I had a conversation with one of our customers on Monday who had probably the sharpest "marketing launch" plan I'd heard of in months.

As we all know by know, the postal service raised the price of stamps to $.41 on Monday the 14th. This usually causes a significant amount of traffic to the post office as people go in to buy new stamps. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a post office, you are going to see a lot of passers by that you normally might not see, or at least not in such concentrated volume!

So, in order to capitalize on the traffic, they scheduled their brand new sign and other outdoor promotion to coincide with the boost in traffic to their neighborhood.

Take note this summer. You'll also see enterprising grade schoolers selling lemonade during sporting events, neighborhood garage sales and other events that bring a concentration of traffic to their area.

I know, it's an episodic (seems more frequent as of late though) thing, but the concept applies more broadly.

[UPDATE] Cynthia pointed out that the stamp price history being 'less episodic' as of late is not quite right, as shown here in the postal rate increase history.

Action Agenda:

What's the next 'traffic driving' event going on near your business?

How can you capitalize on this event for your own business?

Anything you can do to drive traffic to your business and the others around you?

Think about the "neighborhood rummage sale" concept...get your neighborhood businesses together to do something.

Check out this tidy little article on Upselling on DHL's Small Business newsletter website. I was interviewed on the topic some time ago and the article just came out. Pretty basic info on Upselling, but important nonetheless!

I did not know this fact, however:

J. Paul Getty, the former billionaire oil baron—and once the richest man in the world—was well known for emphasizing the selling of products that give continued sales.

Makes perfect sense to me. Those are my favorite types of businesses!

It only comes around every four years, and after all of the NBC hype dies off, usually within the first couple of days, there's a void that could easily be filled with a well timed event, press release or some other marketing opportunity that draws on the energy of the Olympics.

I got a message today through an online networking group referring to a 'local' wine reseller that was doing a "free tour of wines from the Piedmont Province of Italy, which is home to Turin." What a beautiful concept. Simply beautiful!

Yeah, I know, the big brands like Visa are all over this, so, why aren't you? In fact, many big brands bypassed the ultra-expensive Superbowl ads this year and focused on doing an entire campaign, and a more cost-effective one, around the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Here's a few thoughts:

- A coffee shop that offers special drinks named after a different event for the remainder of the 17 days and nights of the games.
- Hometowns of olympic athletes getting together with the chamber of commerce to celebrate the occasion in their establishments
- A grocery store that highlights a section of products that are of Italian heritage or that are olympic sponsors
- Sporting goods stores that capitalize on the brand names used at the olympics (skis, snowboards, etc)
- Sports bars that have "Olympic parties" similar to football parties during football season
- Local gyms that run promotions for classes or workouts that highlight the muscles used in each of the different events
- Local bookstores and libraries that set aside special sections of books on the Olympics and on the Olympic sports in general - special discounts on any books written by Olympic athletes.
- How about a cross of a health club teaching people how to participate in these winter events and giving away recipes for "healthy" Italian dishes.
- An import shop could highlight items from medal-winning countries.
- Local breweries could do a 'medal winner beers from around the world' special

I'm sure there are more. The bottom line here is that you still have almost 10 days to put something together. If that's not enough time, the next olympics are coming up in Beijing in 2008. That should give you plenty of time to plan!

Technorati Tags: Advertising, olympics

I've looked forward to this report for the last few years, since I started reading the first one in 2003! Unfortunately, over the years these things have gotten smaller. I still have the printed version of m y 2003 report that was over 130 pages! They're about 1/3 that size now...damn shame, there's so much great marketing knowledge out there!

Your copy of our 2006 Wisdom Report PDF packed with 110 real-life marketing stories from Sherpa readers is ready for you:

http://wisdom.marketingsherpa.com
Props to Omniture for keeping this badboy free to all of us!

Brilliant marketers from the likes of American Red Cross, CompUSA, Cox Communications, Deloitte & Touche, Palo Alto Software, and The Motley Fool were among the marketers who contributed stories for this 4th Annual Sherpa Wisdom report.

Topics include:

- Email campaign segmentation test results
- Search marketing lessons (especially combining PPC and SEO)
- Offline advertising and marketing lessons
- Web site design and landing page lessons
- Business-to-Business marketing campaign lessons
- Office politics and job searching tips for a successful marketing career

Technorati Tags: Advertising, marketing sherpa, marketing wisdom

Chris Hoyt, president, Hoyt & Company wrote a compelling article on the HUB magazine website about mining the blogosphere for comments and content on your company.

According to a November 2005 Reveries.com survey, over 60% of companies surveyed weren't monitoring the blogosphere.

On the heels of the WOMMA WOMBAT conference, the emergence of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and the venture funding flowing into the word-of-mouth marketing space, its never been more apparent that monitoring the consumer media (blogosphere) is an essential function in every marketing department.

So, what might you listen for on the blogosphere?

