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How to Handle the Obligations of Brand Community

Once you've committed to a brand community, you accept some leadership from them. You DO get to set boundaries, but within those boundaries, you have to let the brand change. Not just evolve into something more successful, but to follow where its market wants to take it. That's very, very hard to do.

Adweek: These Brands Build Community. 2008-May-12, by Brian Morrissey

"The community changes the brand to suit them," said Jeffrey Kalmikoff, CCO at Threadless parent Skinnycorp. "We don't have expectations of what Threadless will be. We just manage the parameters." That includes trying to manage the perception that the brand is getting too big. It turned down offers to sell its shirts in department stores, for example, and chose to open retail stores in markets like Chicago and Boulder, Colo., rather than New York and Los Angeles.

How to Squeeze your Marketing

When times are tough, it's more valuable to shrink your target market rather than letting your margins shrink. Staying in touch with existing customers is usually much less expensive than acquiring customers. If your customers are suffering, then commiserate with them! The most important problem is avoiding fear. Channel your energy into strengthening your relationships.

Chiefmarketer.com: Loyalty Marketing in Times of Economic Distress, 2008-May-20, by Rick Ferguson

Don't spend your finite resources further training your customers to wait you out for the next sale. Instead, focus your efforts on marketing to the two core groups of customers who can most directly influence revenue:

High-value customers you want to retain. Give them offers to keep them spending at their current level. For these loyal customers, tilt the hard-soft benefit equation toward the soft side with special benefits and access unavailable to the general population.

High-potential customers you want to grow. Give them offers to shop more often and spend more during each visit. Use targeted discounts and bonuses through your loyalty program or store card and monitor their transactions.

How Logic Limits Influence

In developing a marketing system, you have to put spaces and slack into the system that allow for positive human interaction and reaction. The story below reminds me of the old saw: 'people don't care what you know until they know that you care.' We are simply unable to capture everything we know about human relations in scripts and flow charts. You can't rely on miracles but you have to allow people to pause, reflect, listen, and add something of themselves to the process.

Strategy+Business: The Science of Subtle Signals, by Mark Buchanan 2007-Aug-29

Successful [customer service] operators, it turned out, speak little and listen much. When they do speak, their voices fluctuate strongly in amplitude and pitch, suggesting interest and responsiveness to the customer’s needs. Operators who speak with little variation come across as too determined and authoritative, but by speaking invitingly, being responsive but not pushy, a skilled operator can let callers find their own way to a sale. “Like a mother speaking singsong to a baby,” says Pentland, “variation sounds perky and inviting. If operators do it right, they’re almost certain to be successful.” ...

Most explanations of human behavior in the business world presume that people — be they employees, consumers, or executives — are influenced most by meaning and reasoning. It’s what gets said that matters, not how it is said. But the per­formance of these telephone operators and a growing volume of other evidence suggest that this view is seriously flawed. In a wide variety of facets of everyday business, the keys to sustained success may actually lie in understanding the kinds of signals that are ordinarily overlooked: tone of voice, body language, the ways people congregate (or don’t), the time spent on tasks, the rhythms of workplace activity, and the patterns of social networks.

How to Neglect Your Prospects

Many companies become slaves to their "top 20%"--the customers who provide 80% of the revenues. But we should always inspect or biggest customers to make sure they have the profits and the future we want, as Ian Brodie points out.

Lighthouse on Sales Excellence: Challenging the 80:20 Rule. 2008-Mar-5, by Ian Brodie

In all three cases the key is to look beyond the simplistic 80:20 rule to check:

• Does it really apply in my business?
• Does it persist over time - or do I actually need to focus on “rising stars”?
• Will extra effort on my top 20% really increase sales - or are they already being fully served?

Now don’t get me wrong - the 80:20 rule can be very helpful as a simple guide to where to focus your effort. But thinking beyond the simple rule will pay big dividends for sales people willing to invest their brain power and challenge the accepted norms.

How to Get Past the First Date

I recently discovered an excellent feature on the Staples web site that lets me review my past orders and re-order something quickly and conveniently. Steve Yastrow wisely points out that when you have a conversation with a friend, you pick up where you left off. Some business-to-business marketers are good at this, but consumer companies, especially brick-and-mortar retail, have a long way to go.

Tompeters!: Steve Yastrow (Second Cool Friends Interview), 2008-May-15, by Erik Hansen

Erik: There's a small, outdoor sporting goods store near me that I've been shopping at, I think, since 1986. No one in that store knows my name. And I'm in there regularly. ... I'm so frustrated. I want to be loyal to this place. They are half a mile from my house ...

SY: Imagine what happens with your customers if you have an ongoing conversation. But being the customer of most companies, like you in this store, is kind of like that movie that Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler did, 50 First Dates. I don't know if you saw this movie. Well, they have this great time together. She's got a memory problem and every day their relationship has to start over. That reminded me of what it's like to do business with most companies, right?

How to Compete for Loyalty

The case used to be that companies instituted loyalty programs to reduce competition. Now loyalty programs drive competition. Credit card companies will not only let you configure your terms, they will also let you put any picture your want on the card. Ability to customize = loyalty.

