Targetted communication.

Just a reminder: Targeted communication should be about giving a message that is relevant to every person you communicate with. This does NOT mean that you have to adapt your message to whatever the receiver wants. Only do this when you are still telling the truth.

Do not tell a story about your great after-sales service, flexibility or friendly salespeople to the guy you segmented in the ‘premium buyer’ category if you are in fact a discount seller.

Do what you do best and find the people that want what you do best instead of trying to convince everybody with whatever version of ’the truth’ they want. You end up with schizophrenic customers… Not to mention about the extra work you create for yourself without having actually business results.

Missing things: The power of shared experiences.

Continuing on the previous-blog post, let’s talk about the pain of not doing things.

You know the feeling: some of your friends go on holiday together. Sure, you miss them and you are glad when they return with great stories and marvelous pictures, but you also feel excluded. Chances are that in the coming weeks, months, years,… they will remember stuff from that fantastic holiday, tell one of those great stories again, rediscover a photo of their journey. To bad you were not there…

Being part of a group, having a shared experience is a very strong motivator. Both the ‘experience’ and the ‘shared’ are important here.

The power of an experience in today’s world is much greater than that of pure possession of a good. Buying a good has become a commodity for almost every product. Living an experience is something unique, because of what YOU feel when you have it.

Combine this with being part of something, making this experience shared and valuable in your social network adds even more power.

If you can offer these shared experiences as a business, you’re good to go.

And on a personal note: Be sure to have a lot of social experiences!

Enjoy!

Loyalty and crowd-driven lock-in…

… or what marketeers can learn from John Denver’s “Leaving on a jet-plane”.

I will be kinda unorthodox, but it is for the sake of the non-believers in new communication.

You know the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than keeping an existing customer most of the time.

Ok?

You got to step one.

Now, the question is, how do you keep customers?

The first way to go is to make sure your product or service is worth wile, you threat your customer with respect,… you make sure you have one happy customer.

The more controversial path also implies making sure that it becomes more difficult for a customer to leave you. In the old days, monopolist really mastered this game. But customers becoming more and more reluctant to this approach (as they should be!). Most people now do not feel anything when they switch suppliers and leave you alone in the dark. These same people however still feel sad when leaving people, their peers, their network,… behind.
So lock-in these days becomes a social lock-in where people who want to stop using your product or service also have to leave their social network around your brand behind… Take away the person’s loved away and they feel like leaving on a jet-plane and they will search for confirmation.

Loyalty becomes a social game.

Step 2 achieved!

Thank you John!

Recruitment in a social world.

Yesterday, I was at a recruitment event of one of the major recruitment media in Belgium. You know the drill: You put a lot of firms that have job openings in one big venue and let the hungry workforce in. Apart from the economical downturn and the effect on this, what stroke me the most was the question of relevance today of such a setup.

First remarkable point: The most people where not at the boots of the companies that actually recruit people, but at the boots of HR, outplacement, interim,… offices that offer cv analysis or give you application advice and howto’s. The regular firms had trouble engaging the conversation with people wandering around.

So what is the added value for the companies that invest in being present there? Being there as a company comes at a high cost: The price the organizer asks, the design of the booth, the people who are there to talk to people, opportunity costs,… What is their added value if most of them offer only a handful of jobs that are all listed on their site (and I cannot believe that more than 1% of visitors had no access to the Internet)? Personally, I cannot imagine that anyone can make a profitable business case around this one.

However, there are other ways. If some HR professionals would for example engage in some new dynamics, they might get far better results. For example, if they had read ‘Meatball Sundae‘ by Seth Godin, they might learn that they better do something very specific for the kind of people they are looking for instead of being present in these mass events.

Or you can as a company just send 2 of your sales consultants that wander around in the venue and that start talking to people that just visited the booth of your competitor. You allready know they are interested in your sector and have an easy way into conversation. A little bit free-riding, but hey, somebody has to be smart.

Social media? What about just social interaction with your workforce tribe?

The future of consulting?

Consulting is a wonderful thing. It basically embraces the global knowledge that is available when you need it, without the need for developing the expertise from scratch. However, reality shows that finding the right consultant/consultancy agency is not always easy. Off course, if you happen to be a major corporation that needs a complete turnover of a strategy, an SAP implementation or a financial audit, choice may be easy: You just go for a Big Consulting firm that your boss knows. Whatever they say will be accepted and makes things a lot more easy for you. The price you pay for this is that it will cost you a lot and probably end up with a “best case” solution that they also sell to other companies and is… well “best case” and not innovative.