1. General consumer understanding
   Find your evangelists & vigilantes
   Early warning signs on issues
   Consumer specifics - likes and dislikes
   Competitive intelligence
   Product/service improvement ideas
   Campaign tracking
   WOM tracking

What would your company listen for?

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging survey, business blogging, womma+wombat

Todd Tweedy of Boldmouth is slowly releasing the results of a recent word-of-mouth marketing study over the next few days on his blog. He's posted some pretty revealing information so far - I can't wait to see the rest.

While a majority of organizations claim they are already using word of mouth and, with even higher numbers noting WOM is either extremely or very important to the organization’s overall marketing plan I was surprised to learn that 71.4% of all organizations that responded to the survey don’t have an established word of mouth marketing plan.

There was another graph that showed almost 50% of organizations surveyed stating that they "are currently using word-of-mouth marketing" Um, sure you are... Of all of the organizations I've worked at and worked with, I've never seen one with a defined word-of-mouth program or have ever heard WOM mentioned in a marketing planning meeting. (note: I'm guilty as charged...I never thought about it 5 years ago either...)

Technorati Tags: boldmouth, survey, word-of-mouth marketing

Todd and the 800 CEO Read crew have a new project called 'In Bubble Wrap' where you can sign up and be eligible to win a business related prized each day (just books, so far, which is awesome...) just by answering a couple of questions and submitting your info.

Check out http://beta.inbubblewrap.com/

Lately, I've been reading the book Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It's a fascinating read that I think anyone who touches marketing or new product development should have to slog through (It's actually quite an engaging read, there's really no slogging involved, but it is a sizeable text, at 512 pages)

According to Rogers, and as summarized by Clarke, there are five important characteristics of an innovation.

They include:

• relative advantage (the degree to which it is perceived to be better than what it supersedes);
  
• compatibility (consistency with existing values, past experiences and needs);
  
• complexity (difficulty of understanding and use);
  
• trialability (the degree to which itcan be experimented with on a limited basis);
  
• observability (the visibility of its results).
  

I've taken some liberties in applying the DoI theory, which is basically "technological innovation that is communicated through particular channels, over time, among the members of a social system," to the challenge of marketing the school district. Assuming that the innovation we're speaking of here is the forward progress evidenced in the Green Bay public school system. I know, it might be a stretch for some, but it's helped out in thinking about how parents adopt one school system over another, especially as newcomers to an area.

Here's a MindMap created for the project. If you have any thoughts on this, please leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: Ben at Church of the Customer have Diffusion of Innovations as one of their top ten reads that will change your 'business life'. I have to agree. It's one of my favorite business reads of the year. I only wish I'd discovered it sooner!

From the "great marketing minds" category, Bonita Coleman Stewart, the Director of Interactive Communications for Chrysler Group, talks about how interactive marketers are getting ahead of traditional marketers. I'm not certain that this is one for the textbooks, but certainly there are marketing departments that could use a good dose of process in thier teams.

[via AdBumb]

One of the best things about being a member of the AMA is participating in the SIGS (special interest group email listservs) where you can ping 3000 of your best friends for some marketing advice. Today, someone asked the following question, to which I responded. Which got me thinking--it would really be fun to own a clothing store at some point. I love clothes, shoes, and stuff like that. Not so sure I like retail though...

We have a similar high-end single-store retail clothing store here in Green Bay. They do a couple of things very well.

1. They are diligent about collecting addresses and emails to do regular 'preferred customer' promotions. They could do even more if they did a "bring a friend and get an extra x% for yourself and pass your discount on to them" to make the promotions more impactful.

2. They provide clothing for the evening newscasters on one of the local TV stations, which, in turn, nets them a mention each and every night on the program.

3. They have a 'tent sale' every so often, which again draws on their loyal clients. We get postcards 3 weeks before the event telling us about a special pre-event sale..before the general public gets wind of it.

4. As the clothier of record for many of the movers & shakers in the Green Bay area, they've become an informal networking venue to learn more about what's going on with peers & other influentials in the area. If they were to take it further, they'd be more aggressive in playing 'master networker' & becoming purveyors of information, not just fine clothing.

I'd also recommend reading a couple of books that might fit the bill here. Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba - Your client likely has a good roster of high-end customers and it pays to turn these influencers into evangelists. Another is The Virtual Handshake by Scott Allen & David Teten. This might be something of interest if you consider your client to be a 'hive' for the network of clients that they have. IMHO, it's the books that aren't "about" retail that give you the best insights on what do to at retail...

"It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water" once wrote Kluckhohn.

If you were to look at their business as 'providing high quality clothing to the greater metro area', I think that there's some missed opportunity. However, if you were to elevate the purpose of their business to 'Ensuring the continued success of XYZ area professionals' (by making them 'look good' in the professional endeavors with quality clothing), then I think you could really have some fun with building their business.

Just some thoughts & observations.

[UPDATE: Maybe there's even room to add the 'social shopping experience' to this list.]

