Category Archives: Marketing

Business Words Losing Meaning

December 9, 2010Business Mistakes, Marketing, Writingawesome, cliches, Howard Cosell, user-friendlyTim Berry

Sometimes words and phrases lose their meaning. They get so diluted by overuse that they end up meaning nothing at all. And that’s important to track when we use them in business.

I first noticed that phenomenon back in the early 1980s with the phrase “user friendly,” as in “user-friendly” software. That phrase was so attractive to users and advertisers that publishers swarmed all over it. Within a matter of a year or so, “user friendly” lost all meaning. Ironically, lots of software, then and now, is actually user hostile. But we in the industry had to look for different wording. That phrase was empty. We all laughed at “user friendly.”

And isn’t this awesome? When I was a kid, “awesome” was reserved for a very few things that truly inspired awe, like Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, and the powers of God (or gods). Hurricanes and earthquakes were awesome. Awe was the active word. You could look it up.

I wonder how much we were all influenced by one particular sportscaster (Howard Cosell) who liked to call a really good play awesome. We had awesome tackles and awesome catches. Whether it was that in particular, or just evolution, awesome now means “good.” Or even “nice.” We have awesome sandwiches, awesome suggestions, and awesome t-shirts.

Think about some of the business phrases we use all the time. How quickly we lose meaning. Nobody thinks inside the box anymore. There are no worst practices, not even intermediate or common practices, just best practices. And good luck with the basic math of giving 110% to anything you do. Even when the hold time is half an hour, the menu is nine levels deep, and the answers scarcer than user hostile software, we are still told, as we’re waiting, that customer satisfaction is that organization’s priority. It’s hard to image what customer service would look like if it weren’t a priority.

Take a look at your business messages. Are you using meaningless phrases?

Charting the Lesson of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal

November 30, 2010Business Ethics, Business Financing, Marketing, Personal ProductivityDavid McCandless, Informationisbeatiful.net, Jimmy Wales, WikipediaTim Berry

Yesterday I posted here David McCandless’ fascinating 18-minute talk on data visualization, in which he puts up charts and graphs as a window into patterns and relationships in numbers.

Watching that talk led me to discover his Information is Beautiful blog, which is a great source of ideas and insights.

For example, the chart shown here, from that blog, titled The Science Behind Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal:

That’s just one recent example. Fascinating stuff.

Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes #4: Lowball Pricing

November 1, 2010Business Planning, Marketingmicroeconomics, top 10 business plan mistakes, top 10 business planning mistakes, top 10 listTim Berry

(Note: this is the seventh of a 10-part series listing my revised top 10 business planning mistakes. The list goes from 10, the least important, to 1, the most important.)

Are you thinking that it’s important to offer better service, or better products, at a lower price? Forget it. That hasn’t been true since the days of Adam Smith and microeconomics and selling lumps of coal.

For lumps of coal, yes, the lower the price, the higher the volume. But that means nothing to the entrepreneur going out into the market with quality goods and services. In the art of positioning, price is the first message you send, and the strongest message.

Markets like the high-priced, high-quality offerings. Don’t be cheap. Low price and low volume works for Walmart and Costco, but they have enormous resources, and you don’t. Price higher, and give more value. Offer high quality, and price accordingly.

Thank goodness this seems to be getting better these days as people become more aware, in general, of the magic of positioning and your price as the first message you send.

(Image credit: istockphoto.com)

I Love How Markets Are Constantly Dividing Into New Slices

October 21, 2010Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Marketingmarket segments, Marketing, markets, target marketingTim Berry

In a pitch presentation, the presenter said:

If we can only get 1% of the $4 billion market, we have a $40 million business.

But you won’t. Nobody ever gets the small percentage of the large market. I hate those tops-down market projections.

What happens instead, I think, is that markets are like organisms that are constantly growing and then dividing themselves into smaller markets. Think of how many different kinds of computers there are, or automobiles, or restaurants … every market seems to have started as a piece that was sliced off of a bigger market.

And I love that way of thinking about markets. Successful companies create new markets. Then competition, the copycats, jump in, and successful companies either fend them off, deal with it, or create yet another new market.

Don’t aim for a tiny piece of a huge market. Create your own new market. Divide and conquer.

(Illustration: jscreations/Shutterstock)

Customer Opinion, Maybe, But Do You Bet The Store On It?

October 5, 2010Business Research, Marketingcustomer research, Gini Dietrich, NeuromarketingTim Berry

Sure and of course we all want to stay close to our customers. No doh. But I’m tired of the overworn customer survey advice that shows up everywhere, as if anybody hadn’t thought of that. And, more important, as if anybody ever tells the truth in surveys.

Opinions are easy, and often off base. Most of this research lives on very thin ice. The customer vote that counts is not their opinion, but what they do with their money. Sorry, that’s my opinion. Irony intended.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of neuromarketing, but that’s such an intriguing phrase, that when I saw Gini Dietrich’s tweet (shown here in Tweetdeck), I had to click. I ended up with Gini’s post Customer-Centric and Customer-Centered Organizations: Which Do You Prefer? on the Spin Sucks blog. And an explanation:

Neuromarketing is fascinating and I’ve been studying it quite a bit all year (the best book I’ve found on the topic is from Patrick Renvoise called Neuromarketing. It talks about how to understand how your customers make decisions so you can create and market the products and services they will buy. While you take the customer into the creation and marketing process by understanding who they are and how they buy, they don’t actually have a say in what you provide.

That’s interesting. It reminds me of a wave of paranoia about subliminal advertising in the 1960s. Playing with your minds. I looked for the wikipedia definition. Kind of creepy, perhaps, but really interesting too:

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

Gini points out in her post that there are some confusing labels around this area. Is it customer focused? Customer centric? One of the more significant questions is whether the customer is the boss, and gets to determine what happens; or does the company build with the customer in mind, but retaining the ultimate control. Apple Computer is a good example. They design for the customer, they build what they think the customer will want; but they don’t let the customer tell them what to build. That’s an interesting distinction.

