I’ve been on both sides of the client/agency fence during my career. Now that I’m solely on the agency side, I really appreciate this more than ever…
Archive for the 'strategy' Category
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SBB.com is really beginning to take off. Our readership is increasing almost daily and we just redesigned the site to stay current. Here are some of the latest posts by author:
Nick Rice
- The Value of Customer Service in an Emergency
- The Call for Project Management
- What is the Essence of Branding
Kammie Kobyleski
- Writing for WOM & Branding the Croc Hunter Way
- Creative Leadership – Juicy Food for the Brand Soul
- Savvy Marketing or Sour Grapes
Robert Kingston
- Sensational Sources to Send Out your Message
- Making Ads to Sing to your Target Market
- Big Brand Undergoes Re-Branding Campaign
- How Effective is Your Advertising?
Brad Williamson
- Do You Suffer from Entrepreneurial Ignorance?
- Sales Secrets from a Scam Artist
- Why it Pays to be Narrow Minded in Business
- All Customers are Liars
Jeff Barson
Danielle Rodgers
technorati tags > small, business, branding, marketing, strategy, techniques
There’s a big push towards niche marketing. Here, Here, Here. As more and more markets commoditize, brand becomes a critical factor. And in most large cash cow commodity markets, there are only two or three major players. Everybody else is left picking at single digit marketshare with little to no growth opportunities.
So you have basically two options for growth. One, you can launch a break-through product or service in your category. Think bagless vacuum cleaners. When there were only bagged vacuums, everybody was pretty much equal. Then the bagless came out in Japan and revolutionized the market – and put most of the aftermarket bag suppliers out of business. It was a game changer. Before that product came out people just assumed you needed a bag to catch the dust.
The second method is to be seen as “head and shoulders” better than anything else in the market. Think Dyson. Until that brand was launched there was little growth or movement in vacuum cleaners. Now Dyson is stealing share from everyone. They really didn’t invent anything new or revolutionary. They’ve done a great job of promoting the things people really care about – weak vacuums that lose suction and pass a lot of dust through back to the carpet. And they’ve done it with stylish advertising and marketing. They look high tech, expensive, and worth it. The funny thing with Dyson is that he was not trained as an engineer, but as an industrial designer. He’s turned a stale market on its end and is raking in the profits.
More and more firms are moving to a niche marketing strategy. They want to be seen as the best provider of a very specific offering. The Long Tail theory tells us that a lot of small providers with very passionate customers can be as powerful as one or two large providers – that they control more of the marketplace than previously realized. The hard part is getting them organized and focused towards a common goal.
Very few firms in the world can be a Wal*Mart (in fact no one can). The average retailer cannot compete with Wal*Mart. So my advice is to not compete at all. You can make a lot of money offering the high-end products that they cannot. You can make a lot of money providing products that are above Target. So why should it surprise or anger people when Wal*Mart puts small Mom & Pop’s out of business. They simply need to adapt with unique offerings. They’ll be more profitable and sustain future growth. In theory, Mom & Pop shops have the advantage of convenience. They should be closer to their customers and they definitely have potential for much better customer service.
So, you will be relegated to commodity status if you cannot easily answer and defend what you are the best at. Start planning now how your products and services can change the game or stand out from the competition. Once you can easily answer the question, your audience will begin to find you. People are always looking for specialists to solve their problems. Being recognized as an expert makes your marketing efforts a lot easier. Jeffrey Gitomer said it best, “No one wants to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.” Being seen as a specialist creates a buying environment, not a sales situation. Even after you are seen as a specialist, you still need to market. Marketing gives you the ability to even further refine your customer set and profitability criteria. It’s about creating more demand than capacity. It’s about creating choices.