Get in on the fun and the conversation with WOMMA on their new experimental blog on WOM vs. Advertising. There will be several authors, including me, who will be blogging on the subject of WOM vs. advertising for the forseeable future.

Check it out!

The Wall St. Journal (sub) writes today about the 'copy cat' ads resulting from the auto industry's latest ploy to drive their sales #'s up. (Notice that Honda, Toyota, and pretty much everyone else outside the US doesn't seem to need to resort to these tactics?) Funny, because I've been thinking about since a few local companies have done 'employee discount' ads and sales on the heels of the Big 3's employee discount ad campaigns. One of them from Menards, a DIY home store chain, was actually really funny. They had the whole round of employees saying "pay what we pay" and you could clearly tell that they were having fun with it, as many of them were nearly laughing. It was almost a parody ad, but effective none the less. I got the rest of my garage shelving there during the sale. Saved a bundle too!

I can't help but think that from some employees' perspectives that this is a bit of a slap. Not that discounts should be a reason for working somewhere, but I recall when I was in the bicycle industry that most kids that worked at shops liked bikes, but LOVED the employee deals and the schwag that went with working there.

Face it, people, especially employees of any enterprise, like to feel special. Special deals are one of those things that some folks hold sacred. Why else are we the members of certaing clubs, buy into store discount programs, carry around a half-dozen keychain cards for the grocery stores in our area and search our employers' intranets for those special 'supplier deals' that might be lurking out there on local lawn service or discounts on national goods, if your employer is large enough. I can't help but feel that this whole 'employee discount' phenomenon just cheapens the whole experience.

On the flip side, it's damn hard to argue with the results. Spurred by the promotions, in July auto makers recorded their third-best sales month in history.

The other funny thing is, where are the bloggers and word-of-mouth in all of this? If it were not for TV, these results would NOT have been possible. Just goes to show that there still is room for TV and the mass media in advertising and marketing. It's true then, advertising does drive the economy!

[UPDATE] Brand Autopsy is calling this the EDEO Marketing Epidemic.

As I was reading the latest issue of Fast Company this morning, I came across a quick comment from a reader in California. He mentioned the phrase that ecologists use to describe the options that a species has when a forcing function, such as climate change, is imminent.

"Species faced with climate change have three choices - adapt, migrate, or die. If the climate changes faster than organisms can adapt or move, then it is likely that they will become extinct."

Adapt: Adapt by being first to market in your industry to embrace things like RSS, weblogs, engaging more deeply with consumers on the web and taking advantage of these new media for all of the advantages they offer.

Migrate: You can migrate to a lesser position in the market. By ignoring the cacophony of voices that are your customers on the Internet, your migration is nearly assured. Also, as a marketer you could migrate to another area of an organization or to an organization that 'gets it', as your current organization may become extinct. (Incidentally, I had a great conversation the other day about the TWO paths that marketers have - Distinction or Extinction. This was relating to higher ed... You can strive for Distinction, or fall into Extinction. Your choice.)

Die: Self explanatory...mostly. Die in terms of a market leadership position...or...die in terms of relevancy (or lack thereof) to your target market.

While you're all thinking about Adapting. Think about the different perspectives that both Bill Flitter and Rick Short have about the "Ps of blogging"... ( 1) point (purpose), 2) passion, 3) personality, 4) perseverance )

Todd over at A Penny For... has reached the end of the road with Fast Company. I too have let my subscription lapse as I just don't get fired up like I used to when I read the magazine. I used to tear it up, cover to cover, and attended the FC Friends group in Pasadena when I was living in L.A. Todd, for those of you who don't know, was the leader of the FC group in Milwaukee. I went to a couple of meetings and was impressed with Todd's leadership. Nevertheless, the spark is gone.

Worthwhile is a good magazine. For marketers, CMO is now a must read. However, neither puts the same face on emerging business ideas and groundbreaking theories. Sure, they've had some interesting things lately, but nothing that rips me out of my seat to action.

Check out Todd's post for the comments too. There are a number of others who've addressed this issue before. Seems we're all feeling the same way about this.

We have learned much from database marketing in the past two decades. Follow this link to DM News for a list of the 24 essential techniques in database marketing. Anyone who works in marketing must be familiar with and be able to use all of these methods.

[via DM News]

Marketing Matters LIVE!, the new internet radio show from the AMA seems like a damn cool idea. Let's do the numbers:

AMA membership: ~40K
Types of audio feeds: 3 (Real, Windows, MP3)
People who have some type of audio player: everyone

This is a smart, smart attempt from the AMA. They are even going to archive the files (podcast them???)so that anyone can listen at any time via the web.

The kick-off show Wednesday, January 19th will feature interviews with Nancy Costopulos, Director of Marketing and Sales, Larry Albus, Director of Sponsorship Sales, and various marketing partners who will be participating in upcoming radio shows.

IMHO, Nancy and Larry are both people that the AMA should have blogging. They are recognized as thought leaders in their space and have a lot to say. I'd love to hear more from them!