Wikipedia puts it well. It’s not what the customer says, but what the customer does, that matters:

Marketing analysts will use neuromarketing to better measure a consumer’s preference, as the verbal response given to the question, “Do you like this product?” may not always be the true answer due to cognitive bias. This knowledge will help marketers create products and services designed more effectively and marketing campaigns focused more on the brain’s response. This makes neuromarketing and its applied results potentially subliminal.

What I like best about it, to be honest, is recognizing that what people say is so often different from what they actually do. That’s always a huge problem in primary research like surveys and focus groups. They’re only as good as we believe the customer is telling the truth. And furthermore, how often does anybody really know why they buy? I fool myself about this all the time. I think everybody does.

So this is a fascinating new area. Can we do this stuff in small business? We can try. And, if nothing else, adding cynicism is a good idea.

(Thin ice image: CarbonSilver Photography/Shutterstock)

One Real Case: Does Fake Buzz Work? Do Fake Reviews Work?

September 17, 2010Business Ethics, Marketing, Web/Tech, Weblogsamazon.com, reviewsTim Berry

Annoying, yes, but does it work? We all assume spam works because it keeps on coming, right? What about putting fake comments on blogs, faking reviews at amazon.com and elsewhere? We all hate those tactics when we see them, but the real question for today is whether or not those tactics actually work. Are the culprits better off?

Of course it’s hard as hell to get good data on a question like this, but I decided to track one case just to satisfy my curiosity.

There is a book for sale at amazon.com that was promoted last month by sneaky fake trackbacks on blogs. I’m not going to mention the book or its author because I don’t want to throw good publicity on bad.

I discovered the fake by accident. The same identical trackback appeared overnight on both of the two blogs I moderate, this one and Up and Running. Otherwise I might have just approved without checking because it was cleverly engineered to look like a legitimate link from another blog that was discussing my post, with a generic tag line like “good discussion on this issue here.”

Because of the coincidence, I clicked the link to check it first before approving it to show up as a trackback below the post. Instead of going (like it should) to a discussion that referenced my blog post, it went straight to the sell page of the same book on amazon.com. And it’s not a book related to the subject. It’s just a book on amazon.com.

I was annoyed. I bookmarked it to check back later.

I’m happy to report it doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Six weeks later, that book is ranked 996,133 in books.

And the book has three reviews, all five-star raves. And (no surprise) two of the three reviews are by people who have reviewed only two books in their life – this book and another book by the same author. They are allegedly by different people. What do you think? Are these just fake reviews? I think so.

I admit it. I want that book to fail. I want those tactics to fail. Seems mean, why wish ill on anyone, but still…

Beware of What Used to Work But Doesn’t Anymore

August 9, 2010Business Stories, Leadership, Management, Marketingcoffee shops, Los Angeles Times, Starbucks, Wi-Fi, wirelessTim Berry

This is a great example of how quickly business assumptions change, and how badly we can screw up just by assuming the status quo. I just read Coffee Shops are Taking Wireless Off the Menu. It reports how coffee shops are turning away from free wireless. It’s an interesting commentary on changing times, but, much more important, a really good business reminder. The LA Times reports:

Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, flipping the switch to lure customers. But now some owners are pulling the plug. They’re finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line. Others want to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into “Matrix”-like zombie shacks where people type and don’t talk.

That shift could gather steam now that free Wi-Fi is less of a perk after coffee giant Starbucks stopped charging for it last month.

Put yourself in the place of coffee shop owners. Just yesterday, free wireless was a feature, a sign on the outside window, a customer lure. You just blink, and now it’s no wireless instead. Business climates, competitive environments, customer loyalties, and customer preferences changed in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, what worked isn’t working anymore.

Think about the rise and fall of direct mail marketing, Web banner ads, V8 engines, artificial sweeteners, TV dinners … we’ve all seen that happen so many times. In business, you keep your mind open. Revisit your assumptions as often as you can.

Because something similar is about to happen in your business. Or maybe it already did. Maybe what you think works, what used to work, isn’t working anymore.

Is Flipboard’s Buzz Bad Timing or Good Marketing?

July 28, 2010Business Mistakes, Marketing, Softwarebuzz, Flipboard, iPad, iPad appsTim Berry

What do you think? Is this bad timing, a buzz-killing mistake, or artificial scarcity that creates more buzz?

I was in an email conversation recently with the founder of one of the coolest new news apps available on the iPad, and he asked me what I thought about Flipboard.

I’m guessing why he asked: all that buzz, all at once. This is an iPad app released last week. It’s supposed to integrate Twitter and Facebook, with news and blogs, and a cool iPad look. In case you missed it, try this Google search. Nearly two million hits. Suddenly, everybody was talking about Flipboard.

Buzz envy. Who can blame him? Pardon my cynicism, but it doesn’t look that much different from the new Huffington Post app, or Apollo News, Pulse News, or Skygrid. So how did they get all that attention all at once? Have your marketing people study that one. It’s very impressive.

But here’s the business problem: timing. Wasting your buzz by not having your logistics ready for it. Take a look at what happens today, after you download your Flipboard, when you start to use it:

You guessed it: they’re taking email addresses and building a waiting list. “We’ll reserve your place in line,” they say. The bandwidth wasn’t set up to handle the marketing. I got interested, downloaded, and now have to wait for however long it takes to actually run the app. The buzz happened without delivery. Remember a few decades back, when people talked about vaporware? Credibility gone fast. Buzz wasted. What a shame.

Unless it actually works. After all, I just added another page to the buzz.