Marketing with Technology and More

Caveat Venditor is the new Caveat Emptor

Many of us grew up in a society where the consumer mantra was always caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.  Beware for the world was filled with unscrupulous marketers and businesses that would rapidly remove hard-earned cash from your pockets and fill them with cheap products that didn’t work as promised , or deliver as required. 

The world is changing rapidly, and the old maxim of caveat emptor is rapidly changing into a new warning of caveat venditor – let the seller beware.  Today’s consumer no longer is powerless to change things, upset them, fail to deliver on your promises, anger them and you will find the tides of enterprise rapidly shift against you.  Upset enough of them, and the world as you know it may come crashing down on you.

This weekend it happened to the makers of Motrin.  They developed what I am sure both they and their ad agency thought was a “cute” ad that promoted their product by poking fun at mothers and baby carriers (Marketing 101 - never make fun of mothers or their children – very bad idea).  What happened was a literal firestorm of consumer action in the form of extremely negative feedback from consumers (many, but not all mothers) on blogs, Twitter and even in at least one case a 9 minute “protest video.” 

If you are on Twitter, check out the hash tag #motrinmoms, there are literally hundreds of postings about the offending ads.  By Sunday evening, close to 70 blog postings had been tracked mentioning it.  The video poster/blogger Katja Presna received an apology from the VP of Marketing - Pain, Pediatrics, GI, Specialty at McNeil (the makers of Motrin), and the Motrin web site had been completely taken down. 

I think McNeil got the message, unfortunately, there was much more they could have done to avert this disaster, and they could have been a part of the conversation rather than just sent out an email to one of the bloggers.  In the new age of Caveat venditor, if you are the seller, be prepared to play by the new rules.  They are:

• Think before you act – the consumer is watching and if they don’t like your actions, they will report on it (via email, blog, micro-blog, video, pod-cast and other social communications tools yet to be developed.  Ask a simple questions, “if I was my consumer would l like the action I am about to take”? 
• Listen – there is a global conversation happening and some of the talk is about you.  Good or bad, you must know what is being said and you must be listening.  Do you know the places where the conversation is occurring?  Do you have a method and a plan for gathering the rivers of conversation that pertain to you?  You should. 
• Converse – You must be part of the conversation.  This doesn’t mean you get to control it and it doesn’t mean you get to advertise in it.  The great part about today’s social media world is that it is like a giant cocktail party and everyone is welcome as long as they obey the norms of the group.  As a participant you will reap much in the way of rewards that go beyond anything you would find in any other one-way customer communications medium.
• Learn – No one has yet figured out this massive new world.  The great opportunity is if you participate now, you get to learn along with the others who are developing this new field.  The only failure will come from failing to participate.

The Invisible Hand Can Be Seen

Back in my University days I took quite a number of economics courses.  One of the first books most  economics students read in those days (and maybe still do) was Scottish economist Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations originally published in 1776.  I enjoyed that book immensely and thought it gave a great explanation of how an economic system was driven by individuals.  One key premise that Smith built his economic treatise on he dubbed  “The Invisible Hand.”

“The Invisible Hand,” was a great metaphor for how markets used to work.  The basic premise was that in free-markets, individuals, driven by their own-self interest, will act in a way that ultimately maximizes the wealth of a community.  “The invisible hand” will guide each in a way that ensures that by maximizing their own self-interest society as a whole gains the most.  Individuals neither intend to promote the public interest, nor do they even know that they are doing so, yet they do, by trying to maximize their own lot in life.

We know much more about economics today than we did in Smith’s time (yet we still manage to screw it up), however this is not my point here.  I believe that “The Invisible Hand” can now be seen in a way that it has never been visible before.  I was first excited by the Internet and what it initially did to reduce friction on economic activity.  Now, along come social networking tools, and I think they are in the process of severing the invisible hand.  For if you are listen to the social media/net world, it is easy to hear discussions that lay out market direction, before the market actually move.

Honest dialog is occurring about products, companies, politics, ideas, movements, organizations, events and tribes (to use Seth Godin’s metaphor).  People may still operate in their own self-interest, but communicate about it in a rare and extended way that distributes that which is of value to society at lightning speed.  So, self-interest that is self-serving is self-destructive in an unprecedented way.  We are at the dawn of the social network era (think Internet 1995) the basic social networking tools of today, blogs, wiki's, photo sharing, etc along with popular commercial resources (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plurk, etc) are empowering people to help each other in ways that are extremely transparent and would have been impossible in the past. 

