April 27, 2012 at 2:42 PM Leave a comment
Over the past two years I have been working to build a community in East Portland. This area is now called Rosewood. When we started two years ago, it was a place of strangers, people living together in a place forgotten and ignored.
In the software world, we know the power of a connected...
You’ve probably known for a while that Firefox is moving to a faster development cycle, and a lot of corporations are peeved.
The complaint of the big IT departments: “We can’t keep up your release cycles. Slow down your innovation, if you please.”
What’s going on here? It’s a fundamental struggle – don’t we love fundamental struggles? – between Control and Innovation. Firefox is doing the innovating – making their tool faster, more adaptable, and more secure with every release (at least, we hope they are). Corporate IT departments want to keep control of the tools they use. They’ve established what Firefox calls “effort-intensive certification policies.” You can’t control something when it changes every week, and you’re not notified till it’s a fait accompli....
Satisfied customers are loyal.
Says who? Not hoteliers. According to a new study, satisfaction across the hospitality industry is rising, but sales aren’t. That’s because customer loyalty is sliding.
How can satisfaction be up and loyalty down? Because the pickings are too good. Hotels have been promoting low-price deals. Instead of choosing their 
favorite hotel, consumers know they can always search for something cheaper. So yes, they’re satisfied. At those prices, who can complain? The study’s author calls this “Price-induced satisfaction.”
Hoteliers have...
As a marketer, the first two items on your to-do list are making people aware and then engaging them. The first task is easy to understand. The second, not so much. And that’s a problem, because engaging your customers is the key to establishing a relationship with them. And relationships are everything.
Customer Experience Crossroads has been exploring the idea of customer relationships lately:
…most relationship marketing strategies are hollow at the core, and are really a pretty label for direct marketing tactics. Which is fine, but don’t call it a relationship.
Exactly. One relationship that’s not hollow, if you can achieve it, is that of trusted advisor. This is not a brokered relationship – exchange is not the point. When you are a trusted advisor, you’re giving your...
I read a fine post on Only Dead Fish the other day. It dealt with the question of how we find community in our fragmented world. Another question occurred to me: what does the fundamental human desire for community have to do with marketing?
Belonging is in our DNA. The instinct to congeal into tribes and villages is powerful. But it’s not unconquerable: post-war American society did a great job quashing it. For generations we were told that happiness equals stuff rather than happiness equals belonging. We moved to suburbs where we could set ourselves apart, with lots of room for our possessions. It didn’t really work out.
Now belonging is back. Open source aligns programmers and users in a shared purpose. The Internet and social media allow disparate people to form communities despite boundaries that would have kept them in different universes a couple of decades ago. People...
A very worthwhile post on Marketing Sherpa about third party lists appeared recently. Adam T. Sutton rightly points out that most business rely heavily on them, and shouldn’t. He also reiterates Brad Bortone’s wise words:
…effective email marketing is based on relationships. These relationships hinge on expectations, promises, and trust.
In truth, third party email lists are a piece of the puzzle, and they’re sometimes appropriate. But the core of marketing is establishing trusted relationships. Which is why, most of the time, you’re better off investing in your own database.
When you do use a third party list, the hardest nut to crack is profiling. A lot of...
Why is it so hard to define value propositions?
It’s your company, after all. You know the product its features. Why is putting it all into a sentence that will make people want to pick up the phone so flippin’ hard?
In our work with B2B companies we delve deeply into our clients’ value propositions. Usually we’re given a list of features and benefits to start with. Over the years we’ve come to understand that features and benefits are not in themselves compelling. In fact, getting to the VP from the features can be an excruciating process – it’s like doing dental work from the back of the head instead of the mouth.
So what do you need? You need a promise.
If you really look at things with your customer’s eyes, the first thing you see is that they’re under pressure. That pressure creates pain, and the pain is tied in with the feeling that they’ve lost control.
Let me repeat: ultimately, pain in business comes from a feeling of being out of...
I read a story recently about a wrecked sailboat that washed ashore five months ago in the swanky California city of Malibu. No one seems sure how it got there. In fact, no one seems to notice it at all.
Perhaps it’s been there so long, it’s become part of the landscape. Or maybe passersby figure it’s someone else’s responsibility to remove it. Whatever the case, the result is the same: a 37 foot eyesore remains on an otherwise pristine beach month after month.
I see this problem when I help companies create a culture of listening. Some people prefer not to listen to customers, because then they’ve got to solve the problems they discover.
That’s the dilemma – listening means responsibility. Sure, listening can be empowering – it’s how companies discover a shared purpose – but it also defines a shared responsibility to do something.
Again and again I...
I’ve been thinking about coffee lately. And innovation. And, of course Nietzsche. Who doesn’t, after all?
Coffee has two roles in innovation. The obvious one is in keeping people awake so they can think of new ideas. The mathematician Alfréd Rényi called a mathematician a “device for turning coffee into theorems.”
But it also has a historical role. By the late 17th Century coffee had taken hold of Europe, and with it came the coffee house: a place where people of different backgrounds get together and talk, argue, exchange ideas, and pass the sugar. When Hobbes, Voltaire, Madison, Paley broke the intellectual ice with their startling new ideas, coffee houses were the perfect place to spread and refine them. The British called coffee houses “penny universities,” since you could rub shoulders with prominent people for the price of a nonfat caramel macchiato.
I’m not sure what...
You hear this complaint a lot: trade shows aren’t cost effective, but if we don’t show up, the market will notice.
They even notice if you show up with a smaller booth to save money, so you splash out – with little ROI – to avoid starting a rumor that your company is in trouble.
For some companies, social media is a defensive investment as well. You need to have them “like” your company or product, just because it’s possible for them to do the same with your competitors.
Since social media involves hard costs, it will ultimately drain your organization, as defensive investments do, unless you look at it from a different perspective.
The best way is to contribute to the community – make it smarter. You could use your social media power to point to webinars, white papers, tips – anything relevant that makes people smarter.
Too much self-promotion in your social media, and you lose credibility. As I was writing this, I came upon Danny’s Brown’s...
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