What do you do better than anyone?
technorati tags > marketing, strategy, niche, small, big, long tail
There are so many things I love about communicating via email:
- low effort
- trackable
- easy to revise in order to get “perfect”
- immediate
- available 24/7
- not restricted by time zones
- impersonal
- searchable
- you know when the recipient receives/opens it
- the list goes on…
Unfortunately, email is a poor way to build relationships. We all know that business is built upon relationships – especially in my role as a business developer. No one wants an account executive that stays in the office all day. They want their acct exec to be in front of them. Unfortunately, half of my job is project management. That requires the exact opposite. Good PM’s are always in the office. They are always in touch with what their teams are supposed to be working on and where they are supposed to be in relation to the status of the project.
Email makes it too easy. It’s too easy to confuse the quantity of communication with the quality. When it comes to quality, nothing is better than face to face. When you’re in person, there’s no guessing about the other person’s reaction to your words, presentation, or comments. Yes, it takes more time to be face to face; but how much time is wasted trying to interpret an email reply? How much time is wasted before you pick up the phone?
I know it’s just basic blocking and tackling. But that’s the point.
Seth Godin’s post about looking me in the eye prompted me to write about email. He gave a challenge, for one week try to do as much in person as possible. I’m going to try. Are you?
technorati tags > email, in person, communication, sales, project, management
After eleven years in business, my firm just brought in our first management consultant. We’ve been growing steadily for the last few years, but have too much of our revenue coming from a single client (an all too common occurance in agencies btw). We know that and are taking a proactive approach to solving that. And part of that approach is me – Mr. New Business Development. I’m the first employee with a dedicated % of time going towards finding new accounts. So far we have grown entirely from referral business. Not too shabby for an ~$8M company. It says a lot about our CEO and the quality of work and service we deliver.
Currently we position ourselves like 99% of the marketing communication firms out there. Which is: we do good work, we have a proven process to ensure good work, we provide great customer service, and we generate a positive ROI/value for our clients. Everybody says that, whether it’s true or not. Most importantly, those are reasons clients STAY, not reasons to BECOME a client.
Try this simple test for positioning; what’s the answer when a client asks point blank “why should I choose you over so and so?” If you have a hard time answering or the answer is one of the statements in the paragraph above; your positioning stinks.
The funny part of this is how painful the process is to go through when you try to do it to yourself. We’ve hit the same dead end many many times over the last 18 months when we’ve tried to hone our own message and value prop. We do this very well for our clients – even they would say so. It just proves that you cannot operate on yourself. You need an external, non-biased, honest point of view to take a true look at your systems, your competition, your offerings, and your value.
Like all consulting engagements, a few bombs were dropped, a few people were irritated, a few gems were exposed. And like normal, it will take a little while to digest the entire experience.
It is a very good exercise for me personally. It gave me a different view of how I am potentially received by my clients. As a consultant, there are times to be brutally honest and times to keep comments to yourself. You cannot alienate your client along the way. Expectations need to be set up front (and agreed upon in writing), long before you come onsite. It’s a big step for business (especially small business owners) to admit they need help. You aren’t there to stroke egos, but you cannot call their baby ugly all day either.
When it’s all said and done, we should have a clear vision for where we are headed, who specifically we’ll target, and how we will position ourselves better than the competition in that space. We should have a plan to grow profitably. And there’s not much sweeter in business than profitable growth – it’s the best way to get rid of issues!
technorati tags > marketing, management, consultant, profit, company, growth
My firm recently lost a big deal. We were one of three agencies to bid on a year long integrated media & advertising contract worth well into the six figures. Now this isn’t a sob story or anything close, we win and lose bids all the time. But it did get me to thinking about was what it takes to win an advertising contract as a small agency (which is pretty much a constant thought as a business developer).
All three firms are small agencies (significantly less than 50 people – but more than 10). And we had a little bit of an inside track in that we have a personal relationship with the decision maker that no one else does to our knowledge. That relationship offered some advice on what the first agency presented to her. It was all about what the decision maker liked and what she expected to see but didn’t. And like normal, we learned about the first firm too late to change our presentation.
