Marketing dream

The other day I was reading a post by Peter DeLegge. He’s been absent of writing to his blog for quite a while, since early 2007. The latest post I saw was about Steve Jobs’ open letter to early Iphone buyers. Summarizing, some people were unhappy because Apple had just decided to lower the price on Iphones. Early buyers naturally thought this would be an unfair move since they paid a lot not too long for exclusivity. Had they known Apple would do something like that so early, a good deal of them would have waited more. Jobs frugally solved the problem. You can see the letter here (thanks, DeLegge). It’s a simple and brilliant piece of marketing, both for the company and its CEO.

I tried to think beyond Apple, Iphone and the letter. I thought about glory for a marketer. For a considerable while I was frustrated and sceptical about marketing. A lot has already been done and many personalities are real marketing scientists, something that really praises me and makes me proud of following a career in marketing. My problem started with a lack of purpose and objective. Seeing constant mediocrity and lack of really substantial ideas in articles, ads, blogs and comments made by marketing insiders just showed a gloomy scenario of how stupid and shallow the profession can be. Then came this letter from Steve Jobs.

If you read it, you’ll see his solution is very simple, though it could sound as a cheap bribe to some. Maybe not that cheap, it’s true. However, I humbly try to imagine myself as part of the Iphone developing team. By developing I mean everyone directly involved, but most especially the marketing and product managers. Apple had done it before, they shook the whole world with Ipod, like Google, Youtube and other mega corporations have done in the past. It wasn’t only a technological breakthrough. A whole generation was affected culturally, legally, socially… you name it. The legacy still remains strong up to date.

Thinking of Apple refreshed, renewed and restored my interest for marketing once again. Trying to imagine a small percentage of the joy and recognition these marketers at Apple got for changing the world making marketing is definitely an objective of life. It shows every single marketer that marketing can have a purpose as long as people believe in it. Developing a major structural product and marketing campaign is something worth years of hard work and effort put into. Above all, it’s the function and beauty of marketing exposed to its entirety.

Best of all is to realize you don’t need to work for Apple to make big projects become reality.

My impression of marketing (to Chinese) in China

I love being wrong, but that doesn’t refrain me from saying some things I think. In September and October I’ve been to a few places in China, including Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Probably every single country in the world knows them as cheap manufacturers. You give a name, they can produce it, and they can produce it much cheaper than the cheapest available. Many foreign companies are based in China trying to guarantee their interests towards western markets looking for cost optimization and how to distribute products to their original and native markets. However, have you ever thought how it would be to be a marketer in China to Chinese customers?

Forget about Hong Kong and Shanghai for a second. It’s different there. Think of a more China-style place like Guangzhou and Beijing. My impression was that there’s only one winner tactic for making people buy things: sell it almost for free. Many times a day the media reports massive demonstrations of lust in China, like millionaires buying super expensive real estate, people going to mega concerts from international moguls like the Rolling Stones and Christina Aguilera or even images of beautiful and hi-tech skyscrapers being inaugurated almost on a daily basis. You know what? This is a legend. Though China is becoming increasingly wealthier, their population is predominantly poor. Sometimes they have shortages of food and a large portion of the population still is deprived from basic services like sewage. Also include there the official censorship. Many times I tried to access Wikipedia, but it simply didn’t work. Coincidence? Think again.

China also has its elite. It’s just a simple math equation. If in the US 1% of the elite represent 3 million people, in China the same proportion will give you almost 15 million really rich people. Just don’t forget the income distribution in China is definitely uneven, much more uneven than in the US. The wealth demonstration of Chinese individuals that we see in the media is represented by the 15 million. The total population has already surpassed the 1.4 billion mark.

The Chinese market is still very green in marketing terms. They will pay what they can pay, it’s not a matter of options. Credit cards are just badly accepted there. Cash is still the strongest paying alternative. After literally going to China, my perception changed radically. A foreigner in China has a cost of living usually much lower than in his own country. I’ve heard of people there who didn’t want to come back home because they lived like kings in China. The Chinese population is quite different though, even in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Shanghai is really an Orient Pearl, I’d love to live there one day as a marketer. But if there’s something I’d never think of is to be a marketer to Chinese customers. The challenge is enormous and that’s good. However, I can still see a lot of attractions on being a marketer for and in developed countries. One of them is the complexity of the market and the amount of variations one can actually deal with when thinking of how to sell a product to someone. The other is the amazing purchase power of a relatively great percentage of the population. That means a single customer can buy more, but at the same time he will concentrate a larger power of decision making it more difficult for a marketer to sell to him. I don’t see that happening in China. The ingenuity of the market only allows customers, the frequent ones, not the elite, to buy what they need. Needless to say it’s not what they want all the time. With more power comes more responsibility. Churchill was right.

CRM as never seen before

Not too long ago I had the chance to step in to a client I had never had access to. Among a lot of new information, I saw their business plan for the next year. Basically they needed to increase their revenues in order to comply with certain legal aspects defined by a local authority. One of the ways found by the marketing team was to go abroad, and by that I mean exploring markets other than their own local hub.

Everything seemed to be logic and made perfectly sense. However, the whole theory went down after I knew the company had a database of 500,000 local people who had purchased their product at least once, inquirers and other segments who’ve given them enough info to explore. From these 500,000 less than 20% actively kept a regular relationship with the company.

For many years I’ve learned and seen CRM happening, but this occasion was special for its more than self-explanatory clarification. Mentally, without a single supporting document I could see how easier would be to work with 400,000 people who had already consented to provide their personal data instead of going abroad and looking for a tiny piece of market in places the company has never been before.

Obviously there are other omitted details involved that would make the decision even plainer to see, but the scope of the problem was answering a simple question: what to do with 400,000 people who once said they wanted to exchange something with the company, but never again activated their profile? Nothing is something simply unimaginable these days. We were being paid to say forget about 400,000 people? That’s close to 10% of Norway’s entire population. If we didn’t work these people, someone else, a competitor, would. If that happened, how to tell the company’s board of directors that the revenue didn’t increase because we were lazy enough to leave 400,000 people sitting still? Involved in the process of suggesting alternatives to deal with these people was an American company. For my dismay, they said 500,000 was a small database.

What do you think about this?

“MARKETING STRATEGY

Friskies developed a new product innovation, Milk Essentials, to add to some of their SKUs in order to give the brand a stronger point of difference in the cluttered dry cat food arena. Milk Essentials combined the taste of milk cats love without the lactose that can give them digestion problems. It needed to be engaging and memorable, and had to be in the market in just nine weeks! “

The Global Knowledge Services Center E-Newsletter (Direct Marketing Association of America – DMA)

June 2007
Volume 6, Issue 7

I think this is not a marketing strategy. Friskies invented a product and branded it only to become a point of difference in the market? “Engaging and memorable”? “Had to be in the market in just nine weeks”? Doesn’t it look like a communication campaign? It certainly does.

This little “Marketing Strategy” paragraph describes two of my most criticized points in marketing. 1) marketing is not necessarily communication, but communication is part of marketing; 2) creating a product to have a “stronger point of difference”? Isn’t it too shameful to say “sell more”, “steal market share from the other brand” or “increase profits”?

Thanks DMA for not explaining to the poor ignorant people of the world what SKU means. For those SKU here goes a brief explanation.

