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.