But here’s the rub. During the initial meetings, our executive made it very clear that she was looking for ideas and visionary direction. She even twice mentioned that she didn’t want to have our best designers put a lot of time into concepts. During our initial internal brainstorming sessions, I fought to present two concepts to our client. These weren’t two different look and feels as much as they were a proposed identity mark and a website mockup. We decided it would be best to show that we could generate quality ideas that met all of the goals of the project and that we would save the other mediums (radio & TV) until after we won the bid. That way we wouldn’t waste a lot of time on scripts and storyboards because those are always subject to heavy revisions.
Apparently the firm that was awarded the project came up with full storyboards for at least two TV spots and a couple of radio script ideas. They presented the exact opposite mediums as we did. In fact, to my knowledge they didn’t do any work on the brand identity itself. Now I’m not saying we’re right and they’re wrong – especially since they won the business. But it is funny how an executive (with a lot of advertising experience) was swayed by storyboards and scripts. I think part of it’s due to the fact that business execs don’t view script writing and story board illustrations as requiring as much effort as graphic design, video, or web work. It’s easy to look at a story board sketch and know that it’s not the final deliverable. When you do website concepts, even though they are probably Photoshop files, they look just like the final website. A lot of executives that I’ve seen can’t grasp the void between polished mock ups and the final deliverable. They do not understand the level of effort required from a programming, testing, and troubleshooting point of view. They only see the surface. And for some reason they don’t seem to think that the time copywriters and illustrators put into sketches cost as much to the agency.
I think a lot of it stems from each firms internal DNA. We are basically an interactive firm with a long history of film/video. While the other agency is group of ex-ad agency guys that spun off and started their own firm. Traditional ad agencies are solely focused on coming up with a break-through idea. If they can sell the idea to their client, they find the right production team to execute it. Interactive firms, on the other hand, do most of their production in-house. They come up with the idea and produce the deliverables themselves. A lot also depends on the size of the project. We would have done a lot more if the project was seven or eight figures instead of six.
So looking back, what would I do differently? I would probably leverage our relationship more to truly find out what would have impressed her and her team. We did what we do naturally. We focused on the deliverables that made the most sense to us. We were looking at the foundation (brand identity and website) and the other firm was looking at the paint and carpet. We focused on long term branding and information delivery while they focused on short term awareness. Both are important. In the end, I think both firms missed opportunities. If we can find a way to work together, the client will get the best of both worlds. That’s the best way to win – meet the business objectives and keep client satisfaction high.
technorati tags > advertising, branding, strategy, business, development
Kathy Sierra has a great post on how much time, effort, and branding is put into creating pre-sales materials while post-sales material like user manuals is pure function.
I find it interesting how corporations are structured to support this mismatch. Marketing handles the glossy slick brochures and outer packaging, while either engineering or Pubs handles the user manuals, set up guides, packing materials, and quick reference sheets in most companies. Very few companies put a lot of thought into creating an experience that is reflective of the brand after a user buys their widget. I know we talk a lot about Apple in the design and user experience space, but they truly do take every opportunity to create loyal customers. Everything from pre-sales collateral to unpacking the device to installing the software and using it has been thought through from the point of view of a normal user not an engineer buried deep within a company that sees these products every day. That creates passionate users. Passion breeds loyalty. And loyal users are a key component of keeping the doors open and the lights on long term.
Here’s a great quote from Kathy:
As a potential customer, I’ll find your attention to user learning a lot more convincing than your attention to new sales. Rather than using your brochure to show how much YOU kick ass, I’d much rather see no-marketing-spin hard evidence of how you’re going to help ME kick ass.
Kathy reminds us that users don’t care about your features. They only care about how improve their daily life. When a user sees your product as an enabler to getting more done or doing things better, they become loyal. If you concentrate your efforts on generating loyal customers, you’ll quickly discover that you need to focus more on the activities that happen post-sale. If you offer generous support, information, and ease of use as soon as they open the box you will create loyal users.