SKU - A unit (part or item) of inventory that is carried as a separate identifiable unit. Eg A box of 100 ball point pens, although containing the same unit, is a different SKU from a single ball point pen.

www.tpacc.com/knowledge_base_dictionary.htm

Blogs, links and blogrolls

A couple of days ago I quickly reviewed The Marketing Consul’s link section and realized some of them are actually blogs, not only regular websites. In theory they would fit into a section commonly known within the blog world as “blogroll”. The blogroll is nothing but a specific link section for blogs. I even thought about creating one, but then started to wonder. What for?

This is connected to an ad I watched also a couple of days ago for the first time. Since I wasn’t paying too much attention, I cannot remember brands or manufacturers, only comes to my mind it was something about a shampoo. The ad played with one of the human nature’s most stupid characteristics: complicating things.

Sometimes it’s all about re-labeling. Things are sold differently so the manufacturer can add more “value” (where value doesn’t mean necessarily quality). Many times I saw a very famous and encouraging video produced by an advertising agency as part of their portfolio (Sunscreen, see on the bottom of this posting). There, one of the catches was about advice. Advice is actually a way to reshape old thoughts on a fashion way and sell them for a higher price they’re truly worth, the narrator said.

Hence I won’t create a blogroll. Links are links no matter what either they’re blogs or regular URLs. I frankly do not mind how one names them as long as they’re there for a real and useful purpose.

Measuring charlatanism

Charlatanism might be a very aggressive word, but honestly this is the way I feel about those marketers who claim to have the secret or the solution for one’s marketing needs. They don’t, as simple as that. With very few exceptions, I hated almost every single minute spent on workshops, luncheons or anything else people who are (well) paid to instruct those who pay (a lot) to receive these people’s advice.

Once I remember, among other cases, of a former HP marketing executive talking about strategies for EA sports. The content was highly sophisticated, very deep into details and the whole strategy made total sense. But please tell me how could I apply a marketing structure and resources coming from HP and EA to my “corner bakery” small employer?

If you think paying 100, 200 dollars for a day with these people will solve your marketing problems, just take a break and unwind because it won’t. They cost a hell of a lot more than that. Actually I even doubt this will some day lead to an insight.

Recently I spent some time planning a corporate blog and the publication of some articles, and it became more explicit that people who read these articles are looking for a free or at least cheap way to solve their marketing problems.

At least in some cases what is annoying can become entertaining. Last year I went to a workshop where the last speaker of the day was a major Canadian marketing and education character. The guy is really smart, and had a terrific oratory. I was even more surprised when he told all of his mental difficulties in his childhood and teens. But he prevailed after all.

I hadn’t checked the program, but at the end of his speech the host came up to the microphone and he seemed pale and very surprised. Then he said: “It wasn’t actually what we were expecting, but it was certainly interesting”.

The topic had been changed by the mental difficulties of the speaker. He was supposed to talk about customer relationship management, but ended up speaking about creativity and how the human being is losing the power to innovate.

The truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth

I’m a person who loves to criticize things, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. I’m not usually fond of commenting other people’s statements, but this one below itched me until I started writing this posting.

“The first half of 2007 has been both eventful and productive for the Canadian Marketing Association.”
(John Gustavson, President and CEO).

The Americans love to invent names and nicknames. I took their mania and would call this statement a “useless-silly-not-necessarily-sincere-opportunity-to-make-PR”. Think with me. Would a president of s marketing association say something different from “we had a great period” or “our activities are soaring” or “we see no limits to keep growing” or anything similar? I don’t think so. His statement can be true, but what’s the point in saying something that is so obvious?

It seems marketers have an enormous eagerness to be all the time optimistic, as if showing some restraint or mentally forbidding more complex and complicated scenarios.

The power of marketing

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Do you want to know a big mistake?

This happened twice in the same day. I visited two websites from totally distinct companies. One is a major clothing retailer in Brazil (Acostamento); the other is a powerful integrated marketing agency (Rapp Collins). What’s the resemblance between both? They care a lot about esthetic and design, but not that much about a visitor to the website. Do you know why?

Because both designs are based on swfs. Without the plug-in one cannot visualize it and that was my case. It’s very naïve to think every single computer on earth has this kind of feature. Other would say having a website totally designed in swf is a way of selecting the target. Well, I’m a person within the marketing environment and would love to get to know both companies’ work, but unfortunately had no chance at all.

Make war, make marketing

I can say marketing is something that I love, but war is a subject I idolize as something to be studied. War came first for me. I’ve been studying it since my teens and only go deeper and deeper.

After all these years reading and theorizing both subjects, it becomes quite clear for me that they’re absolutely correlated. War, just like marketing, passes through countless shifts until it reached its modern shape. And that will continue so on and so forth. The same happens for marketing. On a casual or structured way, the subject is constant development for “ages”.

Marketing and war are two competition-based competences. It looks for me that they are far more than only the “Marketing Warfare” coined by Al Ries and Jack Trout. The true marketers should treat marketing as a real battlefield, with a clear objective (to fight for the customer acquisition and loyalty) and to make use of the right means. And this is just a basic, romantic vision of mine. Wars (and marketing) are really more complicated than that. Apart from these similarities I managed to find some others:

• A marketer can fiercely combat, but “die” in the battlefield if his attention is not fully turned into the battlefield;
• Manpower is a decisive factor;
• Arrogance can bring disastrous results;
• Reckoning plays a major part;
• Creativity, resilience and perseverance should always be part of the mix;
• Logistic coordination should be carefully watched. Marketing and war require a large concentration of efforts towards moving people and equipment;
• A great deal of the success is based on the leadership. Hesitation, weakness or lack of confidence are frequently fatal;
• Like the armed forces, marketing shouldn’t be a democracy but a highly hierarchical system;
• War games (or marketing tests) are not only exercises. They can produce a lot of valuable lessons;
• Talking about lessons, the one who learns faster in the battlefield can thrive faster;

I wonder why Gareth Morgan in his Images of Organization book didn’t think about including such a metaphor system. That could be of some interest to lots of marketers (including me).

Formula to marketing

I’ve been thinking about all these people who promise to solve everyone’s marketing needs and problems or believe it’s all about a linear equation. So I’ve decided to prepare my own formula using concepts learned along the way. Bear in mind:

Marketing = Market in action

Marketing = price + product + place + promotion, hence marketing can be written as

Market in Action = price + product + place + promotion

Segment (S) = target

Target (T) = public / place

Let’s get started.

To better understand your market, divide it into segments

Market / Σ (Segment 1, Segment 2, Segment 3…) in action = price + product + place + promo

But segment is actually…

Market / Σ (Target 1, Target 2, Target 3 …) in action = price + product + place + promo

Target is actually…

Market / Σ (Public 1 / Place 1, Public 2 / Place 2, Public 3 / Place 3 …) in action = price + product + place + promo

Add CRM to your segments

Market / Σ {(Public 1 / Place 1 + CRM, Public 2 / Place 2 + CRM, Public 3 / Place 3 + CRM) in action = price + product + place + promo

Then it becomes

Market / Σ {(Public 1 / Place 1, Public 2 / Place 2, Public 3 / Place 3 …) + 3(CRM)} in action = price + product + place + promo

If bad PR is the square of your problems, subtract it

Market / Σ {(Public 1 / Place 1, Public 2 / Place 2, Public 3 / Place 3 …) + 3(CRM)} in action = (price + product + place + promo) - (PR)²

If you want to multiply your results, call to action

Market / Σ {(Public 1 / Place 1, Public 2 / Place 2, Public 3 / Place 3 …) + 3(CRM)} in action = (price + product + place + promo) - (PR)² * call to action

At last, don’t forget to “ad” Communications and voilà! Here’s a “brand” new formula to make marketing (obviously if marketers are able to solve it).

