Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

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

This is an approximate verbatim transcript of the phone call I just ended.

Me: “Hello, this is Shel, how may I make your day special?”
Her: “I’m from and I wanted to let you know that our sales manager will be in your area on Thursday and would like to make an appointment.”
Me: What does your company do?”
Her: “We have a free credit card terminal for you.”
Me: “I’m happy with my current merchant account provider and I already own my own terminal.”
Her: “Our system includes a digital receipt system where you don’t need paper receipts. What would be a good time on Thursday to meet with her?”
Me: “I need to see information before I set up any appointments. Can you send me something and I’ll call you back if I’m interested?”
Her: “Well, it’s on a laptop, you have to see it.”
Me: “Can’t you e-mail it?”
Her: “You can go on our website–”
Me (interrupting): Wait a minute. You call me up out of the blue and try to sell me something. You want to waste my time with an appointment. And you’re going to make ME do the work to research you, you won’t even send me information?”
Her: (no response)

At that point I hung up. I wonder who would actually buy from this idiotic process.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. These people think they are marketing, but this is not marketing. Marketing is about building relationships, providing or adding value, solving problems. This boiler room telepressurer (I will not dignify her by calling her a telemarketer because she’s not marketing; she’s confronting people who don’t want her message) is doing one of that.

I’ve written six books and hundreds of articles about how to market effectively. People like this give the whole industry a bad name, and then we have to work that much harder to overcome prejudice against us.

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

This is not about politics; it’s about communication style, using a politician as an example.

My wife teaches business communication (with a heavy focus on international dos and don’ts), and she and I both give Barack Obama high marks for his sensitivity to other cultures.

Two quick examples among many:

  • For his state dinner last night with Indian Prime Minister Singh and his wife, no only did the menu have many Indian touches (and was mostly vegetarian, since the Singhs don’t eat meat), but Michelle Obama’s gown was designed by an Indian-American designer, and her preview outfit was the work of different Indian-American designer
  • When he went to Shanghai, he didn’t just learn how to say hello in Chinese, but he actually learned the correct pronunciation in the local Shanghai dialect

    • In the campaign, too Obama was consistently on message, able to deflect all the name-calling from the other side, and consistently able to turn attention back to the real issues.

    So what I’m wondering is why, since he does have such awesome communication skills, he seems totally unable to focus on his message. Issue after issue has gotten bogged down, and he’s fallen into a rut—abandoning the very successful organizing and communication strategies he used so well during the campaign, and continues to use well in his international contacts, in favor of overly nuanced, bureaucratic, uninspiring policy-ese. I think he could move his agenda forward a lot more successfully if he went back to building support among the American people, and organized them to be a force influencing their own legislators to push the change he was elected to bring.

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    By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    Respect your prospect’s intelligence! It’s one of the points I make repeatedly in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–and with good reason. To succeed in business, you need long-term relationships. And you don’t get them by insulting people.

    I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

    It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

    Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

    Shel,
    have you
    seen this?
    Brian

    Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

    The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

    No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

    So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

    Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?

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

    Social Media & Webinar Expert George Kao: Free Teleseminar on Success with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook in 15 Minutes Per Day

    In addition to being very socially conscious and eco-aware (he was an administrator for the largest Green MBA program in the US), the amazing George Kao is a social network trainer who knows social media better than anyone else I’ve encountered. I’ve been marketing seriously via social media since 1995, and it’s been my primary source of clients all the way back to 1996. And yet, I learn so much from listening to George that I not only sat in on *three* of his calls in the last two months, but also made a point of seeking him out for a dinner meeting when I was in San Francisco.

    I’m absolutely thrilled to be co-hosting this call (with my friend Allison Nazarian). If you only pick one teleclass to attend in the next few months, make it this one.

    Mark your calendar: Tuesday Sept 22, 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. And dial in early to avoid being closed out. (There are only 250 seats.)

    Sign up at https://georgekao.com/922s . Note: the call will be recorded, but the replay will cost $80.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

    Normally, I stay far away from all the get-rich-quick stuff. But I remember when copywriter John Reese became the first Internet marketer to (at least publicly) break the million-dollar-in-one-day barrier.

