Steve Yastrow

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 »

“It’s Already Prepared”

This past Saturday morning I took my 16 year-old son Noah to a restaurant, Max’s Deli, in Highland Park, IL  I had told Noah about the breakfast burritos at Max’s, and he was excited to order one.  However, I didn’t see the breakfast burrito on the menu.

“Don’t you have breakfast burritos?” I asked the waitress when she arrived at our table.

“Only Monday through Friday.”

“Do you think they could make one on a Saturday?” I asked.

“I’ll ask.” she replied.

“What’s in the breakfast burrito?” asked Noah. “There are certain things I don’t like.”

“I don’t know what’s in it.” she said, somewhat curtly. “It’s just what they put in the breakfast burrito.”

“Can you ask what’s in it, and then I’ll tell you what I want in my burrito?” Noah continued.

Now, here’s the kicker:  The waitress replied: “You can’t change it. It’s already prepared.”

What?  They haven’t served a breakfast burrito since yesterday, and “it’s already prepared?”

The only thing that was “already prepared” was the waitress’s pre-fab, scripted, impersonal, customer-insensitive response.  I am a big enemy of scripting in service situations; when service employees are taught to spout policies and pre-written statements they are liable to come up with insipid gems like this one.

Here’s what happened next.  The waitress relented, and Noah ordered what he wanted, which amounted to a tortilla with scrambled eggs and onions in it.  In the end, her rotten, transactional, canned, scripted response was totally unnecessary.

What causes companies, and their employees, to think that customers are so dumb that it’s possible to tell them really stupid things?  What causes companies, and their employees, to forget the most basic elements of human communication and human relationships when they interact with customers?

Posted in Customer Encounters, Marketing | 10 Comments »

How will you unleash your latent profit?

In today’s newsletter, I focus on the 2nd step of the Mine Your Own Business System:  Design it.

Designing how you unleash latent profit requires you to address two very important questions:

1. What do we want customers to believe about us?
2. How are we going to encourage them to believe it?

How well is your organization able to answer these questions?  If your answer is “not well,” what are you doing to address these important questions?  Please share your comments!

For more an overview of the Mine Your Own Business System, please see my newsletter from 4 weeks ago.  For more information on Step 1: Find it!, please see my newsletter from 2 weeks ago.

Posted in Mine Your Own Business, latent profit | 2 Comments »

A ton of feathers

After landing in Baltimore late this afternoon, I popped over to Annapolis to meet with my colleague Dan Harris and his associate Steve Holt for a short social get-together. Over drinks and a bite to eat we got on to one of my favorite topics: How most companies don’t tap the potential in their existing customer base. We were discussing how companies reflexively focus a disproportionate amount of resources on acquiring new customers at the expense of developing their current customer relationships.

Steve was making the related point that it’s much more profitable to have fewer, high-producing customers than many low-producing customers. He suddenly improvised a great line: “A ton of bricks weighs as much as a ton of feathers, but it takes up a lot less space.”

What a great image! Managing a ton of feathers requires a lot of overhead “space” in your company. If you can concentrate your revenue “weight” in some very profitable bricks, you’ll be in much better shape.

Posted in We relationships | 1 Comment »

The Rule of The Few and The Many

Close your eyes for a minute and think of a few companies you really like doing business with. (You can open them now) Now, try to remember the interactions that influenced your opinions of those companies.

How many were interactions that were created “en masse” for you and other customers, such as ads, web home pages, fine print, FAQ’s, direct mail pieces, etc.?

How many were one-on-one interactions, such as personal advice from a salesperson, a customer service rep fixing a problem for you, a maintenance person trouble-shooting an issue for you, etc.?

Here is the simple truth: Marketing becomes less effective the more people it tries to reach at one time.

No doubt, it’s impossible to talk to customers one at a time, all of the time. It’s even hard to talk to them in small groups all of the time. Hey, even this blog is a form of mass communication. There are times when it is necessary, and even smart, to talk to customers as a group.

But it is also important to recognize that you are always making a compromise as you talk to many customers at one time. The natural tendency in marketing is to gang up communications and reach more customers, concurrently. Don’t look at this tendency as a convenience that makes the marketing job easier. Look at it as a compromise, even if it is a necessary compromise, that limits your ability to communicate.

Remember The Rule of the Few and the Many. It’s a simple rule: When possible, few is always better than many.

Posted in Brute Force Branding, Marketing | No Comments »

Stop targeting your customers

“We’re attacking the target market with a rifle shot approach.”

“We’re in a fierce battle with the competition to capture market share.”

“We’ve scheduled a volley of advertising for the fall.”

I’ve actually heard people say these things. What is this, marketing, or West Point?

Why are we targeting customers? Are we trying to shoot them?

I’ll bet many of these companies claim to have a focus on “relationship marketing.” (Which usually means their IT department manages CRM software and they use it to “target” offers to certain customers)

These are marketing words I avoid:

“target”
“chase”
“go after”
“attack”
“penetrate”
“exploit”
“saturate”
“capture”
“break through”
“seduce”
“Them”

These are marketing words I love:

“engage”
“collaborate”
“dialogue”
“listen”
“respond”
“dance”
“encounter”
“involve”
“We”

Throwing information at customers is a very ineffective method of communication. If I want to persuade you of something, would I have much luck if I tried to “capture” you or “target” you?

Relationships require dialogue. Monologue can cripple relationships in their tracks.

Marketing is not hypnosis. Is it not something you do to your customers. It is something you do with them.

Posted in Marketing | 16 Comments »

I call them “customers”

Seth Godin and Daniel Pink are two of the most important business writers today … so it is with humility that I disagree with them. Seth wrote a blog post this week titled “Citizens,” in which he asked the question, “What do you call the people that marketers interact with? The ones who aren’t customers yet…” The answer, which Seth said came out of a conversation Dan Pink, is “citizens.”

I call them customers.

My definition of a customer is this: Anyone whose actions affect your results.

I have found this definition to be very useful, because it helps you realize that the job of sales and marketing is not to write brochures, or do ads, or make sales pitches. Sales and marketing, simply, are about encouraging people to do things that positively affect your results.

And, this definition helps you recognize that many of the people, or organizations, who affect your results don’t pay you money. Your vendors affect your results. The media may affect your results. For some of you, the government affects your results. And, people who are “prospective customers” are actually customers, since their actions can affect your results. Why not employ a good marketing approach when trying to motivate these people, even though they are not paying customers?

Relationships with customers start before they are paying customers. And, marketing doesn’t stop after a someone becomes a paying customer. (I’ll admit, I was surprised that Seth, our uber-guru of marketing, started the post by asking, “What do we call the people that marketers interact with? Those who aren’t customers yet …” He, of all people, recognizes that marketing isn’t only focused on creating new, paying customers. Just look at his concepts of Permission Marketing, Idea Viruses, Meatball Sundaes, etc. He always writes about marketing as something much more than lead generation.) The actual point at which someone becomes a paying customer is just a transition point. Yes, it is an important transition point, but it is not a discontinuity in the relationship. We don’t need to start relating to this person in a whole new way; in fact, in many cases it will seem disingenuous if we do.

I certainly agree with the post’s admonition against thinking of future paying customers as part of a “target market.” (See page 79 in We, “Marketing words that I avoid”)

But, I am committed to thinking of anyone who affects my results as a customer, even if they are not yet paying me … or will never pay me. That way, I will interact with them as a customer, and I will have a better chance of encouraging them to act in ways that drive my business results.

Posted in Marketing, We relationships | 7 Comments »

Super Bowl Rant

Have a look at my Super Bowl rant on tompeters.com:

We live in an age of smart consumers who are not easily sold. A rule for this marketplace: The more people you try to talk to at one time, the less effectively you communicate with each individual person.

Posted in Brute Force Branding | 2 Comments »