Market / Σ {(Public 1 / Place 1, Public 2 / Place 2, Public 3 / Place 3 …) + 3(CRM)} in action = (price + product + place + promo) - (PR)² * call to action + Communications

Happy marketing

The other day I was thinking how important it is for a marketer to be confident and happy about his decisions. Many times I read about statesmen that, in time of war or peace, needed to take harsh measures against their own people.

With this thought in mind I started to idealize what would be my next great marketing employment. It would certainly need to deal with strategy and business development, always looking forward to grow and to learn. But most of all, the thing I need the most is to join the professional part of marketing (plans, budgets, media etc) with the customer side of it.

During my years as a marketer, just one job didn’t offer me the opportunity to meet and talk to the final customer. Believe me, I felt it hard not to deal directly with those we really work for. It’s not that much about the business side of it and generating more revenue, increasing the company’s database or anything like that. It’s more about the experiences an individual that has no idea about marketing can involuntarily teach a professional marketer. It’s fun, more relaxed and easier to absorb than any given theory can explain.

Interestingly my best moments dealing with real and final customers came from telemarketing. Almost 6 months on a daily routine still make me think and laugh of some pretty good moments. As when a former friend and colleague of work decided to put down on a paper a list of weird names we could collect. He reached the 130^th before leaving the company. Or when I talked to a woman called Miss (“Excuse me Miss Miss”). There was also a drunken guy decided to apply for a credit card almost 11 p.m. He was drunk, spent 45 minutes talking to me and in the end invited me to go to his fabulous mansion in the beach to have a barbecue. At least he ended up applying for the credit card and I achieved my daily goal.

Live Earth on a marketing perspective – a.k.a. “Harry Potter is our saviour”

Reading an entry from the Canadian Marketing Association blog I felt a frustration that can be compared to a PhD student having its thesis and PowerPoint slides eaten by a beaver a couple of minutes before the presentation. The subject is the Live Earth event that happened on July 7, 2007. It was definitely something to be remembered in the next years given the magnitude of it. I totally support it.

Fine, but then I started to wonder about the whole essence of the event, its consequences and results on a marketing perspective. I’ll start with the numbers and facts, like I always rather do; then we move to the questions, assumptions and end up with conclusions. Well, here it goes.

There were 100 musicians, from major popular artists of the entertainment industry to locals

• 24-hour marathon
• The main hosts were: Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and New York;
• Organizers said almost 2 billion people watched or followed the event
• More than 10,000 ‘friends of live earth’ events are now registered in 129 countries (source: Live Earth website on July 9th).

On a marketing perspective I asked myself

• Price and place: Rio de Janeiro had free concerts paid for by the local city hall on a beach that hosted almost 500,000 people. Wembley Stadium in London was really empty, absolutely empty compared to Queen’s concert 21 years ago. Wouldn’t it be smarter and more impacting to use Rio de Janeiro’s formula of price and place to all events? What’s the point? Raising money or creating awareness? I know they want to raise money to foundations to fight global climate change, but how come the artists were being (well) paid. What happened to the Live Aid philosophy of the 80s?
• Tracking: this is perhaps the most intriguing point. From a promotional point of view it was fantastic. A mega-coordinated event around the world. But honestly, can you see any value marketing-wise? Can they actually track the results? How the organizers will possibly count the percentage of people that

1) Absorbed the messages?

2) “Bought” the messages?

3) Will continue to “buy” the messages (means become greener or adopt tips to reduce the global climate change effect)?

Another point is tracking. It’s been more than five years now I see researches constantly showing marketers and corporate managers/director/VPs do not know or do not track results of a campaign. This is one of the most fundamental steps to take care of these days.

And that makes me think about the “10,000 Live Earth friends” (source: Live Earth website on July 9). This number is 0.0005% of the total people that watched the event. You have more people pre-ordering Harry Potter on a single day than this. Do you know what this means? Does it mean that people believe Harry Potter will be the savior of the planet, so much faith and attention are given to him. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Really, didn’t you expect a little bit more of marketing effort instead of a campaign highly turned to PR and awareness of artists and a foundation? I would expect so. Sometimes buzz only is not enough. You can have Pele and Payton Manning playing for your team and yet not be champion.

What about a little marketing exercise? The continuity of a campaign is also crucial. Al Gore’s been started with a much-publicized documentary that won an Oscar (and gave him 3 minutes of worldwide comedy exposition), he’s on TV everywhere, but frankly let’s talk about continuity and recall. But is it the right message really being passed on? Or is it just show business again?

If you answer the questions below without help then it’s because the marketing cause of this whole thing is not lost. Answers will come in a future posting.

- What’s the name of Al Gore’s Foundation?

- What’s the name of the other guy who co-signed Live Earth’s event (also an active activist)?

- What’s the name of the documentary mentioned above?

- What are they fighting for?

Ok, now try these

- Name three artists that played on Live Earth

- Name three cities that hosted Live Earth

- How did you hear about Live Earth?

Grammar and Business Development

I was doing an exercise to create a guideline on how to structure a business develop plan (for the records, it’s not finished). Doing a research I found a very interesting, well-layouted and comprehensive website/blog by Kilian Nakamura (www.kilian-nakamura.com). Among much useful information, there was one that particularly drew my attention.
Japan’s society is aging fast: By 2025, more than 30% of the population are going to be 65 or older. Japanese seniors are:
The most affluent demographic in Japan* Spending large sums on education, recreation, transport and communication
And so I started to wonder about grammar and how it could help business developers to go beyond the sentences above.

Subject: Japanese seniors
Descriptive sentence: most affluent demographic in Japan
Verb: spending
Direct object: large sums
Indirect object: on education, recreation, transport and communication

What could I ask myself to make a complete sentence and help me to develop a new plan to approach these people?

How to increase their expenditure?
Should they be pummeled more?
Should I offer new packages?
Should there be new ways to sell?
Should new products be introduced?
If so, which ones?
Should the company go vertical and offer new categories?

And this is just the beginning

Think "development" in business

Once Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation are the matrix forces of any business. Today I kept myself thinking by the thousandth time how the marketing world simply ignores this statement these days.

I see a constantly increasing difference between marketing and innovation among some companies. As a matter of fact, I see 2 types of marketing innovation for 2 different types of companies regarding marketing innovation:

Marketing innovation

On demand – when marketing is sparkled through a demand, necessity or anything that didn’t start within the ones responsible for marketing strategies (department-structured or not);

Natural – doesn’t need any “outside” encouragement or reason to start. It comes from an idea, an insight or simply a suggestion not necessarily attached to a situation. Unlike many people and marketers think, this initiative doesn’t have to come from the marketing staff.

