Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Allow me to deviate from this blog’s usual fare of sustainable energy, business ethics, reasons to oppose nuclear power, and progressive vs. conservative politics—today’s post is about mice. The four-legged kind.

We live in a very old farmhouse, built in 1743, surrounded by our neighbors’ corn and hayfields. There have always been lots of mice around, but until a few months ago, the cats and dog kept them to manageable proportions. However, between December and April, all three of our animal companions died. We’re looking to get another cat, maybe two, in the fall, but meanwhile, we’re petless.

So, a couple of months ago,we invested in two lightweight plastic no-hurt traps, baited them with peanut butter, and started hauling a series of mice back out to the field. And I noticed very quickly that different mice reacted very differently to the experience of being trapped, and then released. Microcosms of the human experience, in fact.

Here are a few of the characters we’ve encountered:

  1. Optimist: “Top of the morning to you, Sir, and if I had a hat, I’d tip it. Thanks for letting me into this beautiful green field with lots of goodies to eat.”
  2. Terrified: “It’s so dark and claustrophobic in here that I’m going to pee all over myself with fear.”
  3. Angry: “How dare you put me in a little box all night!”
  4. Klutz: “Darn it, I closed the door while I’m outside and the peanut butter is still inside.”
  5. Burglar: “Heh, heh, heh, more peanut butter! I’ll just tiptoe in so gently the trap doesn’t spring. I didn’t bring calling cards but, I’ll leave some poop to show I was here.”
  6. Escape Artist: “If I rattle this thing enough, I’m sure I can get the door open.” (We’ve learned that it’s a really good idea to stop what we’re doing instantly and carry the trap outside when we get this type.)

Finally, there was today’s mouse, with an attitude I have never before encountered—and ’twas he that inspired this post: “Hey! Im not done eating yet! I’m going back in the trap.” Perhaps I should call him “the climate-denying CEO.” 😉

How would you market to these different types of mice?

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Last year, I set myself up with Cinchcast: a nifty free service that lets you record anything and post it. In the beginning, I was recording my blog posts.

But I’ve gotten lazy. I haven’t made a new Cinch since late November. Then, thanks to this page of tips on repurposing content (mine is #10, BTW), I discovered Odiogo.com, which automatically records every blog post (it even went back several weeks when I set it up). And then it feeds in to iTunes and other  good streams. Even offers a revenue share on ads.

Odiogo promises bloggers “’Near-human’ quality text-to-speech.” Well, maybe if your idea of human speech is some very nervous person reading a presentation in a near-monotone. It’s got a long way to go before it sounds human to me.

But then again, I know people who read books on their phones. So the quality isn’t great, but it’s there and I don’t have to do anything. I’ll still try to be better about Cinching, but at least those who prefer to consume my blog in audio don’t have to wait for me to remember to record.

I invite you to compare for yourself. Links to both my Cinchast page and my Odiogo page are in this blog post.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Just back from a few days in Istanbul, Turkey, where I spoke at a conference and then got to play for a few days.

As with all my trips, I keep my marketing eyes open. Here’s some of what I noticed:

  • Turks are  maniacs for food freshness (and the food is WONDERFUL!) to the point where packing dates as well as expiration dates are common on packages (which I have seen occasionally in the US) and the packing dates are extremely recent (not very common in my own country). I walked into a very small supermarket in kind of a backwater neighborhood on the Asian side and bought a bag of nuts that had been packed just one week earlier. And they tasted amazingly fresh. That tells me that supermarket turnover has to be very fast, and that the customers are looking at those packing dates and rejecting anything too old, if even this small and uncrowded market had food so fresh. If I were marketing any product in Turkey, food or otherwise, I’d think about how to include a freshness campaign.
  • Like many tourist destinations, Istanbul has an army of men (I didn’t see any women doing this) whose job it is to get the tourist into a particular shop (especially carpet shop) or restaurant. In Turkey, they were really personable, and often started by meeting tourists on their way into an attraction, giving some useful pointers, and then saying they’ll meet you at the end and escort you to the shop (and all of them kept those promises). At least the “like” part of the know-like-trust formula is very much a part of doing business. However, most of them lack any discernible USP (Unique Selling Proposition—a reason to do business there rather than with someone else). One that did told us that his partner would give us a discourse on the history of rug-making, which was accurate (I’ll be posting an article soon based on that fascinating conversation).
  • Most of the Turks I saw had dark hair and a medium skin tone, darker than Northern Europeans but lighter than Arabs or Greeks (kind of like my own skin tone, in fact). I did meet several fair-skinned blondes and redheads. Yet if you look at the ads, you’d think half of Turkey is blonde. I could interpret this as blondes having higher status (as they seem to do in the US as well—remember “Is it true Blonde’s have more fun?”), or as rejection of the principle that marketing should use images that resemble your market, or as something else I wasn’t there long enough to understand. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s coincidence.
  • For green marketers especially: if you want to move society to go green, make the green alternative much more attractive. Public transit in Istanbul is cheap, fast, easy to navigate—and extremely heavily used. Car ownership, by contrast, is expensive and full of hassles from icky traffic to high fuel prices to very limited parking in many areas. The result? Only 1 in 10 Istanbul residents have a car. I’m betting that once the rail connection between the Asia and Europe sides is complete (my understanding is that a tunnel is being constructed), public transit will become even more popular.
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By Posted on Posted in language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