Narrowcasting lives!

Just send SMS messages to each phone #, at every carrier. There can be only one anyway...

Sam Decker brings up some enlightening points that are difficult to mind at times, but necessary to maintain sanity. The most important thing we can do sometime is say no.

1. What strategies, initia
2. What measurements will you not pay attention to?
3. What customers will you not target?
4. What people will you not keep?
5. What competitors will you not follow?
6. What will you remove from your web site?
7. What money will you not spend?
8. What meetings will you decline?
9. What trips will you not make?
10. What slides will you not create?
11. What will you not say?
12. What thoughts will you not entertain?

There's a bit of fuss about Bzz Agents going around the web now. Frankly, I like the idea, but many don't.

Christopher Carfi

Hugh

There's lots of Bzz on the subject of open source marketing. Interesting argument between Scoble and blakeross.com

Interestingly enough, the authority on marketing, the American Marketing Association (AMA) has nothing on their website about open source marketing.

Marketing is growing more innovative in response to consumers while becoming more fractured by technology such as Internet, DVRs and cable TV, according to an analysis by The Wharton School marketing professor Patricia Williams. One of the big trends now is to blend advertisements seamlessly with entertainment. "The trend is away from mass advertising -- television advertising in particular -- and toward what I call more nontraditional or alternate forms of advertising, some of which are quite old-fashioned," Williams wrote.

[via Knowledge@Wharton]

During this past week, a question was asked of the AMA Marketing Strategy group on the subject of what kind of marketing budget is required for a software product launch.

You need answers to these questions in your marketing plan:

1. What is your first year revenue target?
2 How many units do you need to sell to meet your revenue target?
3. How long is the sales cycle expected to be?
4. Do you plan to target regionally or nationally for your first set of customers?
5. How does your target audience learn about new products? (radio, print advertising, referrals, direct mail, seminars, etc.) 6. What is your expected conversation ratio from potential prospect to customer? (In other words in order to achieve #2 above (number of units) how many trainers do you have to "touch"?
7. Based upon the sales cycle, and the competition, how many times do you have to "touch" a prospect before they begin to become aware of your product?
8. Will you have a sales team? How dependent is the sales team on the marketing efforts for lead generation?

Answering all of these questions will help you develop a launch plan and a budget based upon the items you have identified as needed to develop leads.

From Suzanne M. Teele at www.aceda.com

I just signed up for BzzAgent and found this quote from a tourism report from my beloved state of Wisconin!

"In 2002, 84% of the people surveyed indicated that recommendations from friends or family members drove their confidence level [in a product or service]."

Jane Friedman of HarperCollins was interviewed in the Wall St. Journal today on where she sees the future of book heading.

While the article doesn't make an express mention of weblogs, she raves on about how the Internet is the author's best friend and how publishing companies are leveraging the internet to supplement what used to be the 'round the country author tour.' Things like Todd's Business Blog Book tour may become more commonplace as authors segment and target their book audience and then apply the most surgical and strategic tools to reach their audience.

On another positive note, there wasn't even a trace of bitching about sellers like Amazon diluting the new book market with links to used books for sale. Nice to see that the publishing industry isn't waving their "woe is us" flag around like they used to.

Best Buy, the subject of a recent book, has an article in the WSJ today (sub, but free this week) on how they're taking a very aggressive approach to segmenting and targeting their most profitable consumers. The tactic has been around for a while, and has been put in play by a cadre of B2B companies, but we're almost never seen this level of assertive analysis done by a major retailer.

[UPDATE] Art Jahnke post his take on this '20% solution' on the CMO magazine blog.

Fascinating stuff for all of your market research and market segmentation fans.

Audi is the most significant advertiser so far, providing "evidence that blue-chip marketers are finally looking at weblogs as part of their online media mix.

B.L. Ochman discusses in her article in Marketing Profs.

The American Marketing Association's official definition of marketing - its conception, evolution, and latest incarnation-is the subject of the cover story of the Sept. 15, 2004 issue of Marketing News.

True to the 'way the hell behind the times' posture of the AMA, the new definition of marketing was officially unveiled at the AMA Summer Educators' Conference in Boston in August with little or no fanfare, and god forbid, someone actually blogging the damn thing. I write this while listening to Scoble & company talk about podcasting, content enclosures, and parametized queries on a 'podcasted' offline version of their recent talk at Gnomedex 4.0 titled "Maximizing Your Blog Strategies" - quite the opposite of the AMA. I highly recommend downloading and listening to it.

The first official definition of marketing was adopted in 1935 by the National Association of Marketing Teachers, a predecessor of the AMA. It was adopted by the AMA in 1948, and again in 1960 when the AMA revisited the definition and decided not to change it. This original definition stood for 50 years, until it was revised in 1985.

The new definition of marketing, as released by the American Marketing Association, is:

"Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders."