Obviously you have to get people to buy your products first so I’m not saying shift all of your resources. The glossy slick brochures, have their place. And are very effective at what they’re designed to do. I’m just saying put more thought into how you can improve the user experience throughout the life of your product not just pre-sale.
technorati tags > presales, post, sales, collateral, user, experience, customer, loyalty, marketing, publications
A recent post by David Armano (Logic+Emotion) got me fired up about my company’s value proposition. I’ve stayed away from this blog being a Cre8tive Group corporate pitch, but I also call out good work when I see it.
For the last two years we’ve used a combination of “Balance” and “You know it when you see it” as our external value propositions. Both David and Seth Godin have covered these topics recently. So mainly, I’m just pumped that my firm is thinking two years ahead of these industry heavyweights that we all look to as new media leaders.
Here is how we have tied the two thoughts together:
(image source: http://web.qx.net/nrice/images/cre8tive_group_it.jpg)
Seth takes a different approach. He doesn’t believe people know it when they see it. I partly agree because the vast majority of people are not visionary thinkers. They have a hard time seeing something that is outside of their box. Over the years we’ve become pretty good at reading between the lines with our clients. Once we understand their business, their audience and their goals; we don’t need to be told exactly what to do. By balancing those tensions above, we often have clients look up during an engagement and say “that’s it, you nailed it”. That’s what we mean when we say “you know it when you see it”. Most clients seem to like and appreciate that approach. And even if they cannot “see it”, they like to think that they can.
Like a lot of small firms, we are constantly trying to separate ourselves from the competition. One of the biggest things that set us apart is the fact that we only work with 8 clients at a time. That’s how much we value quality over quantity. It’s about giving our clients the level of service and thought required to make a difference. We’ve also leveraged the 8 symbol across a lot of our communication touches. It’s a unique way to bring consistency to our materials.
We’re betting on the fact that great experiences along with a consistent image & promise will improve our brand.
technorati tags > seth godin, david armano, logic, emotion, value, proposition, marketing, strategy
No small question to tackle! Over my career I’ve held marketing position in both B2C and B2B. And while I personally didn’t approach each role differently, a lot of people did. I typically work under the general principles of:
- Figure out what the target audience is looking for
- Build your service or product (and your collateral) around meeting that need
- Test, test, test
- Refine and launch
- Test, test, test
- Refine and re-launch, rinse and repeat
I know that’s just Marketing 101, but it’s amazing how many people skip a lot of those steps. In organizations that are not customer-centric, you’re forced to sale what you’ve got. Sometimes those products are big hits and sometimes they’re not; regardless it’s risky. You may not have the luxury of testing or refining.
The idea of business customers needing something that retail consumers didn’t was always foreign to me. Obviously it takes different types of messaging, packaging, promotions and payment structure for a B2B audience, but that’s not a big deal. That’s just good segmentation or targeting. Different audiences should receive relevant messaging. Products targeted at everyone rarely make a difference to anyone.
And obviously different marketing mediums reach the different audiences more effectively. It’s hard to market to top tier business executives with 30 second TV spots. They’re too broad and expensive to reach such a small audience. Rebates don’t work well in large organizations. If you’ve ever worked in a Fortune 500 business, you know how big of a pain it would be to process a rebate coupon with your procurement department much less American Express. Tech-heavy spec sheets or pricing schedules do not appeal to the general public. But, I contend that the thought process is the same. The deliverables, mediums and tactics may differ but you still need to determine the best message that will get this user to buy – and buy now.
It’s about getting them over the hump as quickly as possible. You have to show them what problem your particular offering solves, why you are the provider of choice, and why they should act now. Those foundations should be the core of any marketing initiative.
Seth Godin said it best, “Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation pay for what they buy.”
technorati tags > B2B, B2C, business, consumer, marketing, strategy,
Great article in BusinessWeek today. We all know how hard it is to innovate consistently. Yet some companies do it all the time; Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Target, Amazon, Land’s End, Catepillar, etc…
How do they do it? Here are the keys to beating the competition:
- Experiment fearlessly
- Don’t just get bigger, get unique
- Why compete? Create new markets
- Obsess about customers, not rivals
- Give as good as you get
- Get personal
- Stay hungry
technorati tags > innovation, competition, strategy, market share, business week
