Quote Of The Day 29/11

“Designers say ‘We solve problems’ and ‘We can do strategy’, and they forget that everyone else is also solving problems and contributing to strategy. The question is what problems can you uniquely solve?”
—Virginia Postrel

Quote Of The Day 25/11

“How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?”
—Stephen Fry, quoted in his essay Don’t mind your language.

Talking to His Tribe

Marketing Analysis (4 of 6)

I never listened to an audio book before I downloaded the two Patrick Lencioni books onto my iPod, as I needed the first one in a hurry for module one of the MA programme. Since then I have now taken to checking out the audio book section in iTunes, which I had never bothered with before. I was pretty interested to discover that Seth Godin’s new book ‘Tribes’ is on sale there for 95 cents. Yes that is 95 cents, and it is a complete unabridged book, clocking in at more than three hours.

Seth Godin is my favourite writer on marketing. As evidenced by the fact that his daily blog is the highest volume contributor to the Thought-Of-The-Day posts that I have been interspersing throughout my online Learning Log blog. He primarily writes about marketing, but regularly crosses over into leadership, customer relations, and entrepreneurship; the whole enchilada basically. Most of his books are best sellers, ‘Purple Cow’ and ‘All Marketers Are Liars’ are two of his most successful titles. His daily blog is not only a must-read, but one of the few I have kept in my RSS-reader since my great MA Clear-Out Of 2008.

His interesting new business model/marketing strategy is to continue to sell a €20 hardback edition of his new books for those readers who want an archival edition, or one to give as a gift. But if all you want are his ideas (and, like all good business authors, he wants his ideas to spread) then you can purchase his book for less than a euro. From a marketing perspective I find this fascinating. It rewards the early birds, the Godinites who follow his blog and make it to iTunes within the 95-cent window (I am assuming that ultra-low price-point is not fixed). It also gets his book quickly into the hands of the people most predisposed to talk about it and to spread his reputation by word-of-mouth. Finally, by using dynamic pricing, he is assured of hitting the top five audio book list in iTunes, at least initially. Which raises his profile across target markets who may not be familiar with him.

Now I have not listened to ‘Tribes’ yet (all that required MA reading to get through don’t you know) so I cannot yet vouch for the quality of this new book But for less than the cost of most chocolate bars, it cannot hurt for me to take a punt on this one.

Quote Of The Day 22/11

“Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product.”
—Robert Stephens of The Geek Squad.
—From David Taylor’s ‘Never Mind the Sizzle... Where’s the Sausage’

A Marketing Plan For TypefaceBook™

This week’s group activity for the Marketing module of our MA Programme was to create a new product or service for the design sector. How do you segment your market? Which segment(s) do you target? What is your market positioning relevant to the others? Why have you chosen said marketing positioning?

I tapped out this response on my iPod on the train in this morning (so it is pretty lightweight) but it is something our team can start with for tonight.

A marketing plan for TypefaceBook™We have launched a new online social networking service for graphic designers called TypefaceBook™.

Our Services

• Type designers can upload their typeface designs for discussion.
• Other users can then rate all of the typeface designs, review typeface designs, give advice on improving them, etc.
• Type designers can crowd-source Unicode characters. This is: design the core character-set of your typeface and have the TypefaceBook™ community iterate the related global character-sets: Cyrillic, Greek etc. This would also work for alternate characters: small capitals, non-aligning numerals, all of that good sexy stuff. I guess that is more open-source typeface design than crowd-sourcing. All TypefaceBook™ fonts are Creative Commons licensed.
• We offer multiple RSS feeds, so that our users can subscribe to whatever level of feed they like. Follow the ‘Humanist Sans Serif Typefaces group, or even subscribe to the feed for just the letter ‘R’.
• Using our site is free, our revenue comes from Google Adsense, with a substantial click-through rate.
• We may offer a Pro-User service from Q3 2009, for a subscription fee.

Our Target Market

• It is a global audience, but our community is:
• Typeface Designers (professional)
• Typeface Designers (amateur)
• Typeface Users (professional) people who would purchase from type foundries.
• Typeface Users (amateur) people who would mostly download free fonts.
• Typophiles
• The graphic design industry

