Steve Yastrow

Don’t stop marketing

Today’s newsletter, Most Companies Stop Marketing, is Part 3 of my series about how to tell if your company is doing good marketing.

Marketing is about encouraging your customers to act in ways that improve your business results.  Since it’s often hard to track marekting results directly, the seven questions I address in this series can help you evaluate your company’s marketing efforts. Today we are focusing on this question: Are your marketing efforts integrated over the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your company?

Companies that practice great marketing don’t stop marketing once they acquire a customer.  Great marketing builds long-term relationships with customers.

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How not to talk about marketing

Let’s say you need to talk about marketing with a non-marketing executive.  How should you do it?

Don’t talk about marketing.

My life-long empirical study shows this: Most executives are suspicious of the marketing advice they receive.  Why?

To quote one exec, “They keep talking about all this friggin’ marketing.”

Through my workshops and consulting, I spend a lot of time with C-level executives who don’t have a marketing background.  They are skeptical when marketers sell marketing ideas as marketing ideas, and not as business ideas.  They are skeptical when marketers look at a marketing budget as an entitlement, and not as an investment. And they are skeptical when marketers talk about marketing as a secret, magic formula, that only marketing professionals can understand.

My advice, if you need to sell a non-marketing executive on a marketing idea:  Don’t talk about marketing.

Talk about business issues that matter. Talk about the business results your marketing program is designed to generate. Talk not about what your marketing program does, but what it does for the business.

If you want to sell a C-level executive on a customer loyalty program, don’t talk first about frequency of communications, and (please!) don’t talk about database technology.  Focus on the untapped latent profit in your existing customer base.

If you want a new budget to focus on social media, don’t talk about social media as a mega-trend, and how it is important to show your customers you “get it.” Focus on how peer-to-peer marketing capitalizes on your company’s strength in gaining business through customer referrals.

Many marketers are reticent when it comes to talking about results because many of their most important programs can’t be tied directly to results; it’s hard to show how many customers came to you because of a story in the New York Times, or because you got more sign-ups on your Facebook fan page. But that’s all the more reason to talk about results.  Because direct results are hard to demonstrate, it’s important to show that you have created marketing strategies that aim for the right results. A strategic foundation can build confidence when direct, measurable results don’t exist.

Change the frame of reference. If you have a business conversation, and not a marketing conversation, the person with whom you are speaking will be much more receptive to your marketing ideas.

Posted in Marketing | 4 Comments »

We know where you live

Last week (December 6, 2009, page 26), The New York Times Magazine ran a story about a promotion run by Blu Dot, a furniture maker.

Here’s how the promotion worked:  Recognizing the accepted New York tradition of picking up your neighbor’s discarded furniture from the sidewalk, Blu Dot placed its chairs next to bags of garbage throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Chair-drop locations were announced on Twitter, and photos of chair-snatchings were posted to a Flickr account.

Ok, so far this sounds like a creative marketing promotion, recognizing a local cultural habit while using contemporary marketing tools.

But there was one piece of the promotion that really bothered me.  Half of the chairs had a hidden G.P.S. transmission device, so that the chair – and its new owner – could be tracked. The idea was to follow-up with the new owners to include them in a video about the promotion.

The article described how one woman noticed the G.P.S. device and ripped it from the chair, but claims nobody else complained about this hidden “bug.” Frankly, I’m surprised, and I highly recommend that anyone who wants to duplicate this promotion ditch the G.P.S. part.

When someone accepts a free product from you they are not giving you permission to follow them home. What Blu Dot did was nothing short of spam: They used electronic means to sneak into people’s homes. No matter how much people like your product, you risk scaring them away if you try to slip surreptitiously into their lives.  It’s really bad marketing.

And, besides, it’s pretty creepy.

Posted in Badvertising | 5 Comments »

Is your company doing good marketing? (continued)

In today’s newsletter, I focus on Question 3 of the 6 questions I use when I begin to evaluate a company’s marketing efforts.

Question 3 asks, “Are you clear about the rich story you want your customers to understand?“  Many companies look at their brands in a very cursory way, while their customers are willing to create rich brand stories in their minds.  One step to great marketing: Create a rich brand story that encourages customers to think, “I get it, I want it and I can’t get it anywhere else.”

Posted in Brand Harmony, Marketing | No Comments »

Mental Tendonitis

Over the last few years we’ve heard about new conditions such as “BlackBerry Thumb.”  Human evolution did not prepare us for the way we overuse our hands to send text messages and write emails on our smart phones, and this leads to pain and ailments that we haven’t had to endure in the millions of years since we developed opposable thumbs.

Makes sense.  I got my first cell phone in 1987, and in the last 22 years my hands have been subjected to gymnastics they hadn’t seen in the previous 22.  It often hurts.

