Customer Experience Crossroads

Marketing new products: audio e-mail from GoldMail

There's an interesting trend afoot in marketing that we might call Guerilla Social Marketing. It's hard to tell that it's actually marketing if it's done well.  The basic pattern is to find a discussion group in a place like LinkedIn that relates to your product/service. And ask a question about your product/service. Result: you get exposure AND information.

I'm running across this a lot lately. Here's an example that was relatively nicely done, and lets me tell you about an interesting little tech company.

An advertising guy posted a question on the Innovative Marketing Group discussion regarding a product called GoldMail, a product that can embed audio in slides, put a clickable link in e-mail, and track the clickthroughs. His question was seeking creative ideas for taking this product to market.

It's a good example of a product that is fairly straightforward functionality, bundled in a useful way. You can do this in other ways, but perhaps not as easily.

I like thinking about problems like this, and it didn't take me long to come up with several ideas for marketing this product...

[1] I think you would find professional speakers, presenters and trainers to be a very receptive audience for this product. And an advantage to tapping this market is that they are very active marketers themselves, sending out a lot of newsletters and so forth. To get quick uptake, you could offer a special deal through the association to it's members. In the US, National Speakers Association is what you need. In Canada, it's Canadian Association of Professional Speakers. There is also an international association.

[2] Bloggers might be quite interested in something like this to add audio to their blogs. You could offer something through Typepad, a major blogging platform. Again, you might want to provide them a preferred rate, so that Typepad helps you market the service. Since people are already paying for Typepad, they should be more receptive to paying for additional functionality.

[3] Real estate agents. The leading brokers offer many innovative marketing tools to their agents, and this seems like it could be a great fit. Look for the leading brokers in major markets that are doing innovative things. If you get one major broker on side, others will hear about it and you will get demand pull.

[4] Partner with e-mail newsletter provider, such as Constant Contact, to offer their users additional functionality. Again, you get established base of users, and by doing a little revenue sharing, they can help you take your product quickly to a much larger market.

[5] As a straight promotional strategy, offer a free account for a year to everyone on the top 15 marketing blogs list. (Which is actually a few hundred bloggers, including me www.customercrossroads.com) By getting usage and buzz from this group through reviews, etc., you will quickly build demand traffic.

I assumed, as others on the discussion did, that the company is his client. So he could have just been trying to get a little buzz going, not really seeking ideas at all.

Indeed, few consultants are likely to post their actual work challenges in a place like this, for fear of looking incompetent.

So I'm assuming the actual strategy was related to buzz or linking in some way. In short, Guerilla Social Marketing. Which has likely worked, at least in a small way, since you read this post and now know about this product.  I can't say I like the general trend, but it's happening a lot. If you decide to do this, be subtle about it.

Postscript:

After writing this post, I learned that you can become an affiliate marketer for GoldMail, and collect ongoing royalties from others who sign up. That wasn't my purpose here. Just so you know.

I have nothing against affiliate programs, it's just not something I do.

Humor in advertising: Goldstar's "Thank God You're a Man" campaign

These images are just hilarious. And they work because they tap into essential truths and beliefs.

Susan's take

Get yourself some insight into the essential truths and beliefs of your target segment. Then take those insights to some really creative people.

Acknowledgments

The campaign was produced by McCann Erickson in Israel, according to Ads of the World

I heard about it from Walter Derzko

Happy rituals: how to take your brand to a new level

I was thinking about a few of my happy rituals recently. Showering in the morning. Having extended coffee with the newspaper on Sundays. And sometimes, adding croissants from a favorite bakery, or homemade biscuits into the weekend morning ritual.

You may be, like me, someone who abhors repetitive routine. Even if you are, I suspect you have a few happy rituals.

The happy ritual

A happy ritual is something that gives structure and joy to daily living. When our happy rituals are in place, all is well with our corner of the world, even if the rest of the world is going to hell in a backpack.

Brands can join in those happy rituals. Which is why you find Bisquick, not with baking supplies, but with the pancake mixes at the grocery store. Pancakes are staple happy ritual accompaniment in many households. They are the birthday breakfast choice of lots of children, and one of the first things kids learn to make for themselves.

Coffee, of course, has become a major happy ritual, regardless of whether you are a Starbuckian or favor the independents.

