Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

In all of my years blogging (which haven’t been that many, I’ll admit) I’ve never seen a company be so inauthentic or be less transparent. And, keep in mind, I worked for Enron for two years. But Marqui, my last company (under new direction) has taken the cake.

It seems they’ve scrubbed the first two years of Marqui’s World (the company’s blog) of Tara Smith’s and my names as authors of more than 300 posts there.

I found out when someone asked me whether I hadn’t blogged for them, because they couldn’t find anything written under my name.

And it’s not as if they’ve been keeping the blog up on their own. Upon researching the  situation, I found their last post was dated February 22; and I counted only ten posts since my farewell post in September of 2006.

It’s pretty ironic, since they make software for blogging and web content management. Looks like they want to play in the game, but are completely and shamefully faking their way through it.

What have they got to gain by that?

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My friend Doug Alexander sent me a great article from Advertising Age (registration required) by Marcia Lindsay on niche marketing. In it were ten great tips for grabbing a niche market that I think are absolutely worth passing along:

“To harness the power of niche marketing to achieve your business objectives in the new economy, follow these principles:

1. Position your brand as narrowly as is economically possible.
2. Become the specialist that anticipates the needs of your target.
3. Rapidly work with the target niche to co-innovate.
4. Set as your goal such consumer centricity that the target niche will want to co-brand their identity with yours.
5. Live by a higher standard of ethics.
6. Embrace a business model and metrics that grow the most valuable assets of the new niched economy.
7. Reap first-mover advantage by learning how to identify a niche of opportunity.
8. Re-imagine your role as that of entrepreneurial founder of a special interest group.
9. Forget push marketing; excel at pull marketing.
10. Realize your brand is now “media” competing against all other media.”

In my humble opinion, #4 and #5 and #9 are the most important elements to remember as you approach any new marketing endeavor - the more niche you can get, the better.

And as you go niche, strip all pretenses away, take “beginner’s mind” (as they say in yoga) and be authentic.

Niche, derived from “nest,” should imply that you’re going into the realm of people’s safe places. Treat them with respect, and the response should be overwhelmingly positive.

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I woke up this morning thinking about alchemy. I love the idea of turning common substances (coal) into precious substances (gold) through a mixture of science, wisdom and wizardry. It occurred to me that this is an age of great potential for modern alchemists who turn data into information and then (and this is the magical step) into insights or intelligence.

There was an article in this week’s Economist about Tesco - Britian’s most successful supermarket - moving into the United States armed with powerful retailing science. They have a loyalty program that gives them enormous amounts of data about their customers’ buying habits.

“Tesco’s biggest innovation has been in the way it collects and uses customer data from its Clubcard, a loyalty programme. Many retailers use clubs to provide nothing more sophisticated than a discount to customers as they pay for their goods.

(JJ: simply turning customer data into information)…

The Tesco scheme…. tracks every purchase to build one of the world’s largest databases. This finds correlations between purchases, allowing Tesco to finely tune the product range for each store….

Some quirky correlations also pop out of the data. Take the fact that families buying baby wipes also buy more beer, mainly because fathers of young children have less time to go to the pub. Tesco’s response: mailing families with infants discount coupons for toys and beer.”

(Ahh… there’s the magic - turning information into insights about their customers, and responding with specific offers based on those insights…)

The Philosopher’s Stone

I have a couple of clients who do that for their customers, Chockstone and Attensa. They each take raw data and - using the magic and wisdom of the people who craft their technologies - turn it beyond information into intelligence and insights in the hands of smart marketers.

Chockstone’s loyalty marketing platform (much like the system Tesco uses, I’d imagine) uses the swipe of a card turns customer data into insights. Imagine being a restauraunt franchisee. Previously anonymous customer habits are turned into rich customer profiles like this:

“Customer xxxxxxxxxxxx7852”

Habits: Visits two locations for lunch (42% of time) and dinner (58% of time).

Responds to free food - visit frequency increased by 540% and purchase amount increased 380% during a “free cookie” promotion (from 0.52 visits per week to 3.33 visits per week)

Favorites: favorite sandwich is BLT; second favorite is Ham & Swiss

Average spend: $11.48 per visit (42% greater than the average customer)

As a marketer, that kind of insight into my customers’ habits is priceless. Once those habits are revealed, I can reward them with special offers, thank yous and incent them to return more often.