Companies’ marketing

Whole flow – companies which lack a marketing department. Sometimes salespeople and/or administration personnel are responsible for marketing strategies. In this case they manage the whole flow of analyzing a demand by the market/customers, creating a strategy/solution, and implementing. This situation might happen either on new markets/products/plans or existing problems/gaps. It’s informal, it’s almost entirely concentrated on 1 person, it’s not all the time professional, but it’s marketing.

Total recall – big, fat, stiff marketing departments. They’ve got the money, the means, the structure and the professionals, but are not starters, only follow instructions from other departments. This is quite common to the big players, companies, and businesses in the market. This is also common to marketing companies (consultancies, media and advertising agencies).

How many companies do you know in the second category? Probably hundreds. Companies with a formal marketing department are frequently hostages of product departments. I wonder how close they put “create” and “innovate” together.

Hajimeru. This is the Japanese word for “to start”. Many meanings follow “to start”, including “to make”. But the best one I found for this case is below.

Allocate and then initialize
www.millennium.berkeley.edu/docs/mpi/gm_manual/gm_18.html

Reason why? Innovating is not only initializing something. Innovating is above creation and more complex.

Gal. Marketing

My first year at university was marked by many new lessons. One of them I remember the most was being or not being a generalist in marketing. Having the ability to understand and dominate different disciplines is the key to plan and execute marketing. I totally bought the idea.

But time’s passing by and every day it seems to appear a new and more specific position within marketing departments. You can find among others business analyst, marketing assistant, marketing administrative, marketing specialist, manager of new markets, online manager etc.

For me it is especially annoying to see companies are going so specific on marketing HR. Customers should be segmented, that is true, but for marketers too? Have they ever thought about the implications of creating a marketing Babel Tower?

It is clear specialists have wider control over their environments, but the general overview of marketing strategies loses a lot with such segmented professionals.

Unless...

I saw a very interesting quote on a website the other day, allegedly by David Ogilvy (one of the foremost people in creativity matters ever):

"It isn't creative unless it sells."

Just for the records, I totally support this.

Marketers, intelligent life and close encounters in marketing 2

This is a continuation of the previous article. I just meant to compare the movie and marketing for many reasons:

• The core of marketing is not advertising a product (is it clear ad agencies?). Neither is promoting, pricing or distributing. The core of marketing is to sell a product. Sell more, sell better, sell frequent. Get used to it. A true marketer is not an artist in essence, but a salesman;
• Remind you: without selling to a customer, either “B” (business), “R” (retailer), “S” (supplier), “I” (individual), “P” (peer) or “C” (consumer) there’s no marketing.
• Being effective in marketing has little to do with big budgets, and has more to do about management. A wealthy bank account helps a lot, but don’t fool yourself with the idea one needs to be rich to make marketing;
• Don’t think just because you’re a marketer every single plan you put on the table will work. Deal with failure possibilities before they knock on your door;
• Selling a plan to the senior management once (“the money owners”) is easier than selling a product to a customer twice;
• Your loyalty as a marketer is to the customer, not your boss; it can also be read as “the customer is your boss, not your manager”;
• Spend more time with customers than computers who tell you an amount of data. Machines are very important to compile data, but your final target is actually human and won’t tell everything so easily. Besides, computers don’t make decisions (yet);
• If you have a fabulous idea for a marketing plan, great! Now prove it before putting it into action. Searching for market information is a good start;
• Hiding behind communication-only strategies is marketing cowardice; “the ends will justify the means” (Machiavelli), not the opposite. Communication is part of a whole. There’s no reason to desperately advertise without a purpose, a strategy and a plan.
• Watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s worthy.

Marketers, intelligent life and close encounters in marketing

Fortunately for marketers, customers are not the same anymore. There are thousands of ways of reaching them. And yet, we’re getting distant and distant. I’m talking specifically to companies or individuals who are responsible for elaborating marketing plans. If you or your company doesn’t prepare a formal plan (yearly, quarterly, bi-annually etc) jump this and the next posting.

Being a marketer and trying to understand customers is becoming very similar to the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie. We, humans (marketers) know there’s intelligent life (customers) outside of our little planet (companies), but we’re not 100% confident yet. Some are sceptical to search for answers, others to accept the fact. We, humans are superior to anything outside our planet. Our planet rocks and we, humans know everything.

However, we have had signs of the intelligent life existence (prospects), some people even made contact with them (sales), but the out-of-this planet forms of life barely expose themselves. Now we’re curious, and must go after answers.

Then, after finding scientific bases (planning and strategy) and collecting enough samples (quantitative research and focus group), we, humans elaborate colourful and musical gizmos (print, TV ads, jingles etc) to attract them to our planet. For those who watched the movie, you know how it ends.

Initially the intelligent form of life shows interest for our gizmos (products). They can do whatever we tell them do to do (response, direct marketing). They experiment (free sample perhaps, giveaways), and even let some of us to go with them and understand their culture (customer services, ombudsman etc). They threaten to leave. We insist (pummel, up-sell, cross-sell etc). Suddenly, they close their spaceship doors and leave without a trace (churn).

Will they ever come back (reactivation)? We, humans will never know. Will they ever remember us (recall)? We, humans will never know. Will we ever get to deeply know them (segmentation)? We, humans will never know. Do we care? We, humans are apparently learning (CRM).

What we, humans know for sure is that our initial questions haven’t been answered. Worse, they will remain, instigate our curiosity, and soon restart the vicious cycle of not understanding the intelligent life outside our little planet.

Planning with Pivots

MS Excel has a fabulous, easy and fast tool for planning: it’s called PivotTable. I discovered it a couple of years ago and hasn’t stopped using ever since. But now I decided to turn PivotTable into a standard procedure for planning. I posted an article a while ago about the necessity of using data from different sources and a 3-D comparison. Pivot tables are great for concentrating large chunks of data segmented into different fields.

An example.

I wanted to map and understand purchase behavior of 30,000 customers. The client didn’t know anything about it neither used it properly. They had all the data, but didn’t plan anything over it. Some of the fields in the 27 MB-file were DOB, Postal Code, order amount, customer number, gender etc.

To find the pivot table control, go to the Data tab and select PivotTable and PivotChart. There, Excel will ask you a few details of your selection data. I often used the first option Microsoft Excel list or database, but you might have other options. In the end, create a PivotTable.

After your command, the computer will create a list with all the fields your data contains. From there you can control the most different comparisons. It allows you to sum or count quantities, among other features. This is perfect for any kind of data, from sales (you can have a total breakdown) or people (total amount of customers for instance).

I crossed and compared everything I could. My own data feast. In my case, 10 minutes after starting, results showed me male customers spend more than women and that some regions are more profitable than others. The table also told me how old my customers were and how much each age band used to spend. Guess what I’m going to do with all these conclusions?

Pivot tables are all about what computers were built for: concentrate on strategy and let the machine does the “dirty” work for you. Maybe I’m becoming a marketing geek, but looking at all that privileged information had a terrific impact on my planning beliefs.

A little of philosophy: results will never be new because they’ve already happened. However, the way you discover and how you will use them is what transforms regular marketers into masters of strategy. Dig deeper to find the treasure.

Canadian Animals

Ads in Canada are filled with animals (not the actors). Telecoms (three of the four major ones: Bell, Telus, and Fido), TP (Snub and the one from the bear I don’t recall), hand soap for kids (forgot the brand), mayo (Hellman’s, a dog preparing a sandwich, ), cars (Puss the cat from Shrek for Chrysler), you name it.