Something even more sinister is happening to our brains.  Human beings evolved to deal with the social issues of small clans and the vocational challenges of the hunter gatherer.  As time went on and civilization progressed, we began to encounter much more information, and by Elizabethan times the data an educated person was exposed during his or her entire  lifetime had expanded to equal that of a current weekday edition of the New York Times. Now, of course, the information we are inundated in our contemporary lifetimes has multiplied well beyond that.

BlackBerry Thumb is nothing compared to the mental tendonitis we’re inflicting on our brains. We live in a constant state of information overload and time poverty.  We feel the only option is multitasking and multithinking, but our frontal cortices, with their limited capacity of dealing with about 40 bytes of information each second, aren’t very good at multi-anything.  The result is that we’re often distracted while interacting with people, as our minds hyperlink from topic to somewhat-related topic, and every few seconds remember that we’re supposed to be in a conversation.

The people with whom we’re speaking recognize that we’re not engaged, leading to another ill of modern life: People repeating themselves over and over, because they don’t have confidence they’re being heard. This leads to a pernicious feedback loop, as the listener listens even less as the speaker repeats himself, leading the speaker to repeat even more and the listener to listen even less.  It’s frightening to think how often things we say to people in person get as much true attention as a random tweet.

Hyperlinking has become a model not only for distracted thinking but for disjointed group conversations. I spend a lot of time facilitating group discussions, and I often see people try to “click” on a phrase in someone else’s sentence in order to jump to a related topic. I’ve learned reel them back by clicking on an imaginary “back” button.

Our modern world is busier, more fragmented, more crowded, more disjointed and noisier than anything we were made for. We’re not going to change the world we live in – in fact, we love it and we wouldn’t want to change it. But let’s recognize that we’re not prepared for it, and be aware of the challenges it imposes on us. Let’s try to filter the noise and use our amazing, highly-evolved mammalian brain in a way that leverages its strengths, not in a way that taxes its powers.

Otherwise  we’ll end up with a severe case of mental tendonitis.

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Be patient – You are a christmas tree farmer

Yesterday, I ran into a 24-year old young man who is the son of close family friends. I’ve known “Jake” since he was a little kid, so I’ve seen for years that he has a magnetic, charismatic personality, and has always been able to attract friends.

About a year ago Jake started working for a local firm selling life insurance and investments – a very difficult career for anyone to start at a young age, with its long sales cycles and the need to get people to trust you with their money.  He and I work out at the same club, so I see him on a regular basis and have a chance to hear updates on his progress. Some days I’d see him, elated, after a promising meeting with a prospect.  Sometimes he was discouraged he wasn’t closing more sales yet.

My comments to him:  You have started a career path where long-term relationships create riches.  If you have enough great meetings with prospects now, you will start to build relationships with some of them.  When you are 40, some of the relationships you start this month may be paying your mortgage.  Meetings you have next month will start relationships that will help send your kids to college.  If anybody can make it in this business, you can. The only question: Can you wait?

In most businesses, customer relationships are your most valuable asset. Jake has chosen a business where this is especially true, with great rewards for those who can create and nurture long-term relationships.  But we’re all like Jake to an extent: Can we be patient and invest now, one relationship-building encounter at a time, in building those relationships that will help us prosper in the future?

Certainly, Jake could use his exceptional relationship-building skills for more short-term financial gains.  He could be a waiter in a fine-dining restaurant, creating 45-minute relationships that, I’m sure, would earn him the largest tips of all the servers.  But, beyond the few repeat customers who ask for him, these relationships wouldn’t create lasting value for Jake.  If his insurance job is like that of a christmas tree farmer, being a waiter would be more like that of a migrant worker, earning wages for today but starting over tomorrow.

I’m rooting for Jake, and for his firm. If he and they can be patient, all will benefit, including Jake’s future clients, since We relationships create strong benefits for both  buyers and sellers.

It’s easy to look at Jake’s situation and think, “I’m glad that’s not me. I could never sell insurance.” And yes, specifically, I could never sell insurance. I’d go nuts.  But Jake’s job really isn’t selling insurance. It’s building relationships that differentiate him from other providers in the minds of his clients.  And when we recognize that we again remind ourselves that Jake’s challenge is our challenge: Do we want to be the migrant worker or the christmas tree farmer?  Do we want to build our business around short-term transactions that produce their yields now, or do we want to invest in a rich, bountiful future harvest?

Posted in We relationships | 1 Comment »

Is your company doing good marketing?

How can you tell if your company is doing good marketing? That question is the subject of Steve’s newsletter today. Over the next couple weeks, he’s going to explore the following six questions to help you evaluate and improve your company’s marketing strategy:

• Are your marketing efforts focused on the right results?
• Are you clear about what you want customers to do?
• Are you clear about the rich story you want customers to understand?
• Are your marketing efforts integrated over the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your company?
• Are you focused on internal marketing within the company?
• Does management allow its marketing professionals to succeed?

Today, he focuses on the first two questions. Here’s the link again: How can you tell if your company is doing good marketing?

Posted in Brand Harmony, Marketing, We relationships | 3 Comments »