Seth Godin, pre-eminent modern marketer, sets forth a really useful structure for simplifying how we understand marketing. Not surprising to readers of Simple Marketing is his identification of Stories as one of the fundamental elements of marketing. He writes, “That’s because all we can work with as humans is stories.”

He identifies Data as the other basic building block: “Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what,” sayeth Godin.

Then come three blocks built upon Data and Stories:

• Products demonstrate the story and prove or disprove it.
• Interactions with customers and prospects are the actual touch points which also support or subtract from the credibility of the marketing story.
• Connection is the “end goal” of the other four elements. But don’t be lazy here: the connection isn’t between customers and the marketer. No, the lasting success is connection among the customers themselves. Call it brand loyalty, brand advocacy, allegiance, or… simply Connection.

And Seth takes this home with the challenging question: “What are you working on? If it’s not one of these… why exactly are you bothering.” Good point. These elements — or any set of marketing principles — aren’t just so we can explain it to others, they help us to prioritize our actions, align our resources, and measure our successes. 

Simple and easy. Five easy pieces that focus our marketing. Thanks Seth!

Dinnerware photo by What’s Up, Starkville?

Some years back a field marketing manager showed me with pride an email design developed for a co-marketing campaign with one of our technology partners. “Look, we’ve taken some of our icons and colors and mixed them with our partners icons and colors. We’re giving equal support to each brand!” And that was true: each brand was getting just about zero support from this Frankenstein of a brand design.

Of course with the best of intentions it missed the point. A brand isn’t a collection of shapes and colors. A brand as we all know really resides within the customer’s expectations. Where my colleague was proud of marketing balance in using equal amounts of brand elements she sidestepped the only important question: “What does the customer think?” In this case the mailer was neither fish nor fowl — neither our brand nor our marketing partner’s. And because of that it was doomed to be less effective than if it leveraged a single dominant brand design.

Building a brand is vital to ongoing customer relationships and the viability of our businesses. But we need to decide when we’re sowing and when we’re reaping. In the case of any co-marketing design there are two useful options and one bad one. Yes, you guessed it: an equal mix of brand elements is the bad option. Again, the important point of view here is the customer’s. Which of the two co-marketers has the most credibility with the intended audience? For the best success of the campaign — presumably the best success of the two partners — pick the brand design that will engage the customer more and add the less-relevant partner’s logo as a secondary element.

If that means that your co-marketing partner’s brand is more compelling to the intended audience, suck up your corporate pride and make the program more successful by using the best leverage: your partner. You’ll add some brand equity by being associated with a company that’s relevant to your audience. And you’ll show your colleagues that you’re not a branding weenie who’s hung up on brand growth being more important than sales growth.  Remember that growing brand equity is important because it helps to grow sales. It’s backwards to hamper sales in favor of growing your brand.

Noose photo by Exaussie

Take a look at what Google tells us about marketing process. First, search for Process. You’ll get about 740,000,000 hits. Next, search for some other kinds of processes:

• Business Process: 23,100,000 hits
• Manufacturing Process: 4,800,000
• Planning Process: 4,610,000
• Aging Process: 2,160,000
• Admissions Process: 891,000

What about Marketing Process? 473,000 as I write this. Not very much by comparison is it? But don’t despair. We beat Complaint Process more than two to one: 203,000.

This scarcity of Marketing Process mentions is especially saddening when you consider the billions of dollars that we keep spending on marketing. Funds that were spent, apparently, on wishes and a prayers.

Or were they? I, myself, and every marketeer I’ve worked with have very deliberate steps we take for strategic planning, content development, creative development, production, media evaluation, and measurement. Many of the agencies we hire package these steps into something with a distinctive, trademarkable name. My experience is that we do have repeatable processes. So what gives?

Are we guilty of not making these processes evident to our management? Are we guilty of hiding behind marketing mysticism by keeping these steps to ourselves? I don’t know the answer. But there appears to be a problem.