Interestingly they follow two “animal ad strategies”: single species and zoo. Bell and Fido for instance use single species; Telus goes with zoo. Bell, being recognized as the most traditional Canadian telecom invested in beavers, Frank and Gordon. The beaver is one of Canada’s national animals so it makes sense. But their tricks and jokes playing with Bell’s range of products (wireless, satellite cable etc) is overwhelmingly boring. But their PR is good, to the point a radio announcer spent almost 5 minutes talking about how cute and funny they were (liar). The same week a local news report was showing the ad on TV.

Fido deals with dogs, and dogs only. It doesn’t matter the breed. They (ad agency included) even had the cynical idea of copycatting one of the most acclaimed campaigns in world advertising (animal category) a few years ago. Recently Fido aired a campaign where the dog closely resembles its owner. Pedigree launched an offline campaign about 10 years ago using the same concept.

Telus is all about testing animals, the “zoo strategy”. That’s it, testing. They tried pretty much everything living and non-homo sapiens. The list includes monkeys, rabbits, ducks, giraffes, birds, exotic frogs, ferrets, badgers, and more recently flamingos. Indeed, flamingos. What it has to do with telecom services I don’t know, but the exotic rosy animal is there. It’s not even worth placing a link for you to watch.

We can’t forget some advertisers really need to use animals because it’s their target (or reason for existing). But in this case, Whiskas and Iams (to mention but a few) and humane societies are losing space to this whole fauna invading the commercial break. Their ads are becoming even boring for obvious reasons. Imagine the following situation: the first ad has a bear on it; the second, a flamingo, the third, a dachshund, a pug …Overexposure is psychologically and practically bad.

My tolerance is zero for companies randomly and irrationally using animals. This is not the case of Whiskas, who produced an excellent campaign using people performing as animals. The message was clear, the whole thing was very creative and they didn’t have to explore the image of a poor cat (except for a few seconds of him eating at the end of the ad).

The offline spammers and the "P" word

Much has been discussed about the death of the paper in direct marketing. The “Web 2.0” generation says online is the way to make marketing profit, but there are some doubts about it.

Paper (or offline) direct mail is more alive than ever, but this is not necessarily a “healthy fact”. A good chunk of what is sent by regular mail to individuals is what people commonly call “junk mail”. Can you imagine 4 million tons of paper in one year? This is just what the US produces every 365 days. Do a simple calculation and you will find each citizen there receives 13 kg of paper in average. You can easily assume 95% or more is useless, go straight to the garbage or do not receive any attention from the recipient. And yet, it is worthy.

Junk mail is the offline spam, the dinosaur marketing practice that survived the agility and omnipotence of internet and its features. But please do not confuse direct marketing with junk mail. They’re not necessarily the same and I can tell you that (already worked with both, direct marketing and junk mail). The possibilities and the challenge of dealing with offline direct marketing (and consequently junk mail) are enormous.

Younger marketers might think sending a misleading piece of paper with poor design is something out of fashion and one shouldn’t expect to sell. Wrong. I know lots of companies acting in countries from Japan to the UK always looking for new ways to bring new customers. And they do buy in. Amazingly, these people purchase the most varied types of offer, from being a heir of Leonardo da Vinci to a pre-approved lottery by a certain Prize Settlement Headquarters.

Branding is something quite unique about offline spammers (or junk mail senders). Some companies opt to use different names every time they mail. So you can receive lots of correspondences from the same company, but you will never know it’s the same because the name is absolutely different. This frequent variation also reminds me of a very known word in the world of direct marketing: the “P” word.

Pummel, the “P word”, is a very extensive definition in junk mail concept. Marketers working with this type of market believe that individuals can be won by restlessness. In practice it means “the more one approaches these people, the more chances one has to convert them into customers”. Fair enough, it’s a strategy. But the same theory can be used on the opposite way. More and more people are turning to “preference services”, like the British TPS (in this case it’s specific for telemarketing). Here, customers or prospects may show all their rage against marketing approaches and ask to be removed from the mailer’s list so they won’t be bothered again.

Apparently mailers do not care that much about it. I’ve already seen strategies where people would be pummeled up to 15 times in a single month in case they purchase something. Another consequence of this massive bombardment of mail boxes is a very short lifetime. Customers do not buy in very frequently and usually mailers tend to ignore existing customers to go after fresh names. There’s your enormous challenge in the junk mail industry. How to be profitable trusting very little in people who already relied on you (customers) and offering the world to someone that has never loved you yet (prospect)?

Sweden is not the way

Once I asked the headquarters (in the Netherlands) of the company I was working for to go to Sweden. I wanted to analyze how they structured their marketing activities and understand better the structure. A lead generated by my then-boss made me believe we, the British branch, had the same problems, “marketingwise” to deal with.

My first attempt was to get the name of the Swedish marketing director via the so I could get in touch with him and see what we could arrange. My boss fully encouraged me. A contact in Amsterdam refused to give the name of the contact, asking back what I wanted. After explanation, he refused again saying all the matters regarding Sweden should be dealt by the HQ. The same day, after a long conversation with the GM for the UK, my boss managed to convince her to send me to Stockholm, only to be denied once again 24 hours later.

I don’t remember having written anything about marketing management so far. It is a matter that’s becoming more and more popular, even formally recognized in some university degrees. Imagine how you would feel not having access to something that would enormously contribute to your marketing planning?

Get to know sister companies and branches is a tremendous step to understand what the market is asking for, especially when both companies have a similar problem. So you, reader, don’t say I’m creating something from the scratch, take a look at Wikipedia’s definition of marketing management (bold is mine).

Marketing management is the practical application of marketing techniques. It is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain mutually beneficial exchanges with target markets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_management

Translate the bold part the way you like, but can you actually think of something more obvious than discovering your own organization before going out in the market? That is, at least, what HR recommends on the very first day of work. Amsterdam had all the rights to control the program. But hey, aren’t we all on the same side?

"Dumb it down"

Yesterday I’ve heard for the first time in my life to “dumb it down”. It meant to be “lower your level of professionalism because the client didn’t understand quite everything you wrote on a report”.

It didn’t hit me hard as if I was angry or anything. But it was a different feeling. For the first in my life someone had issues with a style of presenting reports and conclusions that is what most of people currently do. It wasn’t technical, but it had a very business-oriented content, a bunch of statistics, analysis and conclusions.

It was probably my education, or how my former employees taught me to present this kind of thing. But this is something I didn’t quite expect it in the business world.

Anyway, I’ll have to dumb it down from now on.

The fast and the furious

Once I read an article called the “The young guns and the old farts”. It was all about entrepreneurship and told a story of two totally different styles of managing innovation within the same company. One side was the owner-manager and the other, the subordinate. When I tried to take this concept to marketing, it was clear this works as well, except for a major difference: there’s nothing to do with age.

Many features are part of a successful marketing strategy, but some has a bigger impact than others. Everybody is talking about creativity, advertising, tracking results, and planning. I’m fond of planning, have always been and encourage it. But what happened to the initiative part? Who’s got the guts to trigger a project (and not to receive an orientation to start it)? In many cases even the senior management doesn’t actually command the process of new projects.