Gone are the days when adding keywords in meta tags to your site produced rankings. Search engine marketing has evolved into a complex and competitive program. It's also profitable—according to a March 2003 report by Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Safa Rashtchy, online search is the most cost-effective direct-marketing method.
The average cost per lead:

• Search is 29 cents
  
• E-mail is 50 cents
  
• The Yellow Pages are at $1.18
  
• Banner ads are $2.00
  
• Direct mail $9.94

Another thing I wonder is why Entrepreneur used such old data for a recent article? Isn't there anything more recent?

Wrigley has a great idea for marketing their new Eclipse chewing gums and breath mints where they are affixing samples to the holder or piece of cardboard around coffee cups sold at independent cafes around the United States. Why? People drink coffee, get coffee breath, and want to impress the new office associate all in the same morning. Great way to make Eclipse their breath freshener of choice!

Great plan, great execution. Think: How can you use this in your product marketing plans?

Jay Conrad Levinson, the Guerrilla Marketing Guru, serves up 93 (yes, 93) examples of unusual, quirky, and downright effective ways you can catch people's attention. Marketing your business or yourself doesn't have to boring, and if you're a guerrilla marketer, it better not be! You're guaranteed to leave this one with some ideas of your own.

http://changethis.com/4.GuerrillaMarketing

John brings to light a great idea about putting together a 'customer marketing board' where you get you best customers together on a regular basis to serve as our 'consumer marketing board of directors' where they give you input in how you can more effectively market through referral mechanisms and possibly other media.

Great idea, not too hard to execute, and likely a win-win for your customers if you treat your marketing board to some goodies!

Marketers are on track to push through some major budget increases for '05, especially in their online spends.

Marketing and media budgets are to rise again in 2005, as 60% expecting to increase spend, with the online sector to show the sharpest growth, according to a study from market research group Millward Brown. Millward Brown found the online sector was found to be growing the most as a share of total budgets and marketers said that they expect this trend to continue. All channels of online marketing -- web advertising, search, email and promotion -- are expected to increase at a higher rate than other major media. There was other good news for the online sector as the research identified it as the most effective medium for acquiring and retaining customers and in offering efficiency. Direct mail was rated as most effective for reaching a target audience and providing measurable ROI. Almost all marketers, 89%, said that their companies run integrated marketing campaigns, but Millward Brown said that integrated marketing was defined in different ways.

Edward Kim, interactive media manager at Unilever said: "It goes to show that marketers across different industries are prepared to increase their online marketing budgets and view the internet as an attractive part of the media and marketing mix."

Sean D'Souza's PsychoTactics newsletter never lets me down, and there's always great advice on how to sharpen your marketing or sales saw. This issue on 'Sequence in Selling' is no different, and it has to do with the way the airlines present you, the economy class passenger, with all of the other offerings before yours. First class, then business class, and they your seat. Feel good yet? Bottom line, here's what Sean recommends:

1. Create three distinct packages for your product/service.
   
2. Give your client the the chance to choose between the packages.
   
3. Watch your profits soar. And better still watch yourclients come back as they taste the joys of first class.

I couldn't resist sharing this story from an AMA special interest group. Great play on behalf on one brand to limit the impact of another encroaching brand

Q: I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of an information resource (preferably case studies) that speak directly to strategies/best practices under taken by a dominant brand in a product
category to defend against the impending launch of a new brand from a major competitor.

The established Brand product was ArmorAll(R) protectorant for leather, plastics and rubber, sold in the auto aftercare market. The new competitive product, STP "Son-of-a-gun" was introduced into a test market, and the ArmorAll brand reacted with a "Buy-one-get-one" sale. When consumers faced the two products, side by side on the shelf, the ArmorAll sold, and the STP was left. The test market was considered such a failure by STP, that company support for the product was reduced, and it was years before another attempt was made to gain significant market share.

ArmorAll did give away product during the promotion, but was able to control the market with an offer consumers could not refuse. And since one bottle of ArmorAll could typically last for years, the two bottle promotion effectively removed that customer from the STP prospects for quite some time.

Another variation on a theme....

Peter over at BeConnected did a splendid job of highlighting Brian Teasley's ClickZ article from today on how you can leverage your Google AdWord investment for more than just online marketing. Here are a few ideas on the market research intelligence you can gather in the process. ( I would venture a guess that some of this applies to Overture as well)

• Knowing What Words Appeal to Customers
  By creating a series of keyword ads aimed at specific landing pages on your site it is then possible to track what visitors do once they are on your site.
  
• Reading the Minds of Customers
  AdWords offers a tool that suggests other words Google searchers have entered in combination with the keywords you already thought of.
  
• Testing Customer Appeal
  Again, by tracking the effectiveness of different keywords and ad formats you can test the effectiveness of different offers.

I'm in the midst of thinking about vertical markets and customer segmentation and the onset of a new CRM implementation, and what comes to mind is concisely stated in this article about the importance of profiling customers and designing your systems and processes to meet their unqique goals in a segmented fashion. I know, not real earth-shattering stuff, but come on, how many of you are really thinking this way. (we aren't...yet!)