What do you think? Do you openly apply your processes? Do you call them something else? Post a comment and let’s try to figure this out.

Galileo used his improved telescope and keen analysis to discover that the Earth does in fact revolve around the Sun. For us, the evolution of technology and of marketing theory shows us that the customer is king and we serve at his or her pleasure. We begin to focus marketing on solving customer problems and less on just finding someone to buy the stuff we have in our warehouses.  Customer-centric marketing is a smart way to be relevant, develop repeat business, establish a stronger brand, and contribute to our marketplace momentum. But there’s a fly in this oinment: How do we know what our customer wants?

In any business-to-business company there are legions of sales people, product marketers and executives who spend almost as much time with customers as they do waiting in airport security lines. There is so much customer contact that it seems odd for anyone — you, for example — to suggest that you can market better if you do some customer research. “We talk to customers all day long,” say some. “Don’t waste your time and our budgets on focus groups,” say others. ”What can 8 people tell us that we don’t already know from our 500 customers?” Well, quite a lot actually.

A creative director I used to work with loved to point out that some of our clients “lose their keys under the couch, but search for them by the window because the light’s better.” The light is certainly better where all of your employees are talking with customers. But that’s nowhere near good enough for marketing. Before you spend the big bucks on marketing programs and lead generation, you need a very good idea of what you’re going to say to them. Being customer-centric, you need to have terrific customer understanding and insights.

Here’s the problem: the keys to successful marketing are not just current customers. They are but a subset of all your potential customers. They are not the prospects who didn’t buy, who didn’t consider you, or even who didn’t know about you. Isn’t each of these groups vital to the continued growth of your company? Of course they are. But very few in your company meet them, let alone gather enough information about them to improve your marketing messages and focus your programs. Without direct primary research about your addressable customers and prospects you are limited to your addressed customers. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Your CEO tells you that “everyone knows about us.” Well, everyone who is about to meet the CEO of a company is pretty likely to be self-selected for familiarity. Your sales teams can tell you a lot about existing customers and some who “got away”, but their information is heavily filtered by their sales perspective which by definition is not a marketing perspective. The same goes for industry analysts. While they do talk to many prospects with whom you have no contact,  I’ve found their analysis is often filtered by the industry trends they are promoting. All of this information is useful in aggregate, as long as it also includes direct understanding by marketing of customers and prospects. Look for answers to question like these:

How can you get this? Lots of ways, including focus groups, quantitative surveys, secondary research by publishers and (yes) analysts. You can use the “three rings” analysis I wrote about separately.  The important thing is to be sure you get a balance of insights into all parts of your target audience, not just those who have self-selected to be your customers. Customer-centric marketing requires looking at the entire center of your solar system, not just the part that’s easiest to see.

In their article Strategic Insight in Three Circles in Harvard Business Review, Dr. Joel E. Urbany and Dr. James H. Davis present a model for strategic marketing insight that is simple and effective. And you know how I like simple and effective marketing. The three circles concept they describe (and which they protect: © Copyright 2007 Urbany and Davis) begin by helping you map and explain your target audience’s perceptions about your company and your competitors. It continues by identifying areas of marketing focus, of marketing irrelevance, and marketing danger.  All that in three circles? You bet.

.The circles can be used for many different scenarios, but let’s use it to map perceptions. Here’s how it works. One circle is your customers’ beliefs about what you offer. Another is about what your competitor(s) offer. The third is what your customer believes they want. Got it? Now overlap these circles like I have in the illustration here.

At the top, in the middle, you see the Advantage area where your customer believes that you have unique offerings that they want. Just below that is Parity where you and your competitor both offer the same desirable items. Down and a little to the right is Danger where your competitor has unique and desirable offerings — this is their Advantage zone. At the top left is the Growth area where the customer has needs unmet by anyone. Your customer doesn’t think about the other areas so we’ll ignore them too.