    In fact, I remember thinking at the time, oh, for goodness sake, you want us to buy into your product launch so you can set a sales record? Puh-lease! I didn’t buy it. Nevertheless, I watched what was going on, and was pleased for him when he surpassed the goal.

    Well, I just stumbled on a short interview of John Reese by Tony Robbins on the psychology of this order-of-magnitude breakthrough ($100,000 in a day was considered fantastic back then). Both of them compare it to Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, and they share lessons about achieving any BIG goal that I think transcend the (to me, not very interesting) specifics of making a big pile of money.

    Two things struck me particularly:
    1. The opening titles say Reese was $100,000 in debt. I have to wonder how such a world-renowned copywriter (I’d heard his name for years, long before this event) got into such a hole in the first place; the video, alas, doesn’t address this.

    2. Reese’s thinking was much bigger than I realized. I hadn’t known that a million in a day was about ten times as much as had been done before. It reminds me of Amory Lovins’ thinking about energy use: that it’s just as easy or perhaps even easier to save 80 percent of your energy than to save 10 percent.

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    By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

    Whole Foods’ standing is less than it was before CEO John Mackey wrote a well-publicized op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to put the brakes on health care reform. According to Mashable.com, which covers social media, positive perceptions of Whole Foods dropped 10 points in a week, and a 13 point drop in the perception that respondents would be proud to work there. Mashable also notes that the boycott group launched on Facebook is up to 27,000 members.

    I’ve been very vocal over the years, saying that strong values can add business value and profitability–most loudly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Does this mean that CEOs shouldn’t be vocal in expressing their opinions on issues of the day?

    Not at all. To me, it indicates that CEOs should choose businesses where their key demographic is in alignment with their values. Whole Foods’ constituency is overwhelmingly liberal-to-progressive. If management is shown to be ultra-conservative, their stand may “play in Peoria”–but not necessarily in Cambridge, Berkeley, Austin, Ann Arbor, and the other progressive communities that have welcomed a full-service organic and natural supermarket.

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

    Latest idiocy in my inbox:

    Avoid the PR Spam Blacklist

    Last week a well-regarded blogger published and blacklisted the names of individual PR firms and publicists who have sent “unsolicited (and almost always irrelevant) product pitches.”

    While we know that you do not set out deliberately to “spam” journalists, it is clear that the practices that we have relied on in the past are no longer effective for engaging today’s media. Many of these practices are, in fact, counterproductive.

    Our industry is changing.  And as professionals, we must adapt to the way that our audience – the media – is doing business today. Journalists want story ideas they can use. Journalists don’t want an email box full of spam.

    New rules require new tools. And we think our application…(Named product and sales pitch begin here)

    Hello–how did this happen to get into my in-box? If you guessed as a spam, you’re right. I have no prior relationship with this company, and if spamming me with a message about how spamming is ineffective is any indication of their intelligence, I’m not going to have a relationship with them.

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    By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

    OK, so everyone knows by now, bottled water is uncool if you live in a place where the water is fit to drink (and that includes most of the U.S., Canada, and Europe, as well as many other parts of the world). Issues include environmental impact, cost, depletion of public resources, and centralization of corporate power.

    On the other hand, the health benefits of water are very clear—and having suffered a kidney stone, I personally make a priority of drinking water a whole lot.

    So…what do you do when you need that second (or third, or eighth) drink of water, but you’re out and about? Triple Pundit just featured a free service that matches those offering water with those who need it.

    And quite correctly, TP spent some time on the advantages to businesses of participating: getting people in the door, positive word-of-mouth, and more—but they missed a big promotional opportunity: This clever idea, called TapIt, so far has database listings only in New York City and Orlando, but the concept is infinitely scalable. If you have a physical location and can wash a few extra dishes, visit the TapIt site and click “become a partner.” And then, smart marketer that you are, send out a news release in your local area announcing that you’re the very first business in (location) to participate in this environmentally friendly act of good will.

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