Marketing Memos

My dictionary defines fiat as “an arbitrary decree,” which makes redundant a recent Fiat motorcar advertising campaign.

A stylish bimbette and a bubble car landed in my lap this morning, all combined in a ten panel fold-out mailer from Fiat that pimped their 500 series micro machine, which looks like the bastard child of a Mini Cooper and a Volkswagen Beetle. Therein Fiat attempts to differentiate this vehicle by linking various models of their rolling soap bubble with various luxury brand names (Note to Fiat: It isn’t a luxury vehicle if you drive with your knees in your chin). The Gucci edition was shown with the slinky blonde draped across the hood, her impossibly long legs escaping from abbreviated shorts and her top strategically unzipped.

Ironically the photo caption read “European model shown” which could have applied to the vehicle or the vamp.

I have no idea from what rented mailing list Fiat acquired my name and address. I suspect they cross referenced my San Francisco location (where small car parking advantages and higher incomes collide) but that did not inform Fiat about the Toyota Tundra TRD and Jeep in my driveway (though come to think of it I could park the Fiat under my truck). This was Fiat’s first and most innocent mistake – inaccurate targeting. Yet this Fiat faux pas faded in comparison to their basic branding blunders.

A fundamental rule of marketing is to never confuse your audience with mixed metaphors. Small cars for urbanites are produced for a variety of reasons, none of which include projecting sexiness and sophistication. Hot Italian models lounging on tepid Italian subcompacts is an attempt to stretch the Fiat 500’s brand further than politicians stretch the truth. It is an attempt to make a specific audience feel something about Fiat that the car’s design does not deliver. This basic branding error – to force people to feel something that in their gut they know isn’t real – defies the customer, which in turn defies sales.

Brand and reality must at least be neighbors.

Curious about how ghastly the Fiat campaign might be, I dropped by fiat.com, which exposed a second instance of Fiat marketing mayhem. Eliminating friction – unnecessary barriers to customers discovering/experiencing you – is an essential marketing function. Let us pray that Fiat’s automotive engineering is better than their web engineering, for their web site creates more friction than a Klansman at an NAACP convention. In order, Fiat web friction included:

No country homing: Instead of looking-up my IP address and automatically switching me to the U.S. site, Fiat forced me to choose it manually.

Oddball interfaces: Instead of the nearly instant pick list found on most web sites, Fiat forces people to slowly scroll through a list of countries. Since “United States of America” was on the bottom of Fiat’s list, this took some time and evaporated my patience.

Content free and hard to find: Being a bit too clever, Fiat decided to call their dealerships “studios”, which delayed finding the dealership link. Once located, it provided me with the name of their local “studio” and nothing more … no street address, phone number, hours of operation or even a vague scent for bloodhounds to follow.

All in all Fiat flaked and infringed on buyer patience by violating some basic marketing rules:

1. Don’t confuse customers with mixed branding metaphors
2. Don’t miss-sell them by offering what isn’t
3. Don’t get in the way of discovery

After all, you cannot rule the market by fiat.

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I don’t expect much, and I usually get it.

Expected outcomes are what buyers pay money for. Businesses and consumers lob lucre at vendors in order to achieve something, be it optimizing general ledger processes or smelling better. Expected outcomes, or expectations, are the foundation of all commercial relationships. I give you money and you make me smell good.

If the cologne you sold me knocks buzzards off cesspool fencing, then my expectations have not been met.

Microsoft and Hotels.com recently brought all this to light by failing to meet basic expected outcomes. When rudimentary requirements are not provided, customers become ornery. The soured relationship creates new friction to selling them more products and removes all incentive to recommend products to other customers (which in the long run is the cheapest and most effective promotional tool available). Knowing and delivering customer necessaries is so basic I find Microsoft’s and Hotels.com failures on this front to be astounding.

Take Microsoft, please. One fundamental of software releases is to not change the user’s environment. Microsoft has provided a seemingly endless string of surprises, some of which were actually planned though most were not. The sidebar on my screen vanished for no obvious reason, and a dozen reboots never brought it back. However, upgrading from an ancient version of Microsoft Office to one made this century revived the sidebar while destroying two decades of my devotion to keyboard shortcuts that were the basis of my productivity (my mouse had gathered a nice layer of dust). Planned or accidental, unnecessary changes that move or remove functionality also remove the expected outcome and creates friction (let’s pray Libre Office rapidly matures and disposes Microsoft as the laptop productivity tool of choice).