In an attempt to regain control over e-mail, I’ve been unsubscribing from dozens of publications.

And I notice—a LOT of them thank me for this!

As a marketer, I find this puzzling. It makes a lot more sense to me to thank an unsubscriber for having been a subscriber, not for leaving. Still, I’d rather be thanked inappropriately then to get a gruff, cold “you have been unsubscribed.”

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

I just had a very unpleasant experience buying a ticket on Delta Airlines’ website. And since, in writing and speaking about creating green, ethical, and expectation-surpassing business success, I often address customer service issues, I’m going to transform this crappy experience into a no-charge customer service consultation to Delta. I get a blog post; they get free advice. Deal?

1. Thou shalt prepopulate your required telephone “country code” field with the United States country code, especially if the passenger has a U.S. address. Most Americans have no idea what our country code is, and if they do know, they’ll type a 1. +001? You’ve got to be kidding.

2. When thee kickest back my form for not having the country code properly, thou shalt remember my preference on whether I want travel insurance, and not subsequently kick it back out because YOU unchecked my preference.

3. Thou shalt load pages in a reasonable time. If I can read one to three e-mails every time I wait for my page to update over my broadband connection, you have a service delivery problem. And when the session requires 20 or so pages because of all those ridiculous kickbacks for the country code or the insurance, you have a frustrated customer spending half an hour of forever-gone time and computer eye fatigue in order to complete a transaction that should have taken under ten minutes.

4. Thou shalt not tell me my session has timed out while waiting for YOUR page to load, and then not really mean it, causing confusion. Fortunately, I’ve seen this before and just hit the back button several times until I got to a screen that remembered I was actually still logged in. I’d have been pretty annoyed if I had to log out and relog in.

5. Thou shalt not try to route me from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale via New York. It would be faster to drive! If you have to send me in the wrong direction, how about someplace a whole lot closer?

6. Thou shalt not try to take 40,000 of my hard-earned miles for a measly domestic flight from New England to Florida. That should get me to Europe!

7. Thou dost earn my gratitude for a reasonable fare when I switched to cash, and thou didst receive my business as a result.

8. However, thou shalt NEVER raise the fare between the time I click the Purchase button and the time you process my credit card! That, if you had been a human and not a computer, would be called an illegal bait and switch. That is also a way to get customers really mad at you and badmouth you publicly over blogs and social networks. If it says $230 when I hit Purchase, you should honor that price and not tell me, oh, by the way, we raised the price while you were having trouble with our webform. (Your exact words were “Due to changing availability, the fare you selected is no longer available. Here’s the lowest fare for your flight(s).”) Yeah, it’s only ten bucks, but it’s absolutely inexcusable. It’s one thing to raise the price if I come back a day or even an hour later, but I had initiated the transaction at the offered price and you didn’t honor it. Your computers should simply not be allowed to do that (and airline sites in general should not be allowed to present ticket options that are no longer available).

9. Thou earnest back a few karma points for ease of seat selection. Thank you.

10. But thou losest them again for not telling me whether any of the flights serve meals, and if so, allowing me to state my dietary requirements. It would be easy enough to indicate meals, snacks, or no food, and if meals, to indicate needs.

OK, there you have my personal 10—not commandments but suggestions—that would improve your customers’ attitude toward you, deliver a much more positive experience, and create fans instead of reluctant buyers. If you want more, I recommend my award-winning eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’ll even give you (or anyone else who registers a purchase a the site) $2000 in extra bonuses for buying a $21.95 book. See, creating a good customer experience isn’t that hard.

In addition to his award-winning books, Shel Horowitz also writes the Green And Profitable (for business) and Green And Practical (for consumers) monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

Got a sales call this afternoon that was soooo pathetic, so 1980. The poor schlep wanted me to schedule an appointment with his field sales guy. Pretty much the first thing he said after telling me his name and his company (both unfamiliar to me) was that the rep would be in my area Thursday.