Our Marketing Strategy

• Our intent is to run a viral, Marketing_2.0, marketing campaign. Word-of-mouth will be the only way this service will take off given the budget that we have. Running with old-school marketing methodologies means that we will fail, so no press adverts in design magazines and the like. (Although we may partner with design publishers to have a TypefaceBook™ postcard insert inside hardback typography books, and inside copies of the Helvetica documentary DVD for example.
• Our competitors are other social networking sites and other design community sites. Our offering can not supersede any of the established players who have a pre-existing first-mover advantage. Rather our service will have to co-exist alongside those and find its own place within the online design sector ecosystem.
• Our initial service roll-out is a closed beta, invitation-only. Our intent here is to create some desirability and define our tribe. We will build-in incentives for beta users to invite and convert ten or more of their friends: send them a limited-edition type poster or something. If they convert more than fifty, then we send them an exclusive designer tee-shirt.
• Our PR plan is that we will conduct a brace of online interviews with leading design bloggers to raise awareness amongst the design community. Those designers who are most active online are our people.
• We will produced sustained news and become industry spokespeople in relation to our sustained news campaign. We shall generate informed opinion through TypefaceBook™ which will help us to drive customers to our site.
• We shall leverage social networking tools: we will establish a suite of Twitter accounts, Flickr pages, we shall even create a shared group page on that other ‘Facebook’.
• In future there could be an offline component to our marketing plan as well. We could host some annual TypefaceBook-Live™ conferences with type-design speakers and type workshops. One conference in Europe and another State-side to begin with.
• Type is still primarily about print, so we could partner with a design publisher to produce a hardback annual ‘The TypefaceBook™ Book’ (nice meta-title that). This would be available at a discount to our Pro Account members.

My Thought For The Day 20/11

“With all the pretend profits I am making from this imaginary business and marketing strategy I am writing, I am a real makey-uppey millionaire.”
1:39 PM 20 November, 2008 from my Twitter feed.

Quote Of The Day 19/11

“How do you want your answer?
— Immediate.
— Accurate.
— Brief.
(Choose two.)”
—A sign seen on an office door.
Link via Merlin Mann.

I’m New, Reuse Me

Marketing Analysis (3 of 6): 

Celebrations Recyclable Gift Pack

With Christmas fast approaching, the next six weeks is the market window for the various purveyors of boxes of biscuits and gift-packs of sweets. This is when they sell the majority of their inventory for the entire year. How does one gain competitive advantage within this particular market? Doing so through innovation in packaging did not seem the most likely approach to me. That was until Valerie brought home a few boxes of Celebrations chocolates at the weekend. It turns that what enticed her to buy them was this clever flash on the lid.

This is a compelling marketing mixture: retaining the indulgent and gift-giving aspects of their brand offering and combining that with an innovative new aspect. One that speaks to the green-aware, thrifty, recession-wise consumer. They have thought-through the whole life-cycle of their product packaging and made it more useful. There is some level of technology transfer at work in the background here, not anything too high-tech, rather an approach which is simple and effective. I imagine that these new packs are lighter and cheaper to transport, and also more durable than what existed before. By investing in the nature of the plastic that they use in their packs, and enhancing the underlying manufacturing technology, they have enhanced their overall brand proposition and story.

They could support this with advertising, or more usefully, in-store displays, but the real clincher here is the flash on the pack, that is what seals the deal. Finally, there is a viral component to their brand story. If I give you a present of this pack of confectionery, I can point out the utility of the packaging. Equally, if I get one as a gift, the story behind the pack makes a talking point as well. There is a compelling narrative here. Successful branding is worth talking about.

Quote Of The Day 16/11

“Do you know enough?
If not, what are you doing about it?
If so, who do you think you're kidding?”
—Seth Godin

Quote Of The Day 15/11

“Using networking technologies in the way the Obama campaign did is an insurgent strategy to try and gather up an audience. The price of the strategy is you must let go of the control.”
—Karlin Lillington, The Irish Times

Twitter/Obama

Marketing Analysis (2 of 6)

Being a active user of the Twitter micro-blogging service, I was fascinated by the Obama campaign’s use of that service throughout the recent US election. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, I wrote this short explanation during Module One.)

Much has been written elsewhere about the ground-breaking use of online services and Internet marketing by the Obama campaign. As a candidate he has embraced technology and also the spirit of transparency that it enables. OK so there are 300 million people in the US, only a minute fraction of whom would be using Twitter. The difference is that they are an active audience; rather than the passive audience that Obama can market to on TV. One Obama tweet (or, at least one coming from one of his social media staffers) asking people to donate to the Red Cross during this Summer’s hurricane was able to overwhelm the Red Cross website.

So who is the target market here? US citizens of voting age would be the most general definition. Focussing in from that, it is the early-adopters and the technorati, (those who actively use Twitter).
Obviously I am not a US citizen and am ineligible to vote in US elections, but that does not imply that I am disinterested. So while I may not fall into the core target market, I think that as a citizen within a globalised economy I fall somewhat within the remit of people whom the campaign may want to speak to, and more tellingly, to influence.

Scanning the Twitter-feed can be an intoxicating experience once you get used to it. The juxtapositions it facilitates are endlessly varied. The chronological sequence of posts means that a post from NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander with the current weather on Mars may be followed by a post from the actor Stephen Fry on-location shooting a documentary, followed by a friend talking about his children, followed by an Obama post, followed by a news post from RTE or from the Irish Times. It is a great leveller, in that the personal messages and the marketing messages and the news stories all receive equal emphasis.

