Monthly Archives: January 2014

Pointed Communications

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A relative of mine tells her stories … for hours … before ending them with her point. Good thing she isn’t in marketing. Get to the point quickly, then fill in the gaps. I was recently reminded of this while being a judge for the CODiE awards. I think I’m in my 573rd year of being a CODiE judge. The contestant’s presenter launched into a live demo of the product without summarizing what the product did much less its key value propositions. Thankfully he skipped the all-too-common dozen or so slides providing background about the company and other snore generators. He was like my relative, all too eager to tell his story as opposed to telling me why I should care. With attention spans shrinking fast as content explodes, getting to the point becomes ever more important. Telling people why they should care up front causes them to care. When … Continue reading →

Behaving

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My favorite stolen line is that you should never allow customers to engage in unsupervised thinking. As marketers, we are tasked with encouraging specific customer behaviors. Some of these behaviors are rationally based, such as buying software with a known minimal return on investment. Others are completely emotional, such as Volvo suggesting that you are less likely to die a violent automotive death in their cars. Each is designed to get customers to take a specific action, and in complex business-to-business (B2B) sales, this may be a long series of tiny behaviors involving many stakeholders. Unsupervised customers behave as well as unsupervised children. Amazon is in the retail business, not the technology business (that is if you ignore their Elastic Compute Cloud offering). Thus they encourage consumer buying habits. One consumer behavior they need to control is to not allow customers to shop elsewhere – putting Amazon products in customer … Continue reading →