| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
Quick learning from Lauren Flaherty Vice President of On-Demand Marketing IBM. She spoke of the concept of “build to forecast” vs. “sense & respond”.
This concept relates to email marketing, simply because email is one of the only marketing tools that can take advantage of sense & respond as it relates to marketing. “What’s happening with a contact & what is the appropriate response? When, what, from whom?
If you follow this blog, you should know that I frequently whine about the fixation so many marketers still have on “Brand”. My beef is that for the most part, branding is justified by ambiguous terms like awareness that are difficult to measure, and therefore can’t be translated into money. Branding is the most expensive aspect of marketing and the least measurable.
This week I participated in both the Marketing Sherpa Lead Generation Summit in Boston and the CMO Council Summit in Monterey. (yes I saw both oceans in one week)
Carl Pascarella the former President and CMO of Visa caught my attention when he mentioned a concept I hadn't’t considered before: Branding Gets You Permission.
Permission?! Hey, that’s our term! It shouldn’t be coming from the mouth of a trillion dollar branding guy!?
But as he spoke the concept began to jell for me. Branding helps get you to that first permission. Wow. I’m not sure how to use it, but I can't deny is it’s a heck of a lot easier on the cold callers if the prospect on the other end of the phone has an already favorable impression of your company…but how to do it?...
Clent Richardson Chief Marketing Officer from Nortel also spoke about some of his revised thinking on branding. His quote was something like: “It’s not about awareness, it’s about Consideration!”
Permission and Consideration
I can see value here and something that in fact can probably be measured. Imagine….measured branding.
I’ll be thinking a lot about this over the weekend. Stay tuned.
I'm in the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation summit in Boston today so I'm going to take the lazy way out and post a case study that appeared in DM news yesterday.... forgive me :-)
Let me also plug this event. As a B2B marketer I actually learn a lot here. I strongly recommend. There is another event in San Fransisco next month if you are interested (click here)
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and parent company Wellpoint have a philosophy of promoting healthy lifestyles and offering value-added benefits to members. With 28 million customers in 13 states, getting the word out about their programs and special offers is enough to make an experienced marketer feel ill.
As a regional company, each market has unique characteristics that require tailored approaches and messages. Without these, Anthem couldn’t meet its goal of building lasting customer relationships. At the same time, it needed an efficient means to communicate all this customized information to members. Anthem decided to use e-mail and approached ExactTarget to devise a program that would establish and maintain customer relationships.
Ok, probably not very original to a lot of you,
but I just heard this term for the first time
on the Business Week Podcast driving in to
work this morning.
I like the phrase because it’s so simple. “Look me in the eye when talking to me” makes perfect sense. Think about your email programs. How can you modify them to get to eye level? I think imagery has a big role to play here.
Why not modify your images based on who you are talking to? People tend to respond better when talking with someone like them. The podcast talked about e.d. medications. Bob Dole was a little too decrepit for most people, someone in their early 50’s was just right.
Companies like Scott’s do a great job of this with email. The pictures are all dynamically driven based on what they know about my lawn & garden interests. Flower gardeners get almost the same message as vegetable gardeners, but the images are completely different.
“You’re spammers, each and every one of you,” Godin said. ‘You’re sending me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk in a format I don’t want to get about a product I’m not interested in and won’t have time to look at. And you’re hoping to persuade enough people to buy so you can go buy more stamps, or call more people, or buy more inserts, or run more ads. And the problem is, spam doesn’t work like it used to.”
The above is my favorite quote from the DMA meeting in Atlanta :-)
Relevance, smaller more personal communications. Talk to me when you have something to say.
I hate to come of as a hero-worshiper, but when I grow up..this is the guy I want to emulate.
Ok, most of you know that I’m in love with the Pizza Business. First of all, because I love to eat Pizza (well…toppings anyway: Atkins)
But marketing is where the real thinking opportunity is. As a marketer, I often think about how I would go about marketing if I was CMO of a Pizza Shop. You should try it too, because basically in the context of Pizza it all seems so easy. The next leap is to take those thoughts and translate them to your real business. Read about LaRosa’s a local Pizza chain in Ohio in this issue of Pizza Marketing Quarterly. Just in case you don’t currently subscribe to PMQ. :-)
I’m completely serious. For example, you might say: If I was running marketing for that shop, I’d send out a personalized note (email) to all new customers. Now think about this in terms of execution….how would you do this? How would you measure success? What else? People who haven’t ordered for two weeks? People who never take the upsell for the two liter coke?
What would you do if you owned that Pizza shop? Now take those same ideas and think about what is preventing you from doing the exact same things in your organization. With the tools available today, a Pizza Shop has access to some of the greatest database marketing tools in history…easy to use and cheap. So what’s your problem?
Just in case you wondered how much longer you were going to be forced to put up with interruption marketing; it appears only about 12 more months.
I've been trying to live "off the grid" from a marketing standpoint for a little over a year now. It's actually not as tough as you might think.
First there is the internet. I have My Yahoo home page which delivers all the news I care about as soon as I log in every morning. RSS feeds give me the obscure blogs I subscribe to.
Email of course is fantastic for bulletins and one to one communications from my retail and business relationships. What’s great about email is it’s interactive. It can be delivered to me when it’s relevant and I can respond immediately.
I’ve also invested in Sirius Satellite Radio for my Truck, so I avoid commercials that way. (btw Sirius: If I don’t want commercials, what makes you think I want idiot DJ’s????) Fortunately, my iPod is going to make Sirius unnecessary anyway pretty soon…I’ve just got to figure out Podcasts.
That just leaves TV to interrupt me. For that I’ve got Tivo and am going to add Tivo to every Television in my house.
And even more great news today….
The networks are going to start airing their prime time lineup on demand! Now when I forget to Tivo a show, or when I don’t know enough about the show to Tivo it, I can go back and rent a copy on demand. (read story here) If this isn’t the “middle of the end” for traditional mass marketing tactics, I don’t know what is.
I know there are some extremists out there screaming: “What about SPAM?” “What about all those Banner Ads??”
The fact is what I hate most about mass marketing is the Time I lose. Commercials take my time away. Pop Up’s stand between me and what I’m trying to accomplish on the web….which take time. SPAM is going to be solved by authentication standards and better integration by the legitimate marketers…and it doesn’t really take that much time away. Banners don’t bother me at all.