It looks like this...

Identifying target users of any particular touchpoint -- a Web site, for example -- is the first step. That data can be organized into segments, and from those segments the company can create a persona -- a hypothetical customer -- that represents each category.

Best Buy is a shining example of a company that's not afraid to push things over the edge in their marketing dept, and they're not afraid to fail.

As burger burgher Larry Light explained in his insightful speech at AdWatch, the "positionistas are dead." You can't dictate to the consumer and there is no more mass market to be reached with a single message. In such a world, continuous innovation, testing a variety of messages and channels, becomes a necessity -- and that's going to mean misses as well as hits.

Nevertheless, there's a great deal to be gained through experimentation in marketing. More to the point, marketers can accelerate their learning if they aren't afraid to test and MEASURE (aka - total accountability in marketing). Not that marketers don't have some measures, but if you tried to run your factories or finances with some of the measurement systems that marketers use, you'd be in a very sorry situation indeed.

[via AdAge]

From the " no-shit-sherlock" department, a study released today from the CMO council indicates that damn near 50% of high-ranking marketing executives in the country are dissatisfied with their MPM, or marketing performance management. This just reeks of opportunity for a few classes of folks:

1. Job seekers who get it - Go on, show em your spreadsheets...
2. Consultants who can assist in implementing these types of MPM programs
3. Ad agencies who are willing to provide this as a value added service to clients

More than half the companies surveyed do not measure performance for marketing activities surrounding branding or sales and marketing collateral, and nearly half do not measure the performance of channel marketing and market research programs. This leaves marketing organizations with a great deal of room to grow their understanding of the inner working and impact of their campaigns. "This isn't going to be a technology fix. It's a cultural, organizational, and technological challenge," Neale-May says.

My old marketing professors would consider my endorsement of this to be on par with blasphemy (BTW, I thought there were only 4 P's of marketing?) Anyway Bill Flitter of Pheedo (a former fellow Wisconsinite!) has some put some meat behind his theory of the changing of the P's. Frankly, I don't know where he comes up with this stuff, but I really did what Pheedo & Bill have to say, and like their takes on this industry...more good stuff to come I imagine.

Have a gander:
1. Personal
2. Permalink
3. Publish
4. Ping
5. Participate

He goes on to define the new P's here...

[Via Pheedo's Blog]

We're in the process of readying some demo movies for the software we just released and we're caught between "let's just get something out there" and "we really need to do the best job and make a superb first impression." We're a production studio for pete's sake, you'd think this would be easier...

Anyway, this helpful little article came across the Google News Alerts today. Here are seven more things that we'll be looking out for as we create our online video demos of INSPIRE.

"Seven fatal errors" in many companies' online Flash or Video marketing demos

1. Silent Movies
   
2. Over-long demo
   
3. Hide the Product Pricing
   
4. One-way communique' (forgetting to collect sales leads).
   
5. Ostentatious graphics
   
6. Full frontal corporate bio
   
7. Reinvent content (Repurpose demos in a hundred different ways to make it a more worthwhile investment).
   

A year ago, I'd never have posted something like this, but being on the agencyside now, I'm becoming more aware of how our product photos and imagery really affect client sites. There were two great articles this weekend on getting the most from your photo shoots and product photos. The best advice is to get in good with a firm or independent photographer that you trust, and have a great design firm/agency behind the wheel to ensure that those photos can be tweaked to perfection.

This post about "Shoestring Marketing" touches on the subject of why "Time and Money are Interchangeable" and how a mechanic who specializes in BMWs drives around parking lots when his biz is slow and leaves flyers on each of the cars notifying the owners of his specialty, which usually nets his business before he even gets back to the lot.

This same topic was raised by John this weekend when we batted around the value of a local takeout place dropping flyers off to everyone in the neighborhood on a Friday afternoon. I'm partial to building an email list and sending emails to people at work while they're thinking of dinner, but the result is the same.

Which gets me thinking more on this subject. What if I were a local take -n- bake pizza company, like Papa Murphys, that collected email addresses at their retail POS with the promise of just in time deals and coupons for customers. I then declare Thursday "local pizza bonanza night" and send emails at 3:45 to everyone on the list with the promise that they could order online from their local chain and the pizza would be ready for them to pickup on the way home, and stick in the oven for dinner. Every Thursday, I send new email deals.

Taking it a step further, I ask people "What's your favorite pizza night?" and allow them to choose which days they want to get email deals. I them build an automated backend system to blast out the latest specials, I track the user behavior, and start sending more and more personalized info. The info is linked with the instore POS so that I don't lose the huge pizza that they bought for their kids birthday party on Saturday...