The Obama Twitter account has gone quiet since his election, with nothing posted since the fifth  of November. Obviously, there is not a lot of time available for blogging during the presidential transition period. Which is a shame, as it would be great to have regular Twitter updates from the within White House. (I see that while twitter/whitehouse and twitter/potus are all taken twitter/uspresident seems to be still available.)

From a marketing perspective there is a exponential shift when transitioning from being campaigning to being presidential. Their marketing activity has shifted over to the Change.Gov site for the transition period. That website deserves a whole other Marketing_2.0 blog post in its own right. Vocal entrepreneur and tech commentator Jason Calacanis has argued that the new administration ought to have a presence on the top ten social networking sites, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace and such. These are now the mainstream media to the upcoming generation, the sources where they consume their information. Calacanis proposed that as part of the presidential communications office they should appoint a Social Media Secretary. The time is now.

My Thought For The Day 15/11

“Procrastination so resembles an old rogue — a charming, yet unreliable, friend whom you welcome occasionally for a lost weekend, but then leaves your house a week later owing you money and more than one apology.”

My Thought For The Day 14/11

“Somehow I don't think my Learning Log is really the best place for the recursive joke involving fractal footnotes that I just came up with.”
13:46 November 14 from my Twitterfeed.

Schwag Fatigue

Marketing Analysis (1 of 6): Energia Torch Key-fob

Target market
Commuters within the Dublin rail network.

Context
These were given away outside the city centre train stations this morning. Looking deceptively like USB keys they were being snapped up more readily than usual. A side note here: there is a noticeable trend for commuters to be a lot more picky in the free schwag they will accept these days. ‘Schwag Fatigue’ has definitely set in. That particular marketing channel had boomed in the last two years. The various companies involved now seem more coordinated than they have been. Last year it was not unusual to have to run a gauntlet of people in brightly coloured anoraks handing you everything from the ubiquitous free-sheets to macrobiotic yogurt drinks, blueberry muffins, biscuit bars and mini boxes of cereal. While this category of marketing activity must deliver some results (or they would not still be doing it) it is undoubtedly a high-noise channel.

Effectiveness of this item
This is a very opaque piece of marketing. Yes, it is a useful little widget, keep it on your key ring and you have a handy mini-torch. But what does it make me think and feel about Energia? The only clues they have given us to go on are that it is a light and the photo on the front face behind their brand mark is the Christmas lights on Grafton Street. So they probably make light bulbs, or they wish us to associate them with light. (I am assuming they do not want us to make their core brand association be with Christmas.)

All of which is wrong, as I happen to know they are in the electricity-supply business. Also they target businesses, and not consumers. With some degree of Marketing Myopia it looks like they assumed that everyone was familiar with their name, or that the “energ” phoneme in their name immediately clarified their offer. Both are poor assumptions on their part. If they had simply put energia.ie on the key-fob instead, it would have provided potential customers with the opportunity to discover more. As it is, the only possible outcome they can expect for their spend is to establish some basic level of name recall with Dublin rail commuters.

Verdict
A wasted opportunity.

* I have entitled this post as ‘one of seven’, as Denis set our MA class the task of thinking about some marketing examples and to make things more challenging I have set myself the task of finding one a day for the next week and then presenting the best one to the class. I have a pretty intensive work week coming up in work with three major presentations and a day off-site in Galway on Monday so lets see how I get on.

My Thought For The Day 13/11

"Proofing the line-breaks on the hard copy of my learning log. Somebody slap me. Like now."
13:24 November 13 from my Twitterfeed.

Quote Of The Day 5/11

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”
— Hugh Macleod
This quote from 2005 is one that has always stuck in my mind. The palpable sense of Obama euphoria in the air today seems to prove the point.

Trying To Focus Within The Reality Distortion Field

Reading ‘Coaching for Performance’ tonight and valiantly trying to avoid the black-hole level gravity field of the US Election 2008 blanket coverage on all media channels. Mary T. covered a lot of this coaching material on Saturday, and so I am getting a strong sense of deja-vu, which is not helping the old concentration. I shall soldier on...

Quote Of The Day 4/11

“Your product doesn't have features that are more important than the ‘features’ being discussed in this election, yet, like most marketers, you’re obsessed with them. Forget it. The story is what people respond to.”
—Seth Godin
I had to do an election-themed quotation given the day that is in it. Seth Godin is turning into the most-quoted pundit on my Learning Log, but he is consistently hitting the high notes these days. This post on the marketing lessons from Election 08 is particularly insightful.

My Thought ForThe Day 2/11

“Past performance is no indicator of future earnings.”
I cannot assume that whatever I am primarily focussed on doing today is going to earn me the same (or greater) income in five years. I always need to be thinking and looking ahead.