Many of my bosses have always told me to test. Marketing is a big lab of projects. There’s the risk assessment for all of them, of course, but trying different concepts is a good way to find THE concept one’s looking for. As I said in a previous article, marketing is not every time linear, but thinking straight and logically brings better results. Coming back to the point of initiative, pro-activeness is quite fashion these days. Unfortunately it’s something marketers are taking for granted for two reasons: 1) ideas are poorly based on their own realities, and 2) it takes them a lot of time and effort to be implemented.

Some interesting facts.

A few days ago I’ve heard about a simple project that could give a whole new perspective for a client. Time this idea has been in the drawer? 2 years. I participated on the revamp of a corporate website and intranet project a few years ago. Timeline of the project, from conception to implementation: 3 years. A fabulous blog research and survey by Backbone Media (www.backbonemedia.com) says 51% of companies who launched a corporate blog spent just 1 day up to 2 months between idea and implementation of the project. The average marketing project timeline in a marketing department I used to work for jumped from 45 to 60 days within 1 year. A job I had to manage with some co-workers to develop an idea to profit from 26,000 inactive customers: timeless. In this case it was also useless because the owner of the program saw no reason in dealing with these people. They are “dead” for good. How can marketers buy this sort of thing?

Do you see the point? People within a marketing project (clients, marketers, suppliers or whoever it is) are burying amazing initiatives using their pride and power of veto. As long as it makes sense and follow a rational conception, ideas for marketing projects should be worked out right away, really fast and furious if necessary. Marketers should constantly push towards innovation for everyone’s profit (not financially speaking). Once I’ve heard that 3M had a demand to generate 1 new idea every 3 minutes. Who knows if they’re going to be produced (or even if it’s true), but at least they have abundance of material to work with.

Yes, it is true marketers are full of work and priorities, but time is there to squeeze. Consider the fact of setting goals to develop projects in weeks, not months, even less years, doesn’t matter the size. Just try and you will see the benefits.

Free towards a purpose

Some big companies realized something that many people always knew: the best things in life are free. This whole Marketing Consul Project made me think how stylish volunteering is these days. This blog has a clear intention to help others with their marketing conceptions and plans. But popular companies and institutions are widely exploring this volunteer niche.

Perhaps the most recognized brand asking for volunteers today is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the Free Encyclopedia. The website grew from almost unknown 2 years ago to the major knowledge search destination on Earth. It reinvented the Encyclopedia business without charging a single cent for it.

Google is next (www.google.com). Two words: open source. The giant search engine that stormed the market and became history in less than 10 years wants to give you free tools. What do they have in return? Lots of things: loyalty, market share, research lab for their inventions, feedback etc.

Amazon (www.amazon.com) also offers its buyers to drop a line about products they experienced. Can you see a better way to create interaction? Yes, you can, but thi doesn’t deny it’s a great idea. Following this template, MSN Autos (http://autos.msn.com) have millions of reviews from car drivers and buyers. Honestly, they’re more useful than the experts’ comments. I actually decided which car to buy based on the fellow customers that spent some time leaving their opinions.

The Marketing Consul is a great opportunity to be part of this volunteer network. In the end, free knowledge through volunteer is a great way to spread the message and make marketing. Full steam ahead we go!

Marketing: the balance between observation and experience

Marketers can be quite annoying in many ways. As a matter of fact, the literal translation of the word “marketer” into Portuguese is of a dirty person who does everything to achieve something, especially in politics.

One of the ways marketers annoy people is by creating hundreds of different terms (a.k.a. marketing jargon) so nobody else outside their networking will understand them without a reasonable explanation. Viral marketing, SEO marketing, war marketing, fax marketing etc.

What people, marketers or not need to understand is that marketing is simple. Marketing is a perfect union of strategy/theory and empirical knowledge. Details are obtained through careful and insistent observation. This should be the first step.

It is true everyone is eligible to understand marketing, but really few can actually apply it. No wonder so many engineers, journalists, and a bunch of other professions currently occupy marketing positions. Marketing welcomes everyone.

I had the great opportunity to work with professional marketers for a while, people who were “raised” in the marketing field and made of marketing their primary area. I also had the chance to see the other side, people who were just doing marketing because they were told so, for lack of options or because they were the real starters of the whole business: economists, anthropologists, teachers, psychologists, fundraisers etc. Both categories definitely do not match, and you can clearly notice the difference.

Real marketers are annoying (this time in a good sense) and go straight to the point when it’s needed. No frills or chit-chat. They are also concerned about strategically thinking about everything. They know for instance that planning research impacts on communication and strategy has effects on database. I remember of a financial director who also assumed the marketing department in a company. He was great on financial controlling and database, but lacked a great deal of communication, skills and strategy regarding consumers.

The opposite came when I met a former ad executive as the head of the marketing department. He spent most of his time in the communication strategy, but had terrible ideas about the general marketing plan. For him, marketing was placing ads on magazines, sending direct mail to the company’s customers and making sure the website was rightly updated. A third segment of these people are those who have the leverage within a company (e.g. sales directors) and think they understand everything about marketing to the point they actually want to make the entire marketing plan themselves.

Marketing at its initial level is simple, anyone can be part of it. Regular salesmen are seen as exceptional marketers because of their capacity for quickly understanding the environment and adjusting themselves to it. However, when the level of demand grows it makes necessary to count on people who are not mere observers but also prove to be experienced and generalists in marketing. Those are the details that will make the whole difference in the end.

Asking too much

This posting is not about pricing. It’s about strategy. Questioning is among the best ways to brainstorm and create plans. Everything as long as it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems asking questions is becoming out of fashion. People sometimes really don’t understand the difference between settling a doubt and a direct confrontation. It’s like being the devil’s advocate. Lots of questions won’t be ever fully answered. Why did Sears bankrupt in Brazil? How come Wal-Mart is leaving Germany? Why French giant chain Carrefour cannot establish them as a brand in the US? Asking questions to different doubts should be encouraged, not to the point where marketing will become philosophy, but whenever it’s necessary to improve your plan. We shouldn’t be afraid to look like 8-year-old kids putting “whys” and “ifs” ahead of all the other words in every single sentence we say. Innovation pulls innovation. But, just like alcohol, know your limits.

Some of the useful questions I’ve made and heard while working in marketing.

“Why do they sell and we don’t?”
“Why don’t we test this?”
“If this will improve our performance, why hasn’t it been implemented yet”?
“Have you heard about (subject)”?
“Why do we have to use the same suppliers all the time?”
“How do you explain this?”
“Is there any other alternative”?
“Are you sure”?
“Did you talk to (person)?”
“Did you check (subject)?”
“Is it similar to that plan?”
“What’s the value of our product/brand”?
“How can we work this out on a different way”?
“Is it worth trying?”
“What is the competition doing”?

A 3-D version of customers

Direct marketing is a very expensive marketing tool to deal with. It costs more because it intends to reach a very specific target. As a compensation it is expected a higher percentage of conversion because you’re putting all the efforts to take a message to someone who wants to hear it. In many cases though, expectations are not fulfilled mainly due to poor selection of people. Not working on your back-end can also become a problem if your customers are leaving your company/product or just don’t buy anymore. "With more power comes more responsibility" and "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" are the answers.