You can populate these areas with primary research drawn from focus groups or surveys. Or by some very forthright self-analysis by you and your marketing team. However you do it, you know that your marketing should emphasize your Advantage, de-emphasize your Parity, and defuse the Danger. The Growth area is more for your product development teams to explore, but it can be fertile soil for any thought leadership or brand “halo” development.

Three circles and you have a simple way to organize your market data and analyze it for competitive advantage. Not too shabby.

Who has too much time and too much money for your marketing? I thought so. Unfortunately, none of us is burdened with too much of either. Instead, we and our companies rely on our ability to help make sales quickly and efficiently. Here’s where the right product name can help make the difference.

Let’s say you’re responsible for the information technology at a small business. Quick – what do these products do? 1) Tivoli Monitoring Express. 2) Lotus Domino Express.

Well, the first one is some sort of easy monitoring capability sold under the Tivoli name.  The second one? I don’t know. And that’s the problem. It gives me two brand names and leaves it up to me to figure out what the thing actually does, or even what broad category it’s in.

Now, imagine you’re the sales executive who gets to talk to a prospect. With the first product you give the name and then talk about your prospect’s monitoring issues. With the second one, you give the name, then mumble something about “security-rich e-mail, calendaring and scheduling, and instant messaging.” Then you get to talk about your prospect’s need for it, no doubt repeating the product’s name or its function each time the prospect can’t remember. Which name would you prefer to base your commission on?

Here’s the point: Simple, descriptive names give us advantages in helping a customer — and even a salesforce — understand what we’re offering. Each time we create a fanciful name, we require our customers to learn what the name means. This takes up your time and money. But worst of all it gives your customer an opportunity to avoid memorizing the brand name.

Sub-brands are not inherently bad, they are just costly. If your marketing goals and budget justify a sub-brand, then take that path with your eyes wide open. Remember that your product sales will ramp more slowly, and you are splintering your marketing budget into supporting multiple brands.

On the other hand, naming with a simple, descriptive word or two after your corporate brand you gain several advantages:

1. Improve your customers’ speed of understanding
2. Use your company name to differentiate your product
3. Focus your marketing spending on one brand name
4. Dramatically shorten the time and money spent on selecting and clearing fanciful product names

A funny thing happens to funny ideas in marketing. All the discussion, development and production has a very strong tendency to squeeze the funny right out it. We end up with something that is comfortable for everyone involved — and by that fact is no longer funny.  Customers yawn.

The same process squashes the other emotions that we want to portray. Our company reputations suffer. A reputation after all is more than the logical recitation of “brand attributes”. A reputation among people is based on some facts , some interpretation, and something else. It’s an emotional something that compels us to say, “he’s my friend”, or “I don’t like her”. It’s the same for companies. We form perceptions about a company’s reputation through what we see and what we don’t see.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want a bank that puts whoopee cushions on their chairs. But I do want a bank that I trust. Trust is an emotional concept, not a listing of financial assets. In my experience Executive Committees are more nervous about going too far than they are about not going far enough. That’s not terminal if all of your competitors have similar internal constraints. But watch out for the first competitor who starts to build a personality.

Imagine you’re selling mobile phones as handsets and a company with personality jumps in the market. Hello Nokia. Goodbye Motorola. But that’s not the end of it. Hello iPhone! Apple is a gleaming example of the importance of personality in the company’s reputation and success.

What about your company? What’s the authentic personality of you company? What kind of people work there? What kind write your blogs and respond in your forums?  If it were a person (businesses are people, too) how would your company talk? Right there you have the tone of voice to use in your ads, websites, brochures, tradeshows, etc. Use it. Defend it. Accept no substitute.

Marketing agencies know this. The most successful agency relations are directly with the head of marketing and the CEO. The collaboration is two-way. The resulting ideas are big, sustainable, authentic, and reach the market at their full strength. Some examples? Epson. HP. IBM.

Sure, they have big budgets. They also have huge markets to reach. More to the point, they have more people who could get in the way, but don’t. How about you? How many people in your review process have the authority to say “Yes”? How many can only say “No”?  Now you know who to work with on your next big idea.