Better yet, for businesses, everyone keeps a "Menu" folder - I have, and I was always the "goto person" for menus. Whatever I had for takeout menus is what we chose from. What if you were to build an online "local menu" favorites system or something like that that you could forward around the office,

Ok, maybe that's a bit too geek, but It sure is damn fun to think about!

Survey says: Less than one-quarter of marketing professionals surveyed said they usually or always test marketing communciation campaigns before releasing them upon their audience, according to a new study. Another 27% indicated they “occasionally” test their campaigns, with the rest saying they seldom (34%) or never (15%) test marcom campaigns before rolling them out.

Testing takes time, testing takes money, testing tests your patience. Holy crap, well no wonder people don't test.

The question is - has anyone ever done a study on parallel campaigns - one in a market where testing was done and "learned from" and one where the first idea out of the gate was what was sent? Now there's an idea. Take a campaign, launch it in one area with no testing and see what happens. As long as you've got your demos pretty close (age, income, values, whatever) you should be able to launch the other into an area with significant testing and judge whether or not the RESULTS are worth doing the testing for.

Or, I bet someone already has this data...so, where is it???

[via DIRECT & Ovation]

A great article from Leap Frog Strategies on product launches - it's a couple of years old, but still relevant. Thank you Brian Carroll for this one

If you have an important introduction in the upcoming months, make sure you do it right. Don't make these often devastating mistakes:

1. Weak Value Propositions
2. Insufficient Targeting of Prospects
3. Inadequate Sales Tools
4. Poor Sales Processes
5. Calling on Top Prospects First

There are a number of ways to do this - I have a post (see link below) with a link to some resources that I've found to be agreeable, many of which accept article submissions.
http://www.danavan.net/weblog/archives/potential_publications_for_articles.html

Also consider the following:
1. Do you currently offer RSS feeds of all of your reviews so that people can easily "syndicate" them? If you're charging membership fees to certain content, you can password protect these for access, while still affording ease of use.
2. Try to forge alliances with other technology sites/blogs/newsletters - locally, regionally, and nationally.
3. Post things to sites like Yahoo's Free Content, which allows others to grab your information and use it, providing they give you credit

I just finished a discussion with a co-worker about the merits of marketing/adversting online, vis-a-vis that yellow pages. Seriously folks, I had no_freaking_idea how much a yellow pages ad cost, even in Green Bay, WI.

A certain company pays almost $2000 for a 3/4 page ad in the yellow pages, amidst a blur of 4 page ads in a very crowded category - That's $24,000/Year!!! All of their ads say the same_damn_things. Fine, I get that...but there's NO WAY for them to track (OK, maybe there is a way, but seriously, how sophisticated to you want your average small business to be) Worse yet, the prices go UP every year! With, what I feel, is less return. (more people on web, less people in the pages)

I'm sure that there are ways to differentiate yourself in the YP, but why bother. Drop the size of the ad, and jam more of that budget into online.

I was almost angry when I heard how much the YP ad cost, I thought "what a damn ripoff" - just think what we could do with that in online marketing. A year-round combination ALL of the following ideas, used for a small, say 10 person local business, could be done more cost effectively and have have more impact than the Yellow Pages.

- Pay-Per-Click
- Targeted Microsites
- Personal Biz Weblog
- Permission e-mail marketing
- Banner exchanges
- Affiliate program with local complementory businesses
- Targeted online banner placements (on local high-traffic sites, in contextually appropriate areas)
- Sponsorships in other complimentory businesseses online or offline newsletters
- Do some online customer feedback/surveys to gain more intelligence about your customers - use to reinforce all of the above
- Promote your aforementioned efforts on all bills, stationary, biz cards, etc...
- Develop a Loyalty & Referral program, or at least facilitate said programs through your website and e-newsletters
- Do a few press releases on new services, new hires, or damn near anything that's press-worthy for your SMB

Forbes.com, Bitpipe study examines white paper usage

According to the study, which was conducted by market research company Insight Express, 63% of survey participants said they use white papers or case studies to evaluate technology products and services.

The study also found that after reading a white paper or case study, 78% of all respondents passed it on to a colleague.

Also, 93% of respondents said high-quality vendor white papers positively influenced a company's image

But what really matters is "Does it make them want to buy?" Yep - they help in that area too! 57% said that the reading of white paper content influenced thier purchase decision (let's feel good about this and think that a positive impression was made).

ePrairie: Too Many Tech Entrepreneurs Lack Marketing Understanding

Darrell Dvorak of Tatum Partners has a great piece on ePrarie about getting your shit together when it comes to marketing your tech startup.

The world’s greatest management consultant (Peter F. Drucker) doesn’t mince words: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two and only these two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”

If you as the tech entrepreneur don’t have the experience and skills to answer questions like these, you need to hire marketing folks who know all the questions to ask and how to get the answers. Because of your limited resources and small margin for error, you need to work hard to get the very best with your first personnel selections.

A good start would be to probe marketing candidates about their skills and experience in successfully addressing issues like those above. If all they can discuss is their advertising expertise, move on.

