email Service Provider space.  Namely, it's using a very open set of API's to enable email sends.  This may not itself be unique, but this combined with the idea that people on your opt-in marketing email list should ideally reply to an initial email to confirm that they want to be on the list, does two great things:

 
1)  It is a double opt-in method, assuring you're using a gold standard in email marketing privacy practices
 
2)  Because people reply to your email, it adds them to their whitelist (especially in yahoo and gmail), which increases your overall deliverability
 
More email service providers may take a note from this overall approach.  It results in happier subscribers, and when you arm your marketers with better analytics (increased deliverability), they're happier as well.

Filed under  //  ctr   deliverability   email marketing   marketing  
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Make your business stand out by messing up your email delivery

Every once in a while you need to chuckle at an email marketing message that could have been better. Mozeo's a good mobile marketing company, but someone messed up a bit when sending out this email, with at least 4 -5 inches of whitespace at the top of the email.  I almost deleted it after realizing that I had to scroll down twice just to find the first image/ text...

 
I am using Outlook - not an obscure client to design for. A good reminder that testing to mutliple email clients is definitely a good idea before hitting send.
 
Outlook

Filed under  //  email marketing   fail   marketing  
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Wasted banner ads?

I was on slideshare today and noticed a peculiar phenomenon - one that I have seen in the past but only on smaller blogs/websites.  Essentially it was 1 particular ad, repeated several times in close proximity to one another.  In my mind this is a complete waste of advertising spend. Well, maybe not a complete waste, but the fact that the left hand ad is repeated twice is very distracting visually, and it compels me NOT to look at the ad. A better effect would just to use the "skyscraper" ad format. 

 

But at least Google is making money.

 

Outlook

Filed under  //  advertising   marketing   web tools  
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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

Img_0005

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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Be honest about the Brand - and don't pretend you're Charlie Rose

AdAge launched a hilarious and scathing review, from a marketing perspective, of what everyone can learn by NBC's missteps with regard to the Jay Leno Show.  I did manage to watch the Jay Leno Show last week and realized very quickly that Jay tries to be serious (when interviewing 1 on 1) - sort of Charlie Rose-esque - but unfortunately fails at it.  They should have stuck to the parodies and "man on the street" segments.

 
Anyway, AdAge calls out the fact that NBC paints the Jay Leno brand as being an "institution" that everyone in America would watch irrespective of the quality of programming - because it's Jay!  Instead, the quality breaks through and we realize that Jay isn't funny ALL the time, and thus, his status as an "institution" is falling sharply. It would not have been so bad for NBC if they hadn't have painted the brand in such a way... it just erodes trust in the network itself.  A lesson for anyone promoting product brands of any sort.
 
 
7. It's dangerous to pretend your brand is something it's not.
NBC executives, in marketing Leno's move to prime time, tried to position him as a beloved broadcast institution -- like they were bestowing a comedic gift on America -- as a cover for their entirely cynical cost-cutting. In reality, though, it was clear all along that late-night Leno functioned as a sort of utility: an easy, default pre-bedtime diversion literally not ready for prime time, even after 17 years. NBC used to offer substantive entrees at 10 ("ER," "Law & Order"), and figured that viewers could be forced to switch to comfort food. But Leno at 11:35 wasn't ever really even meatloaf; he was more like that stale bag of Funyuns in the back of the cupboard you were willing to settle for because mindless late-night snacking is ... mindless.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=139926

Filed under  //  advertising   marketing  
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"Targeted" is not a theme, it's a necessity

  The winterberry group is now seeing a trend that we have seen for a while. That marketers are requiring more specialized, focused campaigns that take advantage of a more personal approach to niche groups.  Some companies have already built tools to focus marketing on targeted messaging, others will have to catch up.

 

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=102153#

The white paper outlines six trends that took hold in 2008 and another three that are expected to continue defining the role of direct mail in 2009. Expected 2009 trends include:

  • Recession forces decrease in spending
  • Volumes fall as mailers seek efficiencies
  • Production sector in crisis
  • New demand for data, analytics, multichannel
  • Mail emerges as ideal complement to digital
  • "Green" practices fluctuate in importance
  • End of untargeted, high-volume campaigns
  • New marketing automation technologies applied
  • Postal Service as the principal mail delivery channel compromised

Filed under  //  direct mail   marketing  
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