Storytelling is one of the most effective approaches to building the right marketing messages. And who knows storytelling better than Hollywood? Peter Gruber, a very accomplished movie maker, has condensed his industry’s art into four vital elements in the Harvard Business Review. His full article for HBR subscribers was published last week. However, John Caddell in his Shop Talk blog gives us a taste.

The “Four Truths” are right on the money.  You should go to John’s summary or the actual article itself, but here’s my very brief summary:

1. Truth to the Teller — Be authentic.
2. Truth to the Audience — Be compelling.
3. Truth to the Moment — Be relevant.
4. Truth to the Mission — Be inspirational.

What better criteria could you have for developing the story of your company?

A CEO I knew used to say, “Our job is to convice the customer that we have his software and he has our money.” As marketers, our job is to connect customers with our company and to find the right tools or mix of tools to do so. All of the options in advertising, public relations, social media, events, websites, viral videos, and such, are all just tools. Bland, lifeless tools with no intrinsic value other than to reach customers in different ways. To favor one or another simply because it’s new, or because “it’s what we’ve always done” is way off the mark. We need to understand these tools in order to use them well. Let’s embrace the new tools’ abilities to do new things and add them to our tool belts.

I bought a new chisel for my stone carving hobby and couldn’t wait to use it. But you can be sure I did wait until I actually needed to do what it was designed for. I look at the new social media the same way.  Just as I look at traditional advertising the same way. It’s irresponsible to spend your employer’s or client’s money on a program for reasons that aren’t focused on reaching the intended audience in a way that meets your marketing objectives. Want to reach a huge number of broadly defined market segments? SuperBowl TV here I come.  Want to develop thought leadership among your employees, suppliers, partners, and most avid customers? Here’s a blog platform we’ll have up by dinner time.

Hugh Kennedy at PJA Advertising points out that the long lambasted print advertising might be all the more effective precisely because there is less clutter in the magazines nowadays. Looking for the best marketing mix for their clients PJA is laudably unrestrained by any bias towards the new and flashy. 

Let’s not get distracted by the zealots who preach to us about “the new economy” and their bias for certain marketing behaviors. Let’s remember that simply put, we have customers and prospects who need to learn about our company and it’s wares. Pick the right combination of tools considering every possible option and you’ll be getting the most out of your marketing resources. And that’s a marketer’s job, after all.

The prime minister of permission marketing , Seth Godin, finds additional proof that consumers are irrational, and that brand perceptions affect buying behavior. A branded gift card, he writes, “isn’t as good as cash.” True enough. Your recipient can spend it only on one place. But this is where buying behavior and brand come in. Why do we prefer to give and receive gift cards? A number of reasons:

1. It shows that some attention has gone into the gift. Instead of just grabbing $50 out of her purse, my wife gave me a Home Depot gift card to go get the power tool I’d been hinting at. Thoughtful.
2. Cash is an everyday, dirty and often worn out piece of paper. A gift card is shiny, new and bears a logo that triggers a number of brand memories. Less useful than cash perhaps. But much more evocative.

Seth makes some great suggestions on how to make the card actually advance the brand by tieing it to corporate donations to relevant charities.

 Despite quibbling with some of his conclusions, I think this is a great mini-study. It shows how a brand can add tangible value to its consumers. And, through extensions such as the donations, bring value back to the brand.

How can we use this in business marketing? With our products and programs, let’s be sure that the brand design looks shiny and new so that it can evoke the rest of the brand experience. Let’s add an unusual feature that proves our brand values are real. Carbon credits as part of a Green program? Contributions to homeless shelters as part of a competitor replacement promotion? Professional certification classes as part of an installed base upgrade offer?

These additions add in some necessary proof points to our marketing story. The ROI on these additions comes when the perceived value of the extra bit is way more than the actual cost — not too hard to achieve. This is where a  marketing program can go the extra mile to generate immediate sales and long term brand value. Yes, buyers act irrationally. It would be crazy to ignore that.