Hotels.com, an alleged service company, failed to provide service. Needing to change a reservation, I was surprised to see that function absent from their web site (though one could cancel reservations outright). A phone call to their customer support line connected me with a woman in India who between speaking rapidly with a heavy accent and apparently eating her microphone for lunch, was completely unintelligible. After several attempts to make a simple reservation change, then asking to be transferred to someone who spoke less than seven hundred words per second, the call disconnected from their end.

Amusingly [not] canceling and rebooking the reservation via their web site took 1/12^th the time than the “support” phone call.

Your customers have a set of expected outcomes, and they are of three levels:

Basal: These are fundamental outcomes, which if missing, immediately send customers in search of alternatives like Macs and Orbitz.

Operational: These are the outcomes for which customers actively look. This is where most marketers spend time pitching features and benefits, and for which your product engineers had better deliver consistently.

Exceptional: These outcomes enter the realm of customer delight via innovation, anticipating what a customer wants to achieve and not what they say they want to achieve. It is the difference between poking my old Nokia to enter appointments into my calendar and asking Siri to do it for me.

You have to deliver basal outcomes just to survive. You create and provide operational outcomes to remain competitive. You invent exceptional outcomes to dominate your markets.

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Performing in a band might be fun if one didn’t have to work with musicians.

Bands provide a serviceable metaphor for marketing, which is all too often viewed as one or another marketing function and not the tightly coordinated combination of each function/instrument and performer. Take any piece out of a band or marketing department, and you no longer have a professional outfit. I was recently reminded of a time long ago when I was young (during the Taft administration) and the bass player in my garage band quit, yet our front man wanted to do a signed gig without any bass.

The audience was not impressed.

Let’s stretch this metaphor some more and match aspects of running a marketing department with assembling a group of musicians into a working band. Start by depriving the members of each group of alcohol, then begin.

Mapping: A band has several instruments, and each instrument requires a player that is proficient. In modern marketing operations you need PR, social, direct, branding, PPC and other functions depending on your go-to-market strategy. Odds are against finding a guitarist who can double on tuba, so it is equally unwise to look for a social media maven that can handle your Google Adwords campaign. Hire who you must, outsource what you can, but don’t stretch your talent as thin as I am stretching this metaphor.

Focus: Bands pick a genre mainly out of musical preference, but doing so is also like picking a market segment. If you are a blues band, you know the local blues clubs, how to promote to blues enthusiasts, and not to play Madonna tunes. Every company segments and surviving companies focus on one or a small number of segments. A country band can lapse into blues, and a rock band can add some crunchy rap overtones. But they stick mainly to their primary genre/segment.

Integrating: The bass player who abandoned my garage band didn’t have the best rhythm … especially after a couple of dozen beers. But when the band hit its groove, all the different instruments added to one another, which turned on the audience and got girls dancing. Marketing has to do the same. All parts need to harmonize so buyers have a consistent perspective of your company and products. If your PPC team is pitching discounts to techies and your direct mail squad is pimping top-shelf features and prices to CxOs, then nobody understands you, your brand or your value. The VP of marketing needs to be a conductor as well as a strategist.

Delivering: It hurts to hit bum notes, forget lyrics or cancel gigs. A professional band is a business, which is why local hobby bands start and stay in that condition – because they don’t conduct themselves as a business. In bands or businesses you have to deliver, which means delivering what the market needs and doing so consistently. Marketing must strive for consistency in terms of the frequency, reliability, focus and repeatability of their outbound communications. The audience are prospects and existing customers. Keeping them engaged using the mood and modes they prefer and to which they respond always hits the right note.

There is a reason pop stars lip sync their concerts and travel with backup tape machines. They deliver consistent performances.  Your VP of marketing doesn’t have to dress like Lady Gaga, he just has to deliver like her.

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The only organization better than HP at losing customers was Heaven’s Gate.

I have fond memories of Bill and Dave’s HP, which in no way resembles the current Palo Alto pack. When I wrangled HP manufactured big iron mumble-mumble-mumble years ago, they were reasonably good about customer support though their byzantine processes for achieving such was an exotic form of auto-masochism. Even eating lunch at the HP cafeteria was a rough slog.

It has gone down hill since.

Let’s keep in mind that service is a product, and like all products must meet the criteria of the customer. This includes price, quality and – most important – availability. The on-site service agreement for my laptop recently expired, and I went to HP’s web site to renew it. This was my first mistake since HP’s various business divisions and poorly integrated web sites are slightly more complex than the federal tax code. I spent more time than I have to spare attempting to find the right place to review and update my support agreement.