If you are in the conversation, you know what I mean.  If not, be prepared to wake up some day by being slapped in the face by a very visible hand that you just haven’t been looking at.

Personalization in more detail

The other day I posted about the personalization index.  I realized that it was the perfect subject for one of our Email Marketing Minutes.  Et Voila.

Are you getting too Personal?

About ten years ago I came across a very useful formula that has worked very well in most situations when SubscriberMail clients building forms to gather data as part of their email campaigns.  I do not remembe r the original source of this formula (and it may even come from traditional direct response world).  However, if you follow it, it will serve you well.

Many marketers who come to the world of email  start building data collection forms and easily fall into the trap of turning the form into a marketing survey.  The result, a reduced number of subscribers, subscriber irritation, and potentially negative brand impression.  The key questions to ask is how are you going to use the data you collect in an email  interaction.  If you can't explain how you are going to use it to segment or personalize the message in someway, don't ask for it. 

But still, you may have the urge to ask those questions, so here is the Personalization Index to empirically determine are you asking for too much.  Take the number of data items you use in a customer interactions and divide them by the total number of data elements you are gathering.  If the total is .3 or less, you are gathering too much information.  A "PI" of .3 means that for every 3 elements you gather, you are only using one (which is still probably a bit on the high side, but you may have planned uses for the others in the future).

Good to the last drop

Seth Godin had a post today about marketing that delivers exactly the message marketers (and salespeople for that matter) need to hear as the economy gets tougher.  Now is the time to stick to your marketing progams.  Only he says it in a way that it almost sounds like poetry.

Marketing Prof's Digital Mixer - A perfect mix

 

Just returned from Phoenix after attending Marketing Prof’s Digital Mixer.  It was an outstanding event.  I have been to their events in the past, but this one was the best by far.  In trying to put my finger on what made this event great,  I thought back to other events I have attended that had a similar feel. 

The first, was a conference organized by Peter Senge in the early 90’s at Bretton Woods.  The second was a gathering Tom Peters organized in 2002 and invited a few of his “cool friends” to (I had the honor of joining that list after the publication of my first book, Aha) along with some major corporate leaders.  The third happens every year when I attend the TED Conference. 

The feeling at each of these events comes from the participants, not from the content.  Sure the content is important, most of us would never go if the content did not draw us in (or we were not invited to deliver some of it).  The people and the dialogue that go on in the halls, at dinner (or in this case in the casino) are where new connections are made and ideas launched.  At each of these events in the past, there were incredible individuals that I connected with, some who have become life-long friends, others mere acquaintances, but none-the-less, the conversations were life changing for me and many of the participants. 

At Bretton Woods, I met many of the influential leaders of the then very hot Learning Organization community.  I formed a loose partnership with one of them, and we worked together for several years in a variety of interesting ways that led me to the publication of my creativity book, and built a great management development business. 

In Vermont, I connected with many influentials of the digital world who were starting to change the way we viewed the web.  Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Marti Barletta, Robyn Waters, David Weinberger and many more.  I had started SubscriberMail at that time, and the ideas and feedback that came out of that gathering helped shape the vision for our organization.

TED every year is simply TED.  It defies description beyond the fact that it is the single event that I attend that requires I take a vacation afterwards to process the input.  You can certainly read more about TED on this blog, but you can experience some of the content at the TED website.

Now I come to this event, which I have fondly just started to refer to as #mpdm .  For those of you who Twitter, you will understand the reference, the rest of you, will soon.  From my perspective, this event fell into the same basket with the ones I have named above because of the participants.  There were many of the people I know from the email world, along with some of the SEO world.  The catalyst at this event however were the Social Media participants.   They verified for me that this is indeed and exciting marketing element, and in my mind they were the “who’s who” of this new space. 

I am sure that many of the participants formed relationships that are going to fuel new business ventures, create great new concepts and build new marketing ideas.  Many of the connections I made are people I plan to stay connected with and hope to get to know better in the years to come.  I think we will all be on this new marketing road together, and boy does it look cool.  Sure the economy is glum, but with opportunity like this, why worry?  As one of the keynote speakers Gary Vaynerchuk (future owner of the NY Jets) stated so eloquently, in the down economy, the first thing big companies will drop is their funding and focus on new marketing initiatives (like social media).   This creates fantastic opportunities for everyone currently in the space and willing to invest work, time and money.