I politely replied that my time was very precious, and before I scheduled in in-person sales call, I wanted to find out “if it was a good fit for me.” And the first thing I wanted to know was what he was selling.

Turned out to be a credit card processing service. He offered me a free terminal if I would schedule the appointment to tell me about his “favorable” merchant processing rates, depending on the volume.

Well, first of all, I already own my own credit card processing terminal. Second, I’m a pretty low-volume shop, processing a few tickets a month for consulting and a few more for book orders that come to me directly (most are going through traditional book sales channels these days)—so I’m not likely to benefit much from his volume-based rates. And third, when he asked me yet again to set the appointment, I asked for information in writing so I could evaluate the rates. It would have been as simple as giving me a URL to type, but that thought did not occur to him, and probably not to his boss either. In fact, it didn’t even occur to this guy that he could mail or fax the information and then follow up later. (I actually switched to my current merchant processing company because that rep did exactly that, and his rates were in fact substantially better than what I’d been paying.)

Instead, he ended the call.

Well, I’ve got three pieces of advice for people using this selling model:

1. The customer or prospect is in charge these days. I don’t have to bow down to you and be sold to the way you happen to prefer to sell me. You have to offer me the chance to buy the way I want. If you want an in-person appointment and you haven’t shown me the value in it, I won’t meet you. If you want me to sign up over the phone and I want to see the terms in writing, you’ll provide the terms or go away empty.

2. We live in an empowered era. Your competitor is as close as a mouse click. If you won’t people research you, they’ll research, and do business with, somebody else.

3. It’s far more effective to build long-term customer relationships than to go for a quick one-time sale—and these tactics don’t build that relationship.

Of course, I could give them a lot more advice—in the pages of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Why have I been mostly absent from my own blog lately? Because I’ve been working long hours on behalf of a client who had some pressing and time-consuming needs—including hands-on media training, helping him hire a PR assistant, and getting out a rush press release with a very short window of opportunity.

How did I get that client? A referral from a client whose book I produced a couple of years ago. That original single project has now turned into work for four different clients, putting a significant amount of money into my bank account.

It’s hard to beat a direct referral from a delighted client, unless perhaps with a direct referral from a well-respected industry guru (and I get plenty of those, too, including one earlier this week). In both cases, they come to you pre-sold, and if you don’t mess things up, they want to work with you.

Plus, since they came through referral, they often are happy to refer others. Your marketing cost: zero.

Of my seven most recent major clients, three were referrals, one I met at a networking event, one found one of my websites, and one remembered me because I wrote an article about her years ago. I’m not sure how the sixth found me, will have to check.

To get referrals: do the best job you can, and encourage your thrilled clients to tell others about you. If you’re in an Internet social media community together, and the client expresses delight privately, ask that client to share this feeling with the community (that’s when you start getting referrals from industry leaders).

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Heretic that I am, I’m going to take an unpopular position: that the Democrats lost not because they were too bold, but because they weren’t bold enough. As all the “pundits” tell the Democrats (as they always do) to move ever-more-rightward, I’ll say, yet again, that moving rightward and wimp-ward is why they keep losing!

The strength of the Tea Party vote is more than a repudiation of Obama. It’s also a repudiation of the “mainstream” GOP (which was already so far to the right that people like Nelson Rockefeller or Lowell Weicker would have found it very uncomfortable).

The massive switch of independent voters, in particular, was, in short, a continuation of the 2008 Obama call for “change”: a loud cry that people didn’t feel they actually received the change they had voted for in 2008.

And this can be pinned squarely on the Democrats’ failure to make bold policy, and to be willing to tell the story of their success boldly. On health care, on climate change, on the economy…the Democrats whittled themselves down to half-measures. Where was the single-payer health care program that almost every other country in the world has adopted in some form (and why didn’t they position that as the boon to the business community that it is)? Where was the Marshall Plan-scale effort to get us off fossil and nuclear and into job-creating, carbon-slashing clean renewable energy? Where were the measures to hold Wall Street and the GW Bush administration accountable for the mess they made? And where were the visionary leaders who should have populated Obama’s Cabinet?

Despite a huge mandate for change, and a majority in both House and Senate, the Democrats refused to even listen to calls for massive structural reform, and then forgot all the marketing lessons they learned in the campaign and let the other side not just control but completely dominate the discourse—leaving the impression that they are a weak and ineffectual party of favors to special interests who can’t fix the economy or anything else. And failing on three crucial aspects of marketing: to remind people firstly of who got us into this mess, second, of the steps they did take to pull us out, and third, of the policy initiatives where change was actually achieved in the last two years.

