Miel has a post about Melody: Coolz0r – Marketing Thoughts � Logitech’s 17 Year Old Brand Ambassador.
The first thing a jaundiced marketer would wonder is if this is just a special case. After all, the product that Melody is videoing about is the video camera. It’s hard to be more self-referential than that. The second thing I would imagine one would ask is "how can we make this happen for us?"
Of course, you can’t make it happen. That’s the point. If Logitech had orchestrated this, it wouldn’t have worked.
What you can do is make products that allow people to feel good (no, great) when they express themselves. Products or services that involve stories that are fun to spread. YouTube is just the medium.
April 6, 2006
an entire site of music for (and from) tv newscasts: News Music Now V.2 — [In The Spirit of Texas].
One of the secrets of the Yellow Pages was that the phone company would give you a second line when you bought a big ad.
Within days of the book coming out, you’d see and hear the phone ring. And you knew which phone it was. So when the time came to renew your Yellow Pages ad, all the sales rep had to do was glance over at the phone on the wall and the prospect would imagine that phone no longer ringing…
Aaron writes in and asks, why is it so easy for a client to spend a fortune on a brochure and to spend hours agonizing over it, and so hard for them to invest in an end to permission marketing/ideavirus system?
The answer is the same: measure this, measure that.
Once the number is on the wall, in marker, or in phone calls or dollar bills, the investment will follow.
Example: Google adwords. The price of adwords keeps going up because the cost per click pricing model forces clients to measure. As soon as they measure something and see it is working, they want more. Magazine ads don’t have that effect, so companies rarely bid up the price.
Example: Indie musicians at cdbaby. They tour to make a living, and they obsessively track which gigs translate into record sales. As a result, they go back to the places and the types of venues that work, and stop going to the others.
So, my best advice is not to argue with the client about building a big kickass system. Instead, it’s to argue with them about measuring. Once they start measuring, they’ll be begging you for the big system.
April 5, 2006
I had lunch with someone in publishing today. She’s been doing it for more than forty years, I’d say. She said to me, "People ask me what the hardest thing is… is it finding authors? I tell them that the two hardest things are hiring great people and watching the cash flow."
In the computer chip business, some people say the hardest thing is yield. In soft drinks, of course, it’s top of mind marketing. In sales, it’s getting qualified appointments.
What is the hardest thing in your business?
Does everyone you work with know that it’s the hardest thing?
And what percentage of your time do you spend on it?
Shane Wilson points us to Jim Barnes who quotes James Allen, Frederick F. Reichheld and Barney Hamilton, The Three "Ds"
of Customer Experience, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:
A study by Bain & Company found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believed that they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers. But, when customers were asked to indicate their perceptions of the experiences they have in dealing with companies, they rated only 8 percent of companies as truly delivering a superior experience
Tim Stay and his network of 55 blogs have donated ad space to the Big Moo. Thanks! Know More Media: The Big Moo Gets Free Advertising on Know More Media.
April 4, 2006
…don’t do this if you are on a deadline
or have a day job
or hope to accomplish much of anything today
unless your definition of ‘accomplish’ is to see hundreds of cool websites and a bunch of duds.
Stumble.
You install a tool into your browser and it, upon request, finds you the next cool thing. Or not.
1. treat different products differently
2. treat different customers differently
1. why doesn’t fresh fish cost more than the same fish a day later? bowling a few cents less when it’s not so crowded? movie tickets more on the day a movie debuts? why don’t computers with a three-year obsolence cycle have predictable pricing that starts high and gets near cheap just before the new upgrades?
2. why do all of your customers pay the same price when they buy the same product?
There are a million reasons to keep things the way they were before it was easy to change them. And yes, we used to do things in a clumsy way, last minute discounts and early bird specials. But now that it is easy to change things all the time, have you tried?
Rich sends us this story: "Hello_World": That’s what I’m talking about.
The short, Americanized version: Guy runs off the road with his Citroen. Files a claim. The insurance company sends him a toy SUV with a note that says he’d enjoy off-roading a bit more in a different sort of vehicle…
Wow.
Can you imagine the reaction?
No, of course it wouldn’t be a great idea if small bunnies had been killed or people injured. But the sheer chutzpah of having a sense of humor about something so so serious as insurance and money…
Dennis Forbes is incredibly talented at working with data, and has way too much time on his hands. His definitive report on what domain names are out there (and which ones aren’t) is fairly astonishing. Thanks, boingboing, for the link.
