Is your business marketing-proof?
Apple is not “Apple” anymore.
Let that sink in for a second.
One of the most successful brands in the world (allegedly) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They report earnings that stretch from here to Saturn and back – with stops at Starbucks, bathroom breaks and day trips to the galaxy’s biggest ball of yarn – yet they fall short of expectations.
You are not Apple
It’s my reply to a ton of would-be FAQs. You dream of ‘failing’ so well. No brand is infallible, above reproach or the slings and arrows of a tough economy or negative customer feedback. And yet, some businesses seem to be.
Netflix. Before they flip flopped on Quikster, they got a lot of crap by alienating customers and investors with confusing strategy and bad PR. Yes they lost subscribers, but 1) it wasn’t as mass an exodus as the hype made it seem and 2) they stood to make more money in the long run.
Dry Cleaners. Liquor Stores. Restaurants. One of my local cleaners is crap, but they have the location so it doesn’t matter. One of my favorite wine stores is on a busy corner, doing fine without even a website to pimp their libations.
- Friend: “Grr…this place always messes up my order, takes too long, whah whine gripe.”
- You: “Then why do you keep coming here?”
- Friend: “It’s close/convenient/cheap.”
Uverse. See also, almost any utility that provides phone or cable or power. The service they provide might be nice, but when they don’t work, their so-called support is an insult to customer disservice abominations.
What does it take to be marketing proof?
- You’re made of Teflon. No amount of bad press, angry tweets or ranty Facebook posts seem to stick. Angry customers don’t scare you, even if they talk more.
- What down economy? You and your ‘too big to fail’ banker are laughing together, as you’re raking in the cash no matter what.
- Is that a problem? No ‘PR crisis‘ – real or imagined – lasts in stakeholders memories more than a nanosecond.
- You’re the only game in town. You’re where customer service goes to die, be reanimated via some hoo doo rituals, tortured then killed again. But there are no alternatives, no Pepsi to your Coke.
- You’re oxygen. You sell toilet paper, food, gas, utilities – the stuff everyone HAS to have; customers are a given.
- You’ve cornered location. “No one beyond a 30-mile radius probably knows [you] exist, and [you're] happy that way,” says Shakirah Dawud on web-proof SMBs who can ignore Yelp and Google.
- You’re the BIG BOX BRAND. Everyone will assume bigger is better, even if it’s not. You might lose one customer with your terrible customer service – and they may tell all their friends – but there’s plenty more where they came from.
No matter what you do or don’t, what’s said or not, your phone is always ringing, your website always clicking, a line of paying customers waiting outside your door. Is this your business? I probably doubt it.
Thoughts on a marketing-proof business, real or mythical?
Tis the Marketing Season
It’s always the Season for Shopping. That was a good one from the Wall Street Journal, and it’s true: retailers have carved up the year into approximately 13 to 349 buying seasons.
Basically you and your MasterCard get Tax Day and Groundhog Day off from the retailing mania.
Christmas decorations before Halloween?! 
Seriously, that’s bullshit and really annoys me when I hit the stores; see also, playing the music of holiday cheer NON STOP before Thanksgiving. Not to mention as a small business or retailer, you could be leaving money on the table by thinking too far ahead.
Look at your marketing schedule and the promotional calendars to come up with your e-commerce strategies and do what fits you best.
If you sell outdoor living, have fun with Arbor day. For one client, I’ve done tie ins to other events like Super Bowl or Oscar watch. For another, it’s showing how their product is not just a summer item but has year-around uses.
More importantly, think hard about your products, your customers, your business.
Think beyond the holidays.
What can you do ‘THIS’ time that’s different from ‘THAT’ time?
That’s the question to answer as you decide what promotions to run for back-to-school or Christmas or Spring Break. Or forget the usual suspects, create your own seasons.
Your PR is built around relationships with stakeholders and target audiences; what’s beneficial to them is helpful to you. Don’t wait until your customers have a question or problem, reach out and solve it now. Fire up the old CRM goodwill generators and get some value out there.
- If it’s the slow season, offer quicker turnaround at no extra charge.
- If it’s a busy time of year, give a “patience esta une virtue” discount for those willing to wait.
- If you’re going after the B2B crowd, think of their spending schedules, look at the fiscal year and when budgets may be most flexible. When are your customers’ customers most demanding? That’s when you can step up, offer more support when they need it most.
