If you’ve ever written a direct mail letter, you’ve probably agonized. "One more sentence," you wonder, "this might just be the one." After all, direct mail has a job to do… you send the letter and you get the sale (or you don’t.) Making it longer and more powerful and more complete are all essential tasks.
Brochures are a bit different. Brochures rarely lead to a sale. They lead to a sales call. So a brochure has to be engaging and hopefully viral. But its only job is to keep you in the running, not end in a transaction.
Email (sent with permission) has a different function. Its job is to get a response. To move a conversation forward, to help you learn a little bit about the person you’re engaging with.
If your emails read like direct mail letters or look like brochures, you’re wasting time and effort.
July 18, 2007
If you send out an email newsletter, you may have experienced the hassle of being blacklisted from an ISP or web service. The asymmetrical nature of spam makes this particularly painful–professional spammers don’t mind being blacklisted, because they regularly switch identities. It’s the good guys (and the amateur spammers) who get hassled.
Here’s a lens that can help good guys navigate their way through the issue.
Everybody knows that the big winner during the 1849 gold rush was a guy named Strauss, who made jeans (he changed his first name along the way). He figured that he might not find gold, but everybody needed pants. Win or lose, he won.
If you want to really understand what’s going on with copyright and digital rights and all the fights about YouTube and radio, etc., it helps to think about Levi. It’s not personal. It’s just about billable hours.
Fred points out that the music industry is working to cripple internet radio without thinking the strategy through. Many others have reported getting notes from various lawyers that seem more like fishing expeditions than serious efforts to patrol copyrights. I even got a letter from Abbot and Costello’s lawyer.
Watch the money.
In most of these cases, the lawyers get paid by the hour. A copyright holder pays a retainer and the associates just churn and churn and churn. They’ve got a form letter and a whois lookup and they send out another letter. That’s their job. Not to win, but to keep the cycle moving. It’s a bit like selling jeans.
Nine times out of ten, regardless of the industry, strategy is a byproduct of a series of tactics.
July 17, 2007
Brice points us to TOMS Shoes.
I like several things about this approach. The simplicity of the offer, first of all. If you buy a pair of these very inexpensive shoes, he gives a pair to a kid in the developing world for free. No fine print.
Second, Tom has turned the shoe into a souvenir. A post-modern shoe, a shoe for people who don’t need shoes, but are happy to wear a statement. This isn’t the first pair of shoes most Americans will buy, it might not even be the tenth. But it will be one that people talk about when they’re wearing it.
That’s what marketers do, after all. We spend time and money to change the role of our products and services sometime in the future (whereas salespeople try to change the now).
Changing tomorrow is really, really difficult. It’s expensive and abrupt and rarely works out for the best. Which is why the worst time to change your marketing is right after 60 Minutes calls on the phone. Tomorrow is so close, it’s probably going to go down the way it’s going to go down, regardless of what you do. Changing the future of tomorrow is tough.
Changing next week’s future is a little easier, next month is easier still. You can lay the groundwork now to change your team and your products and your story so that over time, you’re in a different place than you are now.
Changing next year, though… that’s really hard. It’s hard because a year is so far away, you can count on the world being a very different place by then.
Something to think about if you’re running for President, building a website or selling services to a big corporation.
July 16, 2007
As you may have noticed, farmer’s markets are springing up all over. The combination of organic and local is proving irresistible to many towns and consumers.
The market in my town is now twice as big as it was just last year. New vendors sell muffins, cookies, muffins, cheese, muffins, and yes, frozen risotto cakes in their own disposable plastic tray. Somewhere along the way, the farmer part got left behind.
This brings out tons of people, consumers who would rather buy a sandwich than a zucchini. It’s the normal progression of things–from the edgy early adopter who seeks purity and novelty above all things, all the way through the early majority and then the mass market. As the market grows, it gets, by definition, more average. Until, as Yogi Berra says, "no one goes there, it’s too crowded."
This creates opportunities and challenges. Last one in with a mass market offering can do very well after the market is pioneered by the iconoclasts. And the iconoclasts have to be very careful of depending on the market they created staying just the way it was, but bigger.
July 15, 2007
Very good ends up being worth a lot more than just good.
And yet some goods and services only seem to offer one level of quality… good. What can you transform into very good?
July 14, 2007
…but it’ll do.
Sure, it would be great if IDEO could design your next product or the CEO of
Texaco would introduce your sales guy to his purchasing department. It would be great if you had the resources to have a detail force at every retailer, or Russell Simmon’s PR firm or a page that got linked to from Yahoo’s home page.
But they won’t, he won’t and you don’t.
The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It’s figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you’ve got.
July 13, 2007
One of the luxuries of being in a low-cost business or in having access to capital is that you can scale quickly. You can go from one salesperson to a hundred, one store to twenty, no franchises to a thousand.
In our rush to scale, sometimes we forget something essential: if it doesn’t work when you’ve got one, it’s extremely unlikely to work when you have dozens.
If a political candidate can’t sway the audience with one speech, how will doing the speech across the district do anything but waste time?
If a direct mail letter doesn’t work when you mail it to a hundred people, it won’t work any better when you mail it to a thousand.
All a roundabout way of saying that obsessing about that tiny moment when someone decides to buy pays big dividends. Rejiggering or even overhauling a single example of what you do is almost always a better way to spend your time than in trying to double the number of places you do what you do.
July 12, 2007
Before you start firing customers, you better be committed to satisfying the rest of your customers. The giant flaw in Sprint’s logic, as many readers have pointed out, is that plenty (almost half) of their customers don’t like them. Getting rid of a nasty group of 1,000 isn’t going to change that very much.
First job: get serious about customer satisfaction.
July 11, 2007