"More makes more"- If want to convert prospects into clients, make sure you are getting the right people. Profile these people into narrow filters. Perhaps you won’t use all the information, but at least you’ll know how to deal with it.

From the most simple to the most complicated to achieve
1. Geographic (Where?)
2. Demographic (Who?)
3. Psychographic (How they behave?)
4. Mapping (a comprehensive 3D selection)

3D is not a video-game measure. It’s actually the combination between the 3 of items (Geo, Demo and Psycho). Using this method it’s possible to find gaps to be explored. This is similar to what entrepreneurs do. They research the market to find something that hasn’t been offered yet or someone who hasn’t had the opportunity to have access to a product or service.

Take Japan as an example. There are 47 prefectures (similar to districts, provinces or states) distributed into 8 regions (geo). The region of Tohoku is the least populated whereas Kanto (where Tokyo is) is by far the highest populated (demo). Though Japan has an interestingly homogenous distribution all over its territory, some differences are clear. There are rural and urban areas where people have different activities and ways of life (psycho).

That’s when data becomes information. Data alone doesn’t "speak", but a combination of statistical (geo and demo) and subjective information (psycho) clears the whole panorama. Detailing customers and markets to the extreme is a great advantage to companies looking for exceptional conversion in direct marketing.

"Eternal vigilance" – This shouldn’t be the rule only for acquisition. Companies in general have huge problems trying to either persuade their customers to remain loyal or to make them buy more. There is lots of competition around and being unfaithful is not a rare practice. Looking into your own customers is usually the best, quickest and cheapest way to convince them to stay with you. The geo-demo-psycho thing can also be applied here, but it will be deeper.

Geographic (Where – may also be the channel, like internet, DM, telephone)
Demographic (Who – gender, age, occupation etc)
Psychographic (Why did they buy this brand and not other? Any promotion involved? Good deal? Value?)
Mapping

Looking for not answered questions is a way to fill the gaps and prepare targeted new strategies. It’s all about finding the right person.

Promotion, dumping and creativity

You haven’t probably realized, but in many cases marketers simply and shallowly attach promotions to prices. It’s so erroneous and common that not a few people would define promotion as discount. But the topic evolved, and a lot. Promotion is one of the four original P’s of marketing (together with Price, Place (distribution) and Product). “Original” because more recently other P’s were added. It’s not the case for now.

The principle of promotion is reciprocation. It shouldn’t be dealt as a discount or price reduction only. It might be, but it’s not the only one. One might have different reasons to promote from purely commercial (please buy) to awareness (please notice) to a desired action (please do something). What they share in common is the fact that both sides will profit somehow.

Dumping is a way to show that price is a very delicate matter. This commonly seen as a dirty practice in the market dubbed as “The sale of a good in a foreign market for a lower price than in the domestic market or for a lower price than its cost of production” (http://www.google.ca/url?sa=X&start=3&oi=define&q=http://www.econ100.com/eu5e/open/glossary.html&usg=AFrqEzfKZDVMikcn5vXMXXw1DVsJIUYxPw). Some marketers truly believe this is the most efficient way to attract customers. In the end, they ignore or simply underpin an eventual financial loss. This is exceptionally cruel for small businesses which do not have enough leverage to keep up with such strategy.

Dealing with price when doing a promotion is not the most appropriated way to sell because consumers’ preferences changed a lot in the past 2 decades. It’s just too simplistic to think someone will buy your product just because it’s cheap. Also, it’s a bad compensation for your profit margins selling for lower than you can produce.

The amount of options a customer has now is amazingly powerful. One might be looking for price, but always remember that premium brands and upscale segments do not occur by chance. There are other people who don’t care about the tag, but the product itself is what counts. And that’s where creativity enters.

Promotion means advertising, letting people know you have a special deal for them. Advertising is not making a joke in national primetime or any other media. That’s what advertising agencies haven’t realized yet. Promotion should be the clearest and quickest way to advertise. Promotion, however, doesn’t start on communication. It’s a far broader strategy that should start on the very core of the marketing plan.

Creativity in promotion equals:

- Being simple
Just like above. The clearer you and your message are, the easier and quicker your audience will catch.

- Promising and delivering
What’s the purpose on promoting something you cannot comply with?

- Avoiding “situations” (too many conditions, misleading messages etc)
Nobody wants or can read almost invisible terms and conditions

- Adding value to your existing product needs to be tangible
Even commodities offer lots of options these days.

- Knowing your target
This was the first advice when I went to a local small business advice center. If you have someone who’s willing to listen, your task becomes easier.

- Leaving the price alone as long as you can
Try indirect benefits like parts, accessories, coupons, gifts certificates, vouchers, extra prizes etc

- Think outside the profit.
Selling is important, but selling once can become a complication in the future. Loyal people are cheaper and more profitable to keep than investing in new acquisitions. Have a back-up plan to satisfy those people who purchased once from you.

Dell is an example that combines very well all these topics. Have you realized how subtle and effective they are with their promotions? They’re frequent (almost every day there’s something going on), there’s a clear added value to their products (like “free” upgrades, free accessories and peripherals, shipping included etc). We’re not talking about selling shoes or two boxes of strawberries for the price of one, but a 700 dollar computer (to mention the cheapest ones).

Rule of 11

This “rule” can be labeled as a conspiracy theory, but in the end it makes sense. For quite a long time people from all over the world have been discussing the quality of Hollywood movies, if not all of them at least a good part of them. “Rule of 11” is supposedly a series of measures taken by studio owners and the movie industry senior players to make sure their movies will pay off properly. The idea is to keep a movie dumb and simple; to the point an 11-year old kid could understand it. If they can, everybody else older than that can too. I don’t know when it started, but apparently it was in the 70’s or 80’s.

It makes total sense. The bulk of people admit they go to the movies to entertain themselves, to forget life outside or to see something they’re not used to. Lots of what happens in American films are quite cliché or at least far away from real life. It’s all about entertainment, something that demands to be uncomplicated. If you want to test how target stereotypes still work, just organize a focus group with average American people and invite them to watch a film by Francois Truffaud. They will not understand everything, won’t like and will have problems with the subtitles, and will likely complain about the film’s pace.

Obviously those who are “manipulated” (us) do not have access to this kind of information. Neither a movie producer nor executive will publicly admit this. I learned this from a very smart Compared Communication teacher on my sophomore year at university. And that kept me thinking. It’s the kind of thing we never think about it, but when it comes to mind there’s no way to deny.

Call Centre

http://www.itcampus.eu

Telemarketing is also part of the marketing world. The company above is probably one of the best in the world today. And they’re only 8 years old. I spent some time with the guys at their itCampus HQ in Leipzig, German, but mostly with Thomas Beer (now based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK), their international marketing and sales director. The company currently invests and performs aggressively in the European market, making partnerships and merging with other specialized companies. Some of their developed technology so far stands as worldwide benchmark in the industry.

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Marketing networking

http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.openbc.com/
Networking is key these days. Some links to help you find people with similar marketing affinities. You need to register. So far I haven’t had any problems with spam coming from these sites.

