You might have noticed you didn’t get a September Marketing Monthly. Things got pretty busy around here, but they’re under control now. Otherwise I’ll end up naming the newsletter Sharon’s Marketing Semi-Monthly, and that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue!
I have had lots of ideas brewing in my head, just not time to get them written up coherently. So rather than let any good ideas slip away, you’ll find a mish mash of three of them below…
It’s
the emotions, stupid!
Last week on NPR, I heard the tail end of a piece on using growth hormones with dairy cows. A spokesman was saying there is no real difference in milk produced by growth-hormone free cows and those given the hormones. He said it was just an emotional thing, to paraphrase.
Helllloooo!!! If it’s emotional, it’s a differentiator! This man obviously works for the pro-hormone branch of the dairy industry, but to so brashly dismiss the value of the emotional story in the marketplace is foolish.
Marketing is telling a story. We buy with our hearts, not our minds. Even if you can scientifically prove there is no difference, trust me, there will be a difference at the supermarket when someone makes a buying decision.
Rather than ignoring the emotional angle, those people better be figuring out how to reposition against it.
Relationship building for business
Thumbing through a marketing magazine, I spotted a brief article titled “Build relationships as in good ol’ days.” Accompanying the article was a 1950s photo of a storekeeper and a child customer. “Yes!” I thought and began to read. “Noooooo,” I bemoaned as I kept reading.
The article wasn’t about having a relationship. It was about building customer loyalty by using technology to track past behaviors and predict future ones. And that’s all fine, but that’s not a relationship.
We are constantly urging clients to have a voice, a personality, a spokesperson even, something people can “relate” to. And therefore have a relationship with.
Interestingly the author used Amazon as a great example. That’s ironic, because we use it as a great example of how to have a generic, corporate Web site that no one can relate to: no face, no name, no nothin’ for people to latch on to as “Amazon.” It’s all very mechanical and cold, not emotional at all.
The days of the village blacksmith are gone, but still people are hungry to do business with someone they know.
Talk about yourself too much?
We recently worked on a sales sheet for a new client, and we’re shocked at what we got back for a rewrite from them. While we had started off addressing the needs and wants of the target audience (potential resellers of their software), the client changed it dramatically to make the entire first half of the front side about the company. When I asked why, he explained that they are relatively unknown so have to establish their credibility with these resellers right off the bat.
Uh, no.
Would you go on a date and spend the first half of the evening only talking about yourself? I hope not! You’d find out about the other person, have a dialog with them, tell them about yourself when appropriate and relevant.
Same with marketing. Sure, those resellers want to know this company is viable, that they won’t be selling an inferior product to their own customers. But that’s what I call a secondary message. The first thing a marketer has to do is get their attention, to speak to that potential customer’s concerns, wishes, desires, pains, etc.
OK, I’m caught up on my proselytizing. Onto October!
Until next month,
Sharon