Also, if you are a PME or have a specific product or want to target new markets and youngsters, chances are that you either cannot or are not willing to engage these guys and girls.

The problem is that with their model, you pay for a solution that already worked but does not necessary works in the future. That is why I believe consulting has to become more innovative instead of copy-pasting. However, to arrive at this level of creativity, traditional consulting structures are not working anymore. People who work in consulting day to day loose their ability to only work on the things where they are best in. They are forced to compromise.

Thanks to today’s communication possibilities, location is no longer an issue. Virtual consulting where specialist all over the world work only on projects when their expertise is really necessary is now possible. Too bad, pure virtual consulting has his limitations: Coordination is low and they forget the nature of human decision makers: They feel better when they have actually one person to talk to… as in really talk to, face to face. A combination where businesses can have real contact with a consulting firm that then virtually connects specialists from all over the world is what we are dreaming of. We called the project JOINED!

Do you believe you can add expertise? Do you think this is a model that can prepare firms for the next decennium?

Feel free to join the conversation.

Check out www.joined.be

Introducing: The 4C Matrix

You also read the trend reports, get information from your agency or hear your son talk about all those new things. Socialweb, media, youth marketing, blablablah,…

The question is, what do you do with it? When I was working on a 20 slide presentation on Youth marketing, I realised that asking the question has already been done. It is the answer that is important. Realising that their is not 1 answer or solution, you might just leave it at that. However, with the advantages of the social web in mind (Not only talk the talk you know), I figured out that giving a possible solution and leave it open for discussion (yes, that is you!) is better than just making another presentation full of questions.

So I give you: The 4C Matrix that can help you in bringing together classical market segmentation theories and creative communication.

Dive right into the presentation right here!

screen1

Let me know how you see things!

Event Driven Marketing: Still hot?

Event Driven Marketing, the term exist already for some years now. So you might argue if it is still hot in modern Marketing. However, a quick look on the number of direct mails and other marcom you receive indicates that a lot of companies urgently need to have a look at what Event Driven Marketing is all about.

Off course, pure by coincidence, I just finished a white paper I was working on more than a year ago. It gives you a fast-paced glimps at what Event Driven Marketing is all about. If you have heard the phrase “We should start from the customer” more than 3 times in your last 5 meetings, you should probably read this ;-).

Feel free to download the PDF file (via Slideshare). After all, it is… Free!

And also, do not hesitate to give your view on it! 😉

Happy EDM-ing!

Job lottery

An Italian supermarket chain has launched a new combined marketing and HR campaign: They give away 10 jobs to people who posses the lucky numbers. These numbers are obtained by every customer that buys for 30 EUR in one of the chain’s stores.

The winners get a job for one year and can be prolonged if they do a great job.

You can argue on the marketing effectiveness of this campaign. I have to admit, the free media space is huge, but which HR manager has signed off on this?

To your current employees, you say something like “Well, you are as important as any randomly selected guy (m/v)”.

To your future employees, you say something like: “Why trouble, getting a job is just a lottery”.

To your customers this may sound like: “Dear customer, the people that will help you may or not be qualified to satisfy your needs… you just have to be lucky”.

To the shareholders, the message is clear: “Who runs this place and why did I put money in it?”.

Sometimes what started as probably a great idea in a brainstorm session is a lousy when you do it…

Original article (Dutch): Deredactie.Be
Supermarket Tigros.

Underestimated sense: Scent.

Keeping up with my running activities, almost back home from my run, 2 people on a bike passed me. My speed is not high at all, so they passed me rather quick. But in a split second a perfume of one of them hit me and in that same split second, my brains brought back the memories of my first girlfriend (whatever that may be in a first relationship ;-)).

Off course, this blog is not about my personal (love) life, but it is striking that scent can lead towards memories and feelings so quick: I did not notice who passed me, and being honest, even if I would see my first girlfriend back now, it would probably take me more than seconds to even recognise her.

I reckon it is harder to introduce scent into marketing campaigns (you cannot easily print a scent for the time being) than your average flashy visuals, but the power in it is great.

Something to keep in mind!

Some info to start with:

Scent blog marketing blog.
Harrods introduces scent marketing.

…and our friends at Google of course.

(A-)social?

This morning, I went jogging. No big deal of course, but whilst running, I realised that before I ran of, I posted on my Facebook account that I was of for a short run… Which is a strange contradiction: We use social media to let everybody know… we do something alone…

Not to mention the number of sites that let you share the details of your run (pace, distance, route,…) with the rest of cyberspace… What happened to sporting with your friends?

Speaking of contradictions…