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Consulting and General marketing

http://marketingtoday.blogspot.com/
http://businessmarketing.net/
I “discovered” Peter DeLegge in 2004 when doing a research for a school project. I became a regular reader of his columns and posts ever since. DeLegge combines professional experience with a style of writing that is very close to what I believe to be ideal. He’s objective, serious but not boring or technical, and very practical. Perhaps this latter is the best part of it all. His words are quite clear and he plainly demonstrates to be a real expert about the subject. The level of industry knowledge update is also amazing. I decided to share not only his corporate website, but also his blog. Both are great research sources.

http://www.sdmg.ca/
SDMG is totally new for me. This week for the first time I logged on to their website. Though I cannot say anything about their work, their definitions posted in the home page are a true class of direct marketing and CRM. In 4 sentences and 1 chart they’re able to educate millions of marketing “newcomers” and even the so-called experts. If I were a marketing teacher, SDMG’s home page concepts would definitely be part of my inaugural class.

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The IFFHS case

http://www.iffhs.de/ (there’s an English version)
Within the list above there is also an intruder: IFFHS. This is actually a football (soccer)-oriented organization responsible for the records and statistics of unthinkable things about the sport. Once regarded as a crazy scientific experiment in a poorly coordinated, strategic-lacking environment, IFFHS is becoming every time more recognized and popular.
Football (soccer) is known to be a very archaic and amateur game in its rules, organization and control if compared to other sports like the NFL, NBA or Formula 1. IFFHS starts to shed some light towards a professional understanding of the game.

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Statistics Organizations and country information

http://www.stat.go.jp/english/ - Japanese Stats, English version
http://www.ibge.com.br/ – Brazilian Stats, in Portuguese. Look for the English version.
http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/ - China Stats, English version
http://www.royalmailus.com/guid_dm.html - Royal Mail Guide to Countries
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html - Current CIA World Fact Book
http://www.swisspost.com/ – Swiss Post (you can order for free the “Direct Marketing Passport to Europe”, it’s a superb document. They also offer exceptional extra material on demand.)

In many opportunities I studied (and agreed with) that researching a market are the type of knowledge one must have to succeed in marketing. I also learned that statistics is a standard module for every single marketing course because it helps marketers to organized their findings and facts. This is been working very often since then.
In order to make an accurate decision about strategy, one has to start to deal with raw data. However, numbers don’t speak for themselves. Then it comes the information phase where a lot of assumptions, facts and, most importantly, conclusions will shape the final plan.
Have you ever thought that one doesn’t live without the other? One cannot accurately decide without minimum and reliable data and one cannot use raw data only to make a decision. Decisions are very specific for each case, but can you imagine of a better place to have access to raw data than public statistics offices? If you can, please tell me. Even CIA is in the business! The wealth of numbers and insights about specific markets they provide is almost limitless. Many times these free websites could be used for a shallow, first research about something one wants to know. Being in the knowledge era who knows more has an ultimate marketing advantage.

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E-marketing

E-marketing evolved into varied different branches in the past 15 years to the point new specialist positions were created.

http://www.kinetixmedia.com/
I had the pleasure to meet the president of Kinetix, Paula Skaper. Her combination of being simple and smart is highly appreciated! She’s quite deep into the business, being a college teacher, president of related organizations (International Internet Marketing Association), sponsor of direct marketing events, speaker, lecturer etc.

http://www.sendtec.com/Right after Kinetix, came Sendtec. They made available for download an amazing report dubbed “How to turn 50 common search mistakes into pure profit”, signed by Irv Brechner and Tim Daly (CMO and VP, Marketing and Strategy respectively). Just like DeLegge (see below) and Skaper, they make search marketing become something like breathing: natural and impossible not to think of. The document is simple, easy to read, useful, quite insightful and a great introduction to search engine marketing.

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Time for Links

I added the first URLs to my “Links” section. I personally endorse all of the links below and spent some time reading and visiting them to assure they’re worth checking out. There’s a short explanation for most of them. Contact me here if you want to suggest an interesting link. Report here if you experience any problems with the links.

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Are you ready to ask?

Input your questions and tell us on what we might help.

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Background of the Marketing Consul

This whole idea started when I had a very, very brief opportunity to serve as a marketing volunteer to a language bureau. They were probably one of the best in town, had a friendly and committed staff, but really needed to increase their revenues. How could they do that? That was the marketing plan they didn’t have. Marketing is far more than what many people think. I met lots, but not all, kinds of freaking scary concepts about it. Engineers who thought marketing was basically painting a logo; owner-managers who think doing PR and placing their ads in a magazine is marketing; marketing managers who believed branding is marketing. The thing is, if you go to Google and type marketing you will find some 500,000,000 items. This is about the double of when you type “religion” or 20 times the word “mankind”. Do you know why?

Because people like marketing. They’re intrinsically involved with. Marketing is about people, but not every person can do marketing properly. It’s about reaching and captivating people to be on your side. You have thousands of terms, a typical jargon that most of the marketers insist to keep secret. That’s another conception about marketing, a discipline segregated to a few only. Not true! A real salesman knows how to market things. Maybe on an empirical and less strategic way, but they do.

Marketing is quite complex. I’ve been formally studying and practicing it for about 8 years and I’ll never be a master on the subject. There are no masters on the subject. It’s an untamed horse. And a different one every time you see it. There are no magic formulas or secrets. It is work, lots of common sense, questioning, discussion and imagination. Once I went to a workshop where the former head of marketing at HP was lecturing. She was great, traveled around the world, and headed very competent teams in 3 different countries. Great, she’s smart, no doubt about it.

When she started to present a customer retention program implemented by EA Sports, I realized her topic wasn’t going to be that useful for me. Reason why? Basically it had nothing to do with the company I worked for. EA Sports are huge, consolidated, market leaders and deal with video-games. The only affinity both companies had was targeting the Japanese market. The rest was different. I had neither money nor such needs to implement a detailed CRM program; focus groups were unthinkable and my customer database knowledge systems were still crawling. EA was transferring their strategy to the online environment while I am still struggling to convince the senior management to start something online etc.

Again, drop your question/comment and we’ll help as we can.

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Objective, for starters

The reason of this blog. There are 2 simple reasons: to spread knowledge and to help, advise and guide people who eventually need to make marketing and business development, including discussing and developing real strategies without involving fees. I’m a consultant by the way (e-mail me here if you want to know more about my background). Once I learned “the best things in life are for free”.

Here’s the deal: leave your question or doubt about marketing and/or business development, any type of question, from the general concept to the specific need. It might be even about your own business or work. I won’t answer everything correctly, even because my objective is to create a networking among the users of this blog. There will be disagreements. Nevertheless, the ultimate decision will be yours, the questioner. Nobody here can accept liability for the ideas suggested. However, as the blog administrator, I’ll make sure the discussion remains professional and high level.

You might ask yourself: why such a person would want to accumulate more work without charging for it? That’s another problem with marketing these days. Marketers will charge you a fortune for something that should be taught at elementary school. I do this for pleasure; for the opportunity to gain knowledge from different people and situations. I chose marketing on my 16th birthday and never regretted a single day since then. Business development is more recent. Also, it is my understanding that marketing is collective, not exclusive property of those who judge themselves marketers. Google offers most of their softwares for free in the web. Adobe is following. Why not sharing marketing and business development ideas?

The Marketing Consul: One day you might wonder yourself how this name came up. It’s actually a combination of meanings. “Consul” is the beginning of consultant (a public consultant in this case), but also a position that is known by the representation of someone, to protect commercial interests and help citizens. Got the whole point?

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