In the case above, the cost of a free cookie is minimal. Especially in businesses where making loyal customers happy is far more cost-effective than trying to acquire new ones.

Attensa’s Enterprise RSS platform will constantly search the web for information, and deliver it to employees in an intelligent fashion.

Imagine being a global PR firm, for example, and having persistent web searches set up for each of your clients and the executives you work with. (It’s like having TiVO set up for the web.)

You’re immediately notified in your email box, on your Blackberry device or even in your corporate IM system when mentions containing your clients appear. In addition, you can subscribe to your targeted editors’ and analysts’ blogs and news feeds, keeping completely up-to-date on their thoughts, musings and articles.

Attensa’s synchronization ties the server, email, web, instant messaging and Blackberry RSS clients together so articles that are read, filed and deleted are continuously up to date.

Immediate access to your information ecosystem - from wherever, whenever - gives you the insight and opportunity to react quickly to news, events and changing market conditions.

In the spirit of transforming your marketing efforts, think about the modern day alchemists’ tools you might use to turn mounds of data into nuggets of gold.

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My friend Michael O’Connor-Clark writes Uninstalled by night and works at Thornley-Fallis in Toronto by day heading up their social networking practice, which is a perfect job for the forward-thinking fellow that he is.

It seems I’m always about three weeks behind him.

Silos

His June 6 post bemoans the fact that every social networking site is in a silo from the next - his identity, friends, reputation, likes and dislikes all have to be managed in separate fashion from site to site - which is one of my personal pet peeves and one of the greatest challenges we’re facing in the online world today.

I was ruminating on organizational silos over the weekend. My thoughts were centered around branding, and how important effective story-telling is becoming in the larger enterprise.

As we become more geographically, technically and experientially dispersed, our grasp of the corporate brand, vision and values is colored and flavored by the particular silo in which we work.

Storytelling

I believe that developing, telling and distributing compelling stories are the only ways we’re going to overcome the silo-ed effect of comprehension and understanding.

There’s a reason why statements like “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and other tales transcend time, language and age boundaries.

I was in a meeting this afternoon with a company who wanted to know more about my approach / process of building brands - and every successful brand I’ve built had three equally strong components:

1. Executive sponsorship and support
2. A clearly defined audience for whom our story should have absolute relevance
3. A strong, compelling, entertaining story that everyone in the company could understand and tell in their own authentic way

DNA

At the same time, I’m concerned that the so-called “corporate DNA” that knowledge workers have traditionally held closely is now:

Distributed easily (with USB drives, personal email accounts and RSS)
No longer controlled
Accessible and (often) anonymous

Largely as a result of enterprise 2.0 technology, today’s employees are freed from the confines of a knowledge-management infrastructure that demands control and compliance over corporate knowledge, messages and brand.

This is now a fact of life for marketers. Our brands are truly now the hands of strangers. (Some of whom get their kicks by practicing unnatural acts with them, it’s true.)

Which is why now - more than ever - we must create memorable, truthful stories about our companies, our values, and our brands and live them every day.

Only then will our corporate DNA will extend truthfully beyond our silos, firewalls, carefully crafted messaging matrixes and corporate brand guidelines; and into the hands of virtual strangers, friends and observers…

And they will judge each of us by our identity, friends, reputation, likes and dislikes wherever they come upon us - which isn’t all that different from real life.

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Stefan Pollard wrote an interesting article in today’s ClickZ newsletter called “How WOM Affects Sender Reputation.” In it, he advised email marketers to consistently poll the web for mentions of their company name, product names, etc.

That’s great advice to email marketers from an email marketer.

However, he missed one important point: you can use RSS tools to automate that reputation management process, and have any mention of your company name, product name, your name, etc. delivered right to you.

My feedback to Stefan:

“You’re absolutely right about talkers, and it’s interesting that many people are just being clued in to online reputation management.

As a hint for your users, checking online reputations can largely be automated using an RSS system (like that from Attensa) that constantly polls the internet for mentions of your company, product names, etc.

RSS readers are free, and for PR professionals (and Marcom folks) an alert sent to your Blackberry with good or bad news can be the difference between reputation management and reputation erosion.”

Will he rely only on his email to pick up the comment? When will he know I’ve blogged about it, too?

To me, that’s the trouble with email, and the beauty of RSS.

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