Marketing ROI: Is Customization an Unreasonable Loyalty Value?. 2008-May-7, by Robert Passikoff

...looking at the 57 categories and nearly 400 brands Brand Keys measures in our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index—we found that the average percent-of-contribution "customization" makes to product and service engagement, adoption and loyalty (and, therefore, profitability) is currently 18%, or nearly five times what the value was when it was first measured in 1997. ... It's something most consumers take for granted today. Of the 57 categories that make up the 2008 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, the top 10 where customization has become one of the largest brand differentiators are: Automobiles Athletic Footwear Online Wireless Cell Phones Hotels Restaurants Parcel Delivery Coffee Providers Clothing Catalogs...

How to Commit to your Audience

As marketers struggle to take advantage of the hot new trend of social networking sites, they are stumbling on their own short-term thinking. They can't just run an advertisement or even a campaign. They have to make a commitment to participate in the community, for better or for worse.

Adweek: Social Ad Lessons, 2008-May-19, by Brian Morrissey

RockYou has seen success matching movies with its applications; Vampire flick 30 Days of Night made a good fit with its Vampire app, resulting in 60,000 registrations for the movie. "The biggest misconception is people assume the performance of these campaigns is the same as the performance of general social networks," said Ro Choy, vp of business development at RockYou. While progress is being made and lessons learned, Schafer believes advertisers need to deal with a more fundamental problem of campaigns in social media: They're not well-suited as short-term endeavors. His agency helped develop an Entourage community on MySpace that has run for four years, requiring continued tending and activation. Yet for most clients, social media campaigns tend to mean running ads for a set period of time. "What social networks are more fertile for are initiatives about CRM and changing attitudes, rather than awareness, frequency and reach," he said.

How to Abuse your Audience

Email newsletters seem so easy, but they are actually the easiest way to abuse your customer relationships. If they aren't thoughtful, relevant, and consistently packaged, you'll be exploiting your customers' time and attention. Good newsletters require a dedicated team of people who know what else is going on around the company, as well as best practices for email. Cheap is deadly. If you are sending email newsletters, you should read the entire article.

MonkeyBrains, the MailChimp Blog:
95% of problems come from newsletters, not promotions, 2008-May-8

Promotional campaigns are hard. Usually, it’s the experienced email marketers who do promotional campaigns. People who run e-commerce websites. People who generate promo codes, and build landing pages. ... The skill level and experience is higher, so they’re more likely to be aware of email marketing etiquette and spam laws and ISP feedback loops. Newbies don’t do promotional campaigns so much. They just do newsletters. Newsletters are easy. Newsletters are fast. And newbies are more likely to make these mistakes (I see it over and over and over again)...

Sea Change in TV Advertising

Unless your business is big enough to devote millions of dollars to television advertising every year, or you're into direct response TV (it's own unique marketing system), using television to market your business has always been very problematic. Houston's Gallery Furniture figured how to avoid prohibitive TV production costs by building an image of being cheap and cheesy, but most companies can't roll with that image. By avoiding production costs, Gallery could afford to run frequently with new messages all the time. So it was a system, not a stunt.

Now a totally new television advertising system is being developed by a company called Spot Runner. I assumed they were always going to be targeting local businesses like dental practices and small retail chains, but now many national advertisers are starting to get involved. I suspect this is the beginning of television micro-targeting. If worldwide luxury marketers can use this system, surely local designers are going to benefit as well.

MediaPost: LVMH Runs With Spot Runner, Luxury Marketer Backs Online Ad Firm, 2008-May-7, by Joe Mandese

The addition of Group Arnault, he says, is consistent with Spot Runner's push to broaden from a long tail to a solution for bigger advertisers looking to develop better and more streamlined means of created highly targeted advertising and media buys on the fly. "[Group Arnault] LVMH brings a different perspective, that of an advertiser," says Grouf. "It gives us a richer understanding of what that will be as we move into a more fragmented environment. ... It brings entirely different categories of advertisers in the market, not just small advertisers, but advertisers who are looking to be much more targeted and focused in the messages they are serving."

How to Take Care of the Goose

Is this company called Reward Paths saying that U.S. mid-sized companies apply short-term, seat-of-the-pants solutions? I'm shocked, shocked. ... For too many medium-sized companies, marketing is about driving sales and cracking those golden eggs this quarter, and not about nurturing a nice flock of golden-egg laying geese. When you establish any marketing program, especially a loyalty program, you should be thinking about how customers will relate to the program after they've been using if for five years or more.

COLLOQUY: Reward Paths enters U.S. loyalty marketplace. 2008-May-1, from press release:

Reward Paths notes that while large U.S. corporations serving consumer markets have been able to establish and afford substantial investments in rewards, miles and points programs for their best customers, the mid-size U.S. corporation, especially those serving business-to-business markets, has often been unable to secure the same capabilities and expertise at affordable costs. As such, they have relied upon undifferentiated discount programs or undisciplined and under-analyzed incentive campaigns to implement similar strategies for their best customers. Reward Paths will change that by bringing a compelling, turn-key, and affordable presence to the U.S. loyalty and rewards marketplace for the mid-market.