Category Archives: Communications

Abstract Agent

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God is a very abstract concept. Religion’s job is selling you on God. Metaphysical marketing, if you will. The marketing of abstracts and afterlives comes to mind as I slowly consume the pages of Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. Regardless of your faith or lack thereof, we all agree that God is beyond human conception, which makes most religion a null program since its first job is to conceptualize God. Its second job is selling God, which in the realm of selling abstract products has been both the biggest project and one of the most successful. The success of religion comes from thousands of years of refined marketing, segmenting the market into a few million different sects, and following Seth Godin’s advice to agree with what people already think. Marketing new products into new markets is a bit like preaching to aborigines — they (the buyers/infidels) have no idea what … Continue reading →

B2B Buzzing

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.” Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word. B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process. Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics … Continue reading →

Social Service

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Facebook is your friend.  So is Google, just not a close friend that you share things with (aside from your GPS location if using an Android phone). Recently we performed a pro-bono experiment in association with a book launch.  Even though the author had a platform and a publicist who wrangled radio talking time, we deployed a little advertising using both Google and Facebook.  The results show why social media makes a difference, and how to move from static to dynamic in social environments. Over an 18 day period we pushed Google and Facebook ads which had the same creative layouts.  Viable keywords were selected with Google as were “interest” categories on Facebook.  For Google, the test was divided between taking clickers to a landing page on the author’s blog site or directly to Amazon.com after a few reader reviews had accumulated.  In Facebook all clickers were taken to a … Continue reading →

Free Thinking

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One of my favorite stolen lines is that customers should never be allowed to engage in unsupervised thinking. Unsupervised thinking is dangerous as any deposed despot will attest. Outbound marketing is entirely about communications.  It involves guiding the thinking of different people (buyer genotypes) at different times (sales cycle, product/market lifecycle) and for different reasons (aid discovery, educate, motivate, close).  Enterprise buyers engage in thinking throughout a sales process, unlike consumers who can often be sold through pure emotions. This came to light recently while coaching a client on a thought leadership paper, and one member of their team viewed the developing collateral as a sales piece, bemoaning the lack of mention about their product features and benefits.  I explained that buyers were an ornery lot, prone to cynical (and typically correct) suspicions. Adding product details not only distracts the reader from cementing their knowledge, but also raises alarms about … Continue reading →