As I wrote two years ago,

Don’t apologize for your beliefs. Three out of the four most recent prior Democratic nominees–Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry–all crawled on their bellies with messages that basically said, “umm, I’m not really a liberal, I didn’t mean it, I’m soooo sorry!” And all three lost because doing that took the wind right out of their sails. Bill Clinton, who is not a liberal, didn’t play that game. Not surprisingly, he won. Obama never apologized, ignored the L-word, and didn’t even flinch when in the closing days, McCain revved it up and actually called him a socialist (traditionally, the kiss of death in US politics).

Monday evening, Rachel Maddow released a video highlighting Obama’s accomplishments. It’s a great video. The Democratic Party itself should have made something like it, six months ago, and worked to get it viral. Released by an outside journalist, twelve hours before the polls opened, it had no time to gather momentum.

Here in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick wasn’t given much chance a year ago. But he ran a positive campaign focused on the slogan, “Optimism and Effort.” He highlighted his accomplishments over and over again, made a case that the work wasn’t done, and inspired audiences with a message of hope, economic recovery, and the rights of ordinary people. In other words, he used the exact strategies I’ve been advocating for decades that the Democrats use. Despite his somewhat centrist record, he was able to position himself as a change agent. I went to one of his rallies and went up to him afterward to thank him for being a sitting governor bold and hopeful enough to go out and make that kind of speech.

He did benefit from a third-party candidate who clearly drew votes from the colorless, bland GOP candidate. But still, he won, and by a larger margin than many pundits had predicted.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Good article on Triple Pundit about how to discuss environmental issues with people who either don’t care or are actively hostile to the Green perspective. Five talking points you can use to reach people via their own self-interest.

The list includes the sweeping headings of population, education, “natural capital,” and the economy.One particularly thought-provoking point in the natural capital category: the easiest and cheapest half of any natural resource is always extracted first, meaning the environmental and economic impact of continuing to extract starts climbing very steeply once the low-hanging fruit is gone. This is why gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon when I was a kid, and floats between $2 and $4 in my area currently (much more expensive in Europe, by the way).

But on the whole, this article doesn’t give a lot of ammunition to environmental advocates in the trenches. The next step is to take these categories and make them specific and actionable, and really appeal to the self-interest of those listening.

Examples?

  • Whether or not you care about climate change, you should care about the huge inflationary spiral caused by soaring fuel prices. If we can reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent, that means your dollar will continue to go a lot farther than it would otherwise. Otherwise, it will continue to get worse because the oil that’s easy and cheap to get is already used up.
  • Do you know I saved 40 percent of my paper costs in my business, just by switching to a two-sided printer and using the double-side feature? Do you think that could work in your business?
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By Posted on Posted in language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Considering their enormous and deep understanding of marketing during the campaign, it’s hard to understand why the Obama administration is so bad at marketing itself as a governing force. Obama’s advisors need to take some lessons from George W. Bush. He was a terrible president, but he was extremely skilled at marketing himself and his accomplishments—and all my years observing politics, I’ve never before seen a team that was as good at staying on message. Better even than Reagan, if you ask me.

With just over a month left before the election, it’s time for the Democrats to go deep and hard on their marketing: to create a message that will resonate with the American people and cut the floor out from under the Republicans.

If I were running the national Democratic Senate and House campaign committees, I’d do it like this:
You voted for “Yes We Can”—But the Republicans Gave You “No We Won’t”

Two years ago, you, the American people, voted for change. You said it was long past time to focus the economy on Main Street…to get out of the illegal and unwinnable Iraq war…to begin once again to stop behaving like a “rogue state” and take our place among nations as the most powerful and inspirational democracy in the world…to once and for all rein in runaway corporate power and massive environmental devastation.

We’ve done a lot in the short time we’ve had to reverse the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. Here’s a list of 91 different things the Obama administration has accomplished.

But most of those 91 accomplishments didn’t require approval by Congress. The Republicans have decided, as a bloc, to vote against almost anything we propose—even if they proposed it first. If it comes from the Democrats, they vote no, end of story. How much more progress would we have made without their tantrumy-two-year-old behavior? How much better shape would the economy and our carbon footprint be in—if, for instance, the green Jobs package hadn’t been so watered down?

You didn’t vote for “No We Won’t” in 2008. You voted for “Yes We Can! Vote Democratic and get the change you wanted all along.

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