Sealed for Your Protection

I am in Columbia Missouri this week for an exciting occasion.  My daughter is graduating from The University of Missouri (I’m one proud father).  Anyway, the trip necessitated a stay in a local hotel.  Having visited her numerous times, we knew what the area had to offer, and opted to try a brand new Hilton Garden Inn that had just opened on the outskirts of town. 

By today’s road warrior travel standards, it was pretty nice.  Free Internet, breakfast, coffee in the room, soap, shampoo, an alarm clock.  But the alarm clock is where it got oddly strange.  At about 10:30 PM, when my wife and I were ready to turn in, I looked at the alarm clock and it said 5:20AM.  So I looked at the clock for the “set time” function and could not find it.  So I called my daughter over, the new college graduate (figuring she would be pretty smart) and she could not figure it out either.  It was easy to set the alarm, but there did not seem to be a way to set the time.  In frustration, I called the front desk.

I simply said, “could you tell me how to set the time on the alarm clock in my room?”  His response was, “you can’t, it is sealed for your protection.”  He told me he would be happy to come up with the tools required to reset the time if I wanted or, he could arrange for a wake-up call.  I told him that this was pretty ridiculous.  I think he somewhat agreed, and had grown tired of telling clients that they could not set their own alarm clocks.

What am I being protected from?  My guess is the hotel is hoping no one will steal an alarm clock they can’t set (although the time has to be off in order for someone to figure that out, so a thief probably would not realize this until after they had stolen it and taken it home).  Sometimes we do things in business that are designed to serve our own best interest (not the customer’s) and then try to disguise it with some lame explanation that does nothing but frustrate a user or consumer even more.  Put as much control in the hands of the customer as you can (especially when it comes to setting their own alarm clock).

Email Success Secrets when Images are set to off

Send out an effective email marketing message is not as easy as it used to be.  At SubscriberMail we have just completed a survey of executives and 63% of them have images turned off as the default on their email clients.  What this means for marketers is that despite all the effort you go to in order to make the message look great in the inbox, it is often lost when it arrives.

The SubscriberMail team has learned many great ways to optimize your messages, and today we released a new whitepaper titled The Great Suppression: Five Strategies to engage audience members when images are Suppressed by Mail Clients.  You are welcome to download a complimentary copy.  As a matter of fact, you may want to check out our entire White Paper Library, filled with great email content.

Google AdWords Marketers - Beware! Phisher's are Out There

I think I am pretty savvy when it comes to on-line purchasing.  The last thing I thought is thatI would ever fall prey to is a Phishing scam, but Phishers are crafty. 

As a business we are regular Adwords users on Google.  I had not used them in a while, so I reactivated a somewhat dormant account the other day.. A day later I ger an email telling me that my account information is not up-to-date, and that I need to correct it.  Diligently I clicked in the message and went to the site that the email pointed me to adWRods.com .  When I spell it out, it is obvious, but without the emphasis, it is easy to go to a bogus site.

When I arrived at the site, it looked just like the Google site, and I readily provided the requested information.  The last thing I would want is our Google campaign shut down because my credit card information was obsolete.  Fortunately, the latest versions of the major browser try to give you a heads-up.  In my case, I received a message that made me look closely at the URL.

I was like they fly in the spider web.  Once I was caught, I was doomed.  Phishers are creative and ingenious.  You have to be diligent every time you provide credit card information.  The identity you save may be your own.

United Airlines - What were these people thinking

I received an email from United Airlines today asking me to participate in a study on the "Elite Membership" kit they sent to me.  I looked at the survey and thought - who put this together, their marketing intern.  Actually, I think a marketing intern would have done a better job. 

The four data points related to all items were (you could only pick one):
- Received it
- Read it
   Received it and Read it
- Don't remember

So here is the question - can I read it if I don't receive it?  It would not taken much brainstorming to figure out that this did not make any sense.  Then it asked me about my membership card, and had the same four options.  I don't know about you, but I don't usually do much reading of my membership cards when I get them.  The second page of the survey asked how useful this information was to me.  I can't believe that they really think much of the advertising they throw into their envelopes these days is very useful to anyone.

It brings me to my point.  We assembled and sent out SubscriberMail's annual email survey in conjunction with the EEC this week.  We initially sent a small sample to test questions and reports.  When we got the sample back, there was a major back end issue with reports.  We were able to reconfigure the survey and send it out correctly.  If you are doing a survey, testing a small sample can give you great feedback on how to improve questions and what the reporting will look like.  Don't trigger a survey without testing.   Perhaps I was in the United test group - for their results sake, let's hope so.