I was thinking about all of this relative to my morning shower. [I'd much rather give up imported asparagus than my showers, if push comes to shove on the environmental front]  My hair care products aren't adding much to the experience. They are highly functional. They do the job I am buying them for. But they're not giving me any extra emotional goodies. No fresh scent that I would miss if I changed products, for example. 

You could argue that there are emotional benefits associated with keeping my hair from going insane during humid weather. Or keeping those expensive highlights looking fresher longer. That's true. the functional benefits do link to emotional benefits. But there could still be a  happy ritual during use.

Whatever the brand experience you are offering, if you stay at the level of functional benefits, you're missing out on ways to garner greater loyalty.

If you only do product research out of the customer's context, you will have trouble finding out about the happy rituals.

Acknowledgements

The image is from unadorned.org/morningpaper by Stephanie Troeth under a creative commons license.

I've written about happy rituals before.

With respect to deconstructing the Curves customer experience: Curves and more Curves.  

Why Starbucks and instant coffee don't make sense to me. How Starbucks surveys about customer experience. Starbucks versus my local independent coffee places.

ideaCity last day... and now i'm really worried about the oceans

If there's one thing I'm taking away from this conference, it's that we need to get serious about the environment, and most specifically the oceans.

One of the creatures in serious trouble is the shark, due to, as you may know, shark fin soup.

Sharks have been around for 450 million years, and have survived five major extinctions. As Rob Stewart said today (he made Sharkwater documentary), everything in the oceans is below them in the foodchain, so they were responsible for the rebuilding of the ocean ecology. "Shark tested" as it were. 

And because the sharks are in trouble, some troublesome and very large squid have now expanded their range up and down the western coast of North America, and will round the cape to the east soon.

Estimates of the death of the oceans are by 2048, and some even sooner, within 25 years.

I was so impressed, however, by the passion and brains of the Millennials that spoke, that I hope they can mobilize the rest of us to do the right thing.

**********************

Worst one-liners:

 

Yesterday I was having a perfectly delightful discussion with Preston Manning, who spoke brilliantly about human rights. And a strange man came up and entered our conversation with these words, directed at me: "The trouble with women is..." It was such a bizarre thing to encounter at a conference about ideas.

*****************

Best one-liners today:

"People always make the right decision when they're given the facts."

"If the oceans fail, so does our species. We have to make a choice."

Squids: "Earth's resident aliens."

"Success is not about how much money I have in my bank account," -- from the guy who ran across the Sahara, Ray Zahab

"It's not about outdoing yourself. It's about expanding your personal limitations." 

"That's when I got it. These people [scientists] had stuck with those boring classes and now they could do cool stuff." Ben Gulak, inventor of the Uno.

"It's like being on a personal cloud."

"Being in the joy business."

"Governments and corporations do not have long-term human survival at heart."

"People that know what's going on have escape plans."

"The wild lies all around us + we take it in like breath. Our lives are inseparable from the lives of insects."

"I am a philosopher, which means I know nothing about anything."

"Why should we now block the further evolution of our species." 

"Genes are nature's nanotechnology."

Back to listen to a Klezmer band, and then one more session of speakers before we all roll off to the last party. This is a conference that spoils you for other conferences. Even the jaded among us are in awe of the science, the personal stories of struggle and achievement, and the passion of the speakers.

ideaCity Day 1

ideaCity (or as I keep mistyping it on this Mac, ideaCuty) is showing signs of the recession. And that's all I'm saying about that for the rest of the week! 

My buddies here have opinions:

 

Kara says: Irwin Cotler and Laura Archer were inspiring. [This is good evidence for the recency effect, since they were both in the last session.]

Pat's faves were: the assisted-death doctor. His volunteers are getting arrested in the US. In Georgia, they ran a sting operation and arrested some 80 year olds. This was truly shocking to a group of urban liberals, such as this audience is filled with. [Richard MacDonald, a very impressive man, Final Exit Network.]

Here are my top "heard and overheard" today. 

Galileo saw Saturn 400 years ago. Now, they know that the rings have spiral ripples. One of Saturn's satellites has a large underground water reservoir, and evidence of carbon atoms. (Encilidas?) Too bad it's so far away. 

"Space is really empty. Even when it's full."

"If the Sun was in Toronto, and was 15 cm across, the nearest star to us would also be a similar size, but would be on the Yukon/Alaska border."

