Category Archives: Communications

Selling Vapor

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Ideas are tough to sell because people don’t adopt ideas easily. I knew a sci-fi writing couple who claimed to have popularized the concept of “ecology” in the 1960s as part of a language adoption experiment. Their observation (which may be sci-fi itself) was back then it took about seven years for a new concept to become culturally ubiquitous. We can assume that in our Internet age that it takes about seven minutes. The problem with marketing an idea of any type (including intangible services) is that ideas may or may not be facts. Facts, data, features, benefits – these are elements that people can wrap their minds around. They are manifestations of already adopted concepts, and thus easy to accept. When anthropogenic global warming theory was first released, nobody aside from a few alleged scientists had conceptualized the theory, and it took time (about seven years) for the notion … Continue reading →

Messaging Messes

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“Blah blah bla blah blah blah!” That pretty much reflects most B2B marketing messages. Precision is lacking, from headlines all the way down to often absent calls-to-action. The penalties for imprecise market messaging include high landing page bounce rates, no actions taken by prospects and leaking sales funnels. The pay-offs from precise market messaging include short sales cycles, brand biasing and rapid word-of-mouth market awareness. So why does your web site say blah? Why is your collateral blah? The goal of messaging is to move a prospect down the path of discovery, terminating in a sale. At each step in this path of discovery, they need to learn about your product in a way that makes sense in that specific moment of discovery, and to be led toward the next phase of discovery. All this requires knowing the phases of discovery then composing very succinct messages such that they achieve … Continue reading →

B2B Emotive Marketing

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Emotions are valuable, and value is emotional. Value is what you advertise. Ignore features, benefits, functions, the color of the paint on the server chassis or even ROI. These may help create value or close deals, but they are not value itself, and people buy value. Your boss doesn’t value your protoplasm, and if he does there may be a sexual harassment suit in his future. He values what you can help him achieve, which in turn should be what your company needs to achieve. The marketing question is what is valued? Rarely is it a functional process or a technical specification. Outcome is the center of value. Take AwayFind, a company that alerts you when you have an important email waiting. They have many features which are not valuable. The outcome however – to not be enslaved by needing to constantly check email – is very valuable. It is … Continue reading →

Social Shortcomings

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Social marketing isn’t it. With humans living on the net, and with obvious advantages to social media manipulations as a marketing tactic, many people have happily abandoned other forms of promotions in favor of social. Later they unhappily abandon their jobs to fill slots in unemployment lines. Humans, being the quirky bunch they are, need a number of things to occur before a purchase. Most of all they need to perceive value in a product and believe the value will actually be delivered. Good marketers can create a brand (the basic value proposition) and awareness of the brand, then discover this is not enough. Alone, knowing a brand and that it makes a promise is weak soup that omits essential ingredients in the marketer’s cookbook. No wonder social marketing often tastes bland. To believe in a brand requires some form of “proof.” This may be fanciful or it may be … Continue reading →

Old School Social

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My dentist does social marketing. This should surprise nobody because social marketing has existed since the first two cavemen competed by selling left-over mastodon meat (“My mastodon steaks come with 30% fewer fatal microbes!”). Businesses have always used the power of social networking, long before social media became a reality. Social media changes nothing and thinking about primitive social marketing helps to clarify your social outreach. Social marketing is, in essence, assuring that people talk about you in positive terms. As an example, when you move to a new city, odds are you ask everyone about their recommendation for a good dentist. Some will warn you about bad jaw crackers, and others will wax poetic about how gentle and through is their dental doc. This is social promotions in its most basic form. The product (dental services) is referenced by customers based on the positioning criteria they most vale (money, … Continue reading →

Fiat Folly

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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 … Continue reading →

Romancing the Market

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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 … Continue reading →