Rule #1: Make it simple, obvious and easy.

It is not enough to provide a service. Selling the service is a service itself. There are few better ways to lose a customer than to make discovering what you offer and how to buy it a chore. Yet after five different web sites, two emails and one phone call which transferred across three different HP representatives, I was no closer to renewing the laptop support agreement than before I started. A service is a product. A service that cannot be bought is a product you cannot sell. A service that your employees cannot find and deliver is not even a product … it is a strain on the relationship.

Rule #2: If you are going to sell a product, you should attempt it.

Any time a customer or prospect encounters unnecessary friction, they are given reasons to buy from a different vendor. This involves not just the core product (in this example, a support contract) but all other products covered by the brand (e.g. servers, tablets, printers). Unnecessary friction kills sales, and as SaaS leaders like SalesForce.com have demonstrated, a lack of friction accelerates adoption. Oddly, HP understood the key to reducing friction which was to track the serial number of the unit for all sales and support activities. I know this because several HP web sites and four different HP employees asked for the serial number as a prelude to “assisting” me. Yet HP shrouded the simple option of renewing my support agreement in labyrinth that Theseus couldn’t navigate.

In high tech, everyone has to offer service because nobody can support complex technologies by themselves. Treat your service offering as you would your core product. Doing less will result in lost customers, damaged reputation and a brand fewer people will love.

Postscript: I made one final plunge into the HP support pool based on an email from HP’s esupport team. This led to dealing with no fewer than six people in four different departments (including some poor gal in India who could not be convinced that my laptop wasn’t a printer). I remain on hold and fear they will find my skeleton slumped over my desk before an HP support contract can be created.

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There is a reason that blind dates were never very popular.

Marketing and dating are both incremental dances with well understood steps in forming a relationship. Amazingly many companies, and most technology companies, lack even a fundamental notion of incremental intimacy, which many also explain why many techie founders remain bachelors. Anyone who suffered the dating process understands the phases of location, attraction, value and risk assessment. Yet your average technology web site avoids all these steps.

First off is findability. In dating this may involve joining activity groups or hanging out in the right bar on a Saturday night. In marketing it has always been about advertising, and in the modern extension of that, search optimization. Being found is a requirement to being desired. Failure to promote or to be locatable on the web makes the odds of obtaining prospects nil. But just today I ran across a web site for an application platform vendor whose primary landing pages lacked meaningful search optimization. This is akin to longing for love and staying home playing video games every night.

Only after eligible prospects find you can attraction take place. My first boss used to snicker and say “It must be Friday.” When I asked him what brought that up, he pointed to some young lass and said “The single girls always dress-up on Friday.” His point, as it relates to marketing and the entire cosmetics industry, is that you should be attractive at the first meeting. It is not enough to be at the popular meat market or on the web – you have to create a compelling appeal. Show prospects a text-dense web page that offers a tough slog to understanding, and they will turn instead to a more comely contender. Branding sets the mood and encourages the next step in the ritual.

A pretty face is a start, but a potential mate or customer next needs to perceive some value in the relationship. In cocktail lounges potential value propositions are communicated non-verbally – a smile that engenders romantic thoughts, a wink that suggests more base activities, and occasionally even more salacious gestures that should encourage running away. Tech companies by and large are lousy at articulating value propositions, and these value props rarely appear on landing pages. Once your product has been found and shows prospects a reason to be attracted, to then avoid displaying potential value halts the interest of your suitor.

The most critical step in dating or vending is risk abatement. Initial conversations with the gal you met at a club quickly exposes obvious risk factors. Is she dumb, does she have emotional baggage, are the voices in her head the cause of her involuntarily twitching? Once you have made your product findable, attractive and shown some value, your customer’s next step is to look for flaws. The common risk factors are things like a lack of features, few customers, no funding, poorly stated product details or general lack of clarity. Circuit City and their CarMax subsidiary became famous for engineering-out negative aspects of their market – reducing common risks. Itemize warning flags for which your prospects look, then remove/improve to push prospects to ask for a first date (a.k.a. a sales call).

Here is your challenge. For the next five companies that you randomly hear of, look at the stages of finding, attraction, value and risk and see is they have engineered their marketing to get that first date with prospects. After reviewing five previously unknown companies, then evaluate yours. If after self-assessment you feel like it is Saturday night and you are watching old movies on TV, then you have your next marketing projects defined.

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