And if you’ve waited this long, don’t jump on the first Johnny-come-Groupon that knocks on your email. Look at what you want now, what you can do later, and remember, the next ‘holiday’ season starts tom… -er, now.
Thoughts on holiday marketing, besides the crass commercialization of it all?
Photo credit: Funny comic by Pittsburgh Tribune Review cartoonist Randy Bish.
Take the Mass out of Marketing?
There are always exceptions but I don’t get some ‘mass’ marketing. Unless you’re selling something any and every consumer wants and needs to buy — i.e. toilet paper because yes, we’re all full of crap – it doesn’t make much sense.
Targeting your audience with a shotgun? Or a laser?
As technology gives consumers more ways to block, skip, fast forward and otherwise ignore our marketing efforts, I think it’s time to take the mass out of marketing, or refocus how our ‘precise’ aim should be and just do it smarter.
Refining a target is square one; talking about seeing past the big numbers and really look at all those filters that your private data gives marketers before gearing up your content marketing push.
Goldilocks is not your only customer
IMO Coke made a mistake putting big money into pushing Coke Zero solely at men. The marketing strategy – ‘men don’t drink diet’ – I find limited because:
- I don’t get it. An informal focus group of the gentlemen soda drinkers in my world: many drink diet and none feel emasculated by it, even if the ads are aimed at women.
- They didn’t go for it. I wanted ads of lumberjacks in pink plaid eating quiche drinking Coke Zero while walking tiny dogs, ‘not drinking this will attract hot chicks’ ads like it’s a horrible body spray. If you are gonna skewer a stereotype, put it on a spit a over fire that can be seen two counties away.
- It was dumb. Most Coke Zero drinkers I know are women, so you spend gagizillions of dollars developing a product and targeting NOT them? Even if you don’t go after them, you almost target against them and their money? Ok, good luck with that.
Yes Coke Zero is successful in the cola wars, but it’s because women – a lot of them – are also buying. (Sidenote: Coke Zero is a big NASCAR sponsor; 40% of fans are women. Hmm.)
My point is, in thinking of your mass product as ‘this one is too hard, this one too soft’ you can sometimes overthink what is just right and for whom.
Show me the Moneyball
Movie previews, saw that there is some serious female talent in the cast, yet they were barely mentioned in the trailer for new comedy “The Big Year.” Because comedies about men are not relevant to women? Tell that to the team behind The Hangover; or Bridesmaids, as the men in that audience were laughing their asses off along with us women.
Entertainment – many products – cross demographic lines. Women in the audience seemed to like Moneyball, so there isn’t a good reason to limit the preview to only the male audience you think you’ll target. (See also, Serenity - targeting only the Sci-Fi fan and marketing ‘different’ wrong.)
I’m a woman, I like sports and I enjoyed Moneyball. FWIW As a business owner or manager, it’ll have you rethinking those metrics, how you look at the numbers you think you need to hit the sweet spot between niche and mass to succeed.
Apple as go to example
The iPad is marketed as enterprise devise, as education tool, as communications wonder, as gaming machine, as electronic babysitter, digital crack. One ad that targets all those demos so that every Goldilocks with $500 can buy the iPad that’s just right for her.
What’s some of the worst ‘mass’ marketing you’ve seen, too broad or too narrow? Can you think of how to to redefine your niche, where your cross-over – and hidden sales – audiences might be?
Vagina Marketing
Warning: this rant was inspired by my friend Jenn Whinnem and some bullshit I’ve read and seen in the last couple weeks. If my ‘feminist politics’ get your boxers, briefs, thongs or granny panties in a twist, feel free to bounce rate out of here.
Vagina Marketing
How does one go about marketing the vagina? That was my question to Jenn, along with the ‘joke’ that it’s illegal to do so save Nevada. See this is about the marketing of the word vagina.
Words change meaning. In Kate and Leopold Liev Schriber couldn’t stop laughing at how commonplace the word Erection was used back in old timey, sephia-toned days for something other selling boners to middle aged men.
Words have connotations. There’s the riddle designed to show gender bias, about the doctor who’s Dun Dun DUN! also a Mother, the kind that’s a woman. With ovaries.
The brain trust at Summer’s Eve is at again, because their last round of douchey stupidity wasn’t dumb enough. The meme of their latest blight on marketing:
Vaginas are awesome!
Look people, stop squirming. You wouldn’t be here without a vagina, unless you’re a clone, were hatched in a lab or are possibly an alien. It’s a word, a part of the anatomy. I’m more squeaked out by the word bowels, so let’s pretend to not be 12 years old or Butthead’s 2nd cousin, thrice removed. Ahem.