I've had online CPG tactics on the brain this morning... Some great ideas to drive action at the website. However, I was stumped by the question of "how do these various web-drive-to tactics compare?" What are THEIR response rates?

Oddly enough, The Promotion Marketing Association has taken the lead on a project to come up with a benchmark study for response rates.Such metrics have long been sought after by agencies and brands alike, and are a key component in developing budgets and determining return-on-investment.

If the industry-wide study comes to fruition it would be the first of its kind for promotion, an industry that has typically been unwilling to share response rates and other metrics considered proprietary. The study would seek to establish performance benchmarks for promotion marketing tactics, such as sweepstakes, games, contests, rebates and others.

Here's to hoping that study gets done sooner than later!

John Cass has been musing about how to build credibility via WOM advertising and 3rd party advocates. He's got a few ideas on how to get this going. If anyone has more, please add them via comments on John's site.

* Associate your company with national or regional associations
* Find credible spokespeople
* Write case studies that tell compelling stories from real customers
* Get some good press from your industry's media
* Understand your company’s strengths and larger connections, communicate the strengths and connections consistently

These are pretty fundamental, but that still doesn't mean that everyone is doing them.

David Jung posted about an ad in a trade rag that leads to a word document for a landing page. Nice.

As human beings, we tend to be too nearsighted - limiting our thinking to paradigms we find comfortable for ourselves. But when you’re trying to understand and fulfill the needs of your customers, it’s almost always necessary to become farsighted, stepping outside of those paradigms to view things from your customers’ perspectives. That’s especially true when considering new marketing approaches.

1. Not Listening to Customers Many businesses operate on “intuition” and don’t realize that their experience may not reflect the reality of their customer base. For example, a CEO may be told by his or her sales representatives that all is well with the customers, when in actuality, the customer experience is less than positive. Objective research is the cure; through it everyone will gain a realistic view of the situation.

2. Being Afraid to Spend Money in Order to Make Money Marketing innovation doesn’t come for free. In order to understand your customers and address their needs in a positive, creative and interesting way, you’ll have to invest significant resources. Of course, the return on your investment should be carefully measured, and, as in any wise business decision, it should be possible to see a profit from the experience down the line.

3. Garbling the Message
So often in the excitement to communicate with customers, firms try to cram all key messages into one message and one channel of communication. Careful thought is needed to come up with a single message and a single voice to communicate clearly.

4. Thinking for the Moment
In the midst of daily demands, it’s easy to get bogged down in the here and now. But strategic thinking isn’t only for generals. It’s necessary to think “strategically” in long-range terms in order to spend marketing dollars effectively. Marketing “tactics,” or practical action steps, will flow naturally from strategic thinking.

5. Trying to Do It All Yourself Delegation of responsibilities is one key to a successful marketing program. It’s important to put one individual in charge of each action step or “tactic” in your marketing plan. Individual responsibilities include adhering to that tactic’s budget and timeline.

6. Forgetting the Feedback Conducting a marketing program (or any communications program) without built-in evaluations is like walking in the dark. Regular feedback is an absolutely critical part of your marketing strategy so that if necessary, you can adjust your course of action as you go along. Remember, if you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing.

Mark Ramsey, founder and president of Mercury Radio Research,writes a worthy blog, "Radio Marketing Nexus", that delivers "cutting edge insights to help you market your radio station better and win more listeners." If you dig into the Mercury Radio Research site you'll discover a very interesting presentation "Which Marketing Techniques Work and Which Don't." This presentation has a HEAVY radio slant (as you would expect) but if you are interested in creating more effective media messages, then I suggest you peruse the pdf presentation.

Thanks to Brand Autopsy for this quip.

Anne Holland, Managing Editor of MarketingSherpa picks the best 99 stories and quotes from 355-submitted ones for the annual "Lessons Learned Marketing Wisdom Report". Here's your link for the (free) PDF:
http://wisdom.marketingsherpa.com

How it works:

- Each December, we ask MarketingSherpa readers to submit a real-life story or quote about what they've learned in the past year.
- Then, we pick the absolute best, most-useful stories and compile them into the Wisdom report for you.
- Entries are indexed by organization name and by personal name to make it easier for you to skim.

David Cohen has an interesting article in ClickZ today about maintaining credibility and objectivity in front of clients, relating specifically to the situations when you realize that Interactive marketing is NOT right for that client. How do you tell? When would YOU recommend that a client NOT do Interactive, vis-a-vis other "non-interactive" marketing tactics (I'll let you my Marketing Principles textbook if you need to refresh :).

Ironic as it seemed to me when I first started with an Interactive company, Interactive is not always the best way for us to market for the purpose of obtaining new clients and establishing our credibility as an Interactive company to those who may require our services.

Peter Montoya highlighted a recent experience with a campaign donation that necessitates a reflection for pause on whether you may be annoying your customers with your persistent marketing. When is it too much?

A few guidelines from Peter: