Marketing Memos

Media ain’t what it used to be … thank God.

The internet has made everyone a publisher, and as such has completely rearranged from where information and power emit. Dead is the quaint era when all info rained like fetid manna from centralized sources. Today you, the marketing ground workers, have seemingly endless avenues for promoting your products, your brand and your profits.

Which is why some of you have been driven to drink (though for a few it was just a short stroll).

The reason self-medication is becoming popular in marketing circles has nothing to do with Mad Men or three martini lunches. It derives from needing to orchestrate outreach through all these media channels. Wherever such seeming chaos ensures, it is best to take a deep breath, a shot of something, and distill your options into a manageable set. In media, there are three basic categories through which you communicate to the world:

They Broadcast: This is traditional media – television, radio, newspapers, magazines – the rapidly fading Fourth Estate. Traditional media still has a place in modern marketing and is suited for when you need to cast a wide net over large tracts of market turf (product launches, corporate branding, etc.).

You Broadcast: Using content marketing, email and other means for directly connecting to target audiences. This approach is always cost effective, often targetable and, when done right, effective in promoting your stuff.

Everyone Broadcasts: Mainly social media, this is the leveraging of other people outside of traditional media to carry your messages and content to others.

What is maddening is that the means of manipulating each category is different, requiring different skills, tactics and teams. Yet common foundations – such as a consistent brand – must appear in all. Yet this rarely works for most companies. Small firms typically have one person in charge of media operations, and they are never savvy with them all. Large companies have different teams for each area of outreach, but stumble in cross-team coordination. It is never easy and never perfect.

Yet it is essential to do all three of the broadcast types, if for no other reason than your competition is already doing so.

Regardless of small or large operations, leadership and base lining consistency is the start. Small and large companies alike need to clearly document their brand, their core marketing messages, the position they wish the market to perceive them, and their communications objectives, then force reviews of all outbound activities against these documents. Small companies can outsource what they lack with in-house staff, but need to perform these documenting and enforcement steps as religiously as larger firms do with internal teams.

So put the bottle back in the desk drawer and wrap your mind around the three classes of media. When you launch any outreach, ask yourself which of the three should be involved, then breakdown the categories therein. This will sooth your aching head, shorten your work for the day and allow you to take that three martini lunch you had in mind.

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I have talked clients out of broad market research studies.

Doing so doesn’t help my bottom line.

We at Silicon Strategies Marketing do quite a bit of market research work, both qualitative and quantitative. Surveys have become one of my favorite projects because divining numerical answers from complex situations engages my inner geek. Our clients have a tendency to want to know everything today. They envision surveying their broad markets with dense surveys that measure everything, right down to if respondents were or were not bottle babies.

I talk nearly every one of them out of this.

Your market is divided into segments, for which there are a small handful of magical requirements. Yet all segments are not created equal – some are more interesting and profitable than others. After developing your segmentation model, your next step is to scorecard potential segments and quickly decide which are most viable– for there is no use attacking segments for which your product doesn’t fit, there are too few customers or the competition is too great. Your remaining target segments are where you should focus your greatest energies.

Which includes market research and surveying.

Hypothesize for a moment that 40% of your addressable market are segments for which you have good opportunity. The other 60% is either unprofitable, highly competitive or very ill defined. If you studied in detail the entire market, you would be guided to making decisions that degraded your profits and market penetration by 60%. If you deeply studied the remaining 40%, you would design more perfect whole products, dominate those segments, and have higher margins by not wasting marketing spend.

And who doesn’t like highly profitable market dominance.

The lesson herein is that who you survey is as important as what you ask. Surveying those people that make you rich and famous is better than surveying everyone. Segmenting precedes deep market research and keeps me from making more money (which sounds like poor marketing on my part, but not leading you astray is part of my value proposition).

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“I wasn’t aware you existed.”

Sounds like something my congressman would say to me.

Brand awareness is the minimal quantum of connection with customers, and the foundation for every other marketing maneuver. If they don’t know you exist, then there is no hope they will adopt your product. You must achieve brand awareness before customers can even approach brand knowledge, acceptance, preference, loyalty, advocacy and religion (and if you need some religious indoctrination on all things branding, flip to chapter six of the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual).

However, “awareness” has proven to be a tenebrous term. In branding, “awareness” constitutes being aware that a product exists, what value it provides and a notion of why the customer should give a durn. For example, I’m aware that Lady Gaga exists, but even after multiple brand exposures, I still cannot identify her value or why I shouldn’t change the channel. Granted, middle aged marketing gurus are not Gaga’s core demographic, and if they were then she would be in a line of work even lower than pop music.

Yet companies large and small fail to interweave value propositions and differentiation into their initial market outreach. Customers often encounter advertising blitz campaigns that force them to recognize a logo and jingle yet leave them completely clueless about the product. Great gobs of money have been wasted in pushing product facades under the noses of customers who are actively trying to ignore promotions.

If you were wondering where you bonus check went, talk to your promotions department.

A problem that new products and most start-ups face is how to gain brand awareness. There are dozens of tactical paths to making people aware that you exist, but there is a smaller set of imperatives for establishing quick and cost-effective brand awareness:

Target small:

Unless you have a hefty budget, it is better to target a small and highly homogeneous set of buyers, perhaps even a subset of one market segment. Your spend per prospect is greater and thus the odds of owning complete mindshare is higher. It is better to have 1,000 customers who know you to the bone than 1,000,000 who have only a fleeting recollection.

Hit them three times:

An ancient rule in cognitive sciences is that a person must be exposed to a product or concept three times before they are fully aware of it. The old joke goes something like:

Tell them the first time and they say “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Tell them the second time, they say “I think I’ve heard of that before.”

Tell them the third time and they reply “ I’ve known that my whole life!”

The point is that you cannot toss a single brand grenade into a market and hope the shrapnel hits everyone hard enough. You must lob pineapples until all targets are taken.

Hit them from multiple angles:

The human mind, even the one in your boss’s skull, is an elaborate matrix machine. It develops memory through a network of pattern recognition. The more vectors on which an item is presented, the more interconnections and the more memory a person has of the subject. In establishing brand awareness, exposing the customer to the brand via many avenues – TV, radio, magazines, social, PR, etc. – increases the likelihood that they will build brand awareness quickly. Since all these activities take treasure, it is again wise to target narrowly in your early brand awareness building.

Referential proof:

We trust people we know, which may indicate we don’t know people very well. But if someone you know even mentions a brand, you are much more likely to remember it. This is one reason social media has become the new marketing darling, because it leverages a highly effective means for building brand awareness, not just through unpaid exposure but through a trust association that imprints brands more indelibly.

One of your first jobs as a marketing maven is to establish brand awareness, and do so without bankrupting your company. Doing so means being smart on what you are building awareness of (value and differentiation), who you are building with (tight targeting) and how completely you own their brains. Failing to build brand awareness means not building a brand at all.

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A quick note to Silicon Strategies customers and fans of Marketing Memos.

We have nearly completed our relocation away from San Francisco, landing squarely in San Jose – the eastern anchor of Silicon Valley.

I personally look forward to seeing fellow Valley tech company execs at the various regional functions in the near future.

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A rather Glassy lady said “I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.”

She should have been in marketing.

Marketers and brand managers are in the expectation business. Part of their job entails defining and setting the expectations of their customers or their market. Since expectations are the state of anticipating something, we marketing mavens create the customer’s state anticipation.

When reality doesn’t match what is anticipated, odd and dangerous things occur. If you don’t understand this, just think back to your first blind date.

When defining the expectations you want customers to have, you can aim too low, too high, just right or aim for something entirely different. Only the last two work and the latter is the trickiest, though often most profitable.

Generally speaking, setting customer expectations a little low is a good strategy. Pleasantly surprised people become repeat customers. If their expectations are consistently exceeded, even by small amounts, they become advocates and do a large part of your promotions for you. Some marketers try to set expectations very low, which routinely backfires. First, it drives prospects away, thinking that your product is well below their needs. But when outrageously happy with significantly exceeded expectations, customers are crushingly disappointed when you don’t repeat the feat (this is now known as the iPhone Maps Affect). Market expectations are like mechanical engineering – a little variation in tolerances is OK, but a lot will wreck the machine.

Setting expectation too high directly results in disappointed customers. The larger the gap between the expectations you set and what you deliver, the larger the customer backlash. Indeed, if customer expectations are just slightly above your performance, then most customers will shrug their shoulders and write it off to marketing excess (which, sadly, most people now expect).

Most interesting is where brands set non-product expectations. Take Apple anything. Much has been written and mocked about Apple’s “cool” brand. Apple customer expectations are largely set in their self-image and not in Apple products themselves. Apple is using the customer as the source of customer expectations. Be it the iPod dancing silhouettes, short-supplies of new products to allegedly create fake personifications of excessive demand, or the well-manicured Cult of Jobs, Apple sets an expectation of self-esteem, the peak of Maslow’s infamous hierarchy. What the product does is secondary to how customers feel about themselves using Apple products.

The Apple genius therein is that people don’t like feeling bad about themselves. They do not discount their own sense of self-worth (well, a small number of individuals thrive on such self-destructive behavior, and are marketed to appropriately). Thus Apple addicts rarely find fault with their purchase decision because that decision is firmly anchored in their own self-perception, which remains golden.

Odds are you cannot create a brand so self-centered in consumer psyches that it is as unshakable as Apple’s. But you can set customer expectations just below what you can deliver and then tie your brand to customer emotional motivations, which can be issues of self-image. Doing so will make you feel pretty good about yourself.

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