They have cast a Cat on a Mission, a CAT PUPPET as spokesperson for this ‘viral’ atrocity. Bad tongue in cheek meta puns, OMG.
SpokesKITTY Carlton is supposed to make the WORD Vaginal synonymous with Awesome. The point is “to get women talking about their bodies in an open way,” according to their press release. And this shit will somehow help them sell crap.
Western civilization is doomed
Time capsule: Jersey Shore, Viagra, E-Harmony, KY ‘for women’, overpriced cars, junk food, no-effort diets, teeth whitening. We’re apparently the most vapid, narcissistic, selfish little trolls and sadly much of this crap is being ‘marketed’ to and/or ‘for’ women. Piffle.
Thinking about Cialis, Viagra ads, all ripe for the mocking – thank YouTube. They’ll use terms like ‘ED’ or ‘erectile disfunction’ but don’t dare use the words penis, flacid, limp, impotent, soft or anything else that might dare suggest the lack of a man reaction is anything other than a serious medical problem. Guess you don’t make money making dudes feel crappy about themselves, worrying about penile freshness? IDK.
Women on the other hand, it’s some inferiority on their parts – which marketers exploit to sell them crap – if they can’t pass the freshness test or experience that pleasure moment. See also, KY and its Intense ‘for women’ ads that are in fact, also very much about and for men.
Summer’s Eve has decided that the way to remove the ‘stigma’ of the word vagina – quoting from their press release – is to invent “a fun way to give it a new, positive place in today’s vernacular.”
Because the word vagina itself is so offensively negative?! I get what they wanted to do, but think this is pretty much a dumb, offensive way to go about doing it. That or I just don’t get their brand of funny.
The part I skipped
Same week I saw this: the courts decided that violence towards women was cool to sell to kids, provided the scantily-clad women covered their naughiest of digitally-enhanced, jiggling NIPPLE and VAGINA bits. Yes, I am over simplifying. I’m also skipping another 1,200 word diatribe on cultural values and who is responsible when a child of 12 buys a ‘game’ in which the object is to shoot, kill, curse, steal, fight and/or abuse women.
Instead, I’ll ask the marketers “to women for women” WTH my version of a game would be like, if it will be totally Vaginal and when can I expect it to hit shelves? Oh if I score points by buying shoes, you’re all fired. Blah blah tell me what you think blah.
Learning from the Worst of the Worst? Lessons in Dumbness
Nothing is useless. Even the worst can serve as a bad example.
That little quip has been quoted a few ways, very true. It calls to mind the flap in that NYT blog post about PR, which if you’re here, you’ve probably already read it and its partner in the blame game. It’s been discussed, blogged, challenged, with many clever and helpful posts by some of the best and brightest.
Even in failure, we can learn something.
Leading by Example
Either good or bad, that’s one of the first things I started blogging about: marketing, public relations, social media. That’s why my Advertising posts have the subhead “WTH were they thinking?” It’s why the PR category is about “the good, the bad, the galactically stupid.”
I did a summary post on everything from pay to play, to spin, to plagiarism, covering ethical issues in journalism and PR.
What I wrote then: “Nothing deep or especially clever, just Fire Bad, Tree Pretty, Ethics Good.“
How dumb was I? Not very, but then not helpful either. I just called out these examples as bad without offering insights.
I used good, bad and dumb examples of PR for this object lessons post.
What I wrote then: “Lessons learned: 1) Start with better PR practices than bulk emailing pitches and 2) Have a plan for when things go sideways. Mistakes will happen. It’s what you do next to quickly fix it that’ll make a difference.”
How dumb was I? Less so, as I did seek to offer at least some lessons from these public fails.
Examples of Leadership
When I rant about Summer’s Eve, Groupon, The Gap or rave about Apple or Old Spice, there are lessons SMBs can learn and apply to their businesses. If you own a small business in Atlanta or Marietta or Roswell, you can learn from the mistakes of others, capitalize on their growing pains without risking your own.
I need to share case studies, examples of success with marketing, PR and social media. Give SMBs some takeaways that they can learn from the success of those who get it right and the fails of those who get it wrong.
I’ll add it to my ever-growing Blog Better Damnit! list. Thoughts?
Photo credit: Resisted the temptation to use a Charlie Sheen pic, but that shit’s not really funny. A Despair Demotivator it is.