"Religion is mythology misuderstood." 

"Organized medicine is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one."

"Democracy was born 27 centuries ago. It's enemies are war, tyrranny, ideologies of opression. These days, democracy fights back, and often triumphs, but sometimes at great cost."

"Only people in the provinces talk about being world class."

"Aboriginals make up the source of the root of the ideas upon which we are acting, when we (Canadians) are acting at our best."

"Are they really human rights, or are they privileges, when only the privileged can exercise their human rights?"

OK, off to refill on caffeine, and take a bio break. Catch you later, and thanks for stopping by.

Northrop Frye apparently said: "If there is anything historical in the Bible, it is there by accident."

"Myth is what never was, but always is."

Off to ideaCity09

I'm off for three days of brain feeding at ideaCity. In prior years, I did try to post to the blog from the computers in the lobby. But this year, my plan is to Twitter.
If you want to stay tuned, you can follow me on @susanabbott
And I hereby promise to tweet about interesting stuff, not hors d'oevres and such. Will try for some pix too. [If i can figure out how to do it ok? I may look like a tech head, but it's sheer fakery.]

It looks like there might be an official Idea City Twitter this year,  @IdeaCityNews.

Regular programming will resume next week.

And thank you for reading.

Your humble servant, etc.

Susan

Is body language as useful as we think? How to tell if someone is lying

Clients often have a strong preference for in-person qualitative research. They say it is because the body language and facial expressions of the respondents are important. I know one of the reasons is that they find it more engaging.

How important is body language anyway? Can you get anything more than gross indications of interest from it?

People have been researching lying to try to help, in particular, the police, child protection workers, and security services. Here is some of what they have learned, according to a recent story in The New York Times.

• Liars do not avert their eyes more than people telling the truth
• Liars do not fidget, sweat or slump more than truth-tellers
• There are fleeting changes in expression, but these are difficult to analyze

It turns out that content analysis is actually more useful.

People who are lying tend to try to stick to a script, to avoid getting caught in a lie.
People telling the truth don't have a script, so they tend to recall more extraneous details, and make mistakes. And the more they talk about a given experience, the more of these details come to mind.

This is particularly noticeable if you have some baseline for how a given individual tells a story, so the recommended procedure is to start with a basic story.

My take:

In my work, it's not so much that people are lying, as that they are posturing, or saying things that they believe to be more socially acceptable. It's nice to learn that the words are just as important as the non-verbal to truly understand.

Resources:

Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets, by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, May 12, 2009

Deep diving customer needs: What we can learn from solicitations

Dear Mr. [your name here]:
I am personally pleased to announce your selection for the Institute's esteemed MAN OF THE YEAR representing your country for 2009. This Award exemplified the importance and validation of deeds well done.

The letter goes on in this fashion for a couple of pages. For $295 USD you can get yourself a nice plaque for your wall that says you have been named Man of the Year by the American Biographical Institute. 

The award itself is "an elegant 8 x 10 inch plaque in a cherrywood piano finish with a black gloss insert and gold lettering." And it's guaranteed against material defects during shipment.

Just think of the margin on this operation.

It seems to be a very successful business, in operation since 1967.

But it reminds me of something I once heard about the wine industry, along these lines... if you can't win a medal in a wine industry contest, you need to start a new contest.

I guess you could just go out and buy your own plaque. But that probably feels just slightly less satisfying, and where's the fun in that.

Susan's take:

OK, maybe you don't want to sell people overpriced plaques. But people need and want to feel special and unique and they want their achievements recognized. In a world of six billion people, getting a little recognition counts for a lot.

Maybe there is a better way to achieve that.

Resources:

Wikipedia entry on American Biographical Institute, showing some of the awards they make available. 

Benazir Bhutto was apparently awarded the 2000 Millennium Medal of Honor in November 1998.

A university professor issued a press release on his award.

It looks like there's a similar operation in the UK, called the International Biographical Centre.

Check out the list of awards this 'surgeon' has. Clearly, this individual understands the importance of third party confirmation in getting people to trust you.

What is a customer relationship? And how does it relate to CRM?

Customer relationship: a relationship that is valued by the client/customer, and valuable to the company.

Anything less than this, and it's database marketing, even if you call it Customer Relationship Management.