Showing only Notes + Links tagged marketing
We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.
Joel Spolsky, in his announcement that he is quitting blogging. (via @caterina)
Spolsky has really interesting opinions on running a company (these are the posts that have always brought me to his blog) and I understand the whole corporate responsibility thing—grow the business!!—but it’s a shame that he’s quitting blogging because, he says:
- It’s too time consuming (no ROI)
- He has fished out the blog-reader-as-customer market
- He can’t please every single one of his customers while voicing his opinions.
He continues:
My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger*. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows — how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We’ve completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.
It just seems kind of sad to see businesses transition from startup to corporation and leave their voice behind.
On the advertising end of the communications spectrum, which Spolsky is hoping to skew towards, is this profile of pants-by-mail company Bonobos from AdAge:
Mr. Dunn says the company spent little on advertising until its second year when it took to Facebook with the slogan, “End Khaki Diaper Butt.” About 20% of Bonobos’ current base was acquired through Facebook. Because of its direct-to-consumer model, Bonobos can be efficient with ad dollars, tracking which sales result from a specific click-through behavior.
With the average Bonobos customer spending $200 on his first visit, Mr. Dunn drew up a cost-per-acquisition model that concluded the company can spend up to $100 per new customer and still have a profitable first transaction.
…
“You’ve got to focus on the product, not the marketing,” Mr. Dunn said. “If word-of-mouth isn’t there, it’s hard to get to those first 10,000 customers.”
Though the advertising clearly works, I’m wary of all this coming from AdAge (a publication about how great advertising is). But $100 per new customer is a pretty enticing number…imagine all the things you could do with that!
* Is that even true? Either way, best metaphor ever.
The way [Pandora] hooked me in with the free hours made me feel like this is something I should probably pay for because I clearly value the service they are providing. Thinking about it more, this perhaps might be an interesting model for publishers. Not sure how it would work or if tracking time spent on a website is the way to go or not, but it would be interesting if content producers could come up with easily digestible measurements to show consumers how much they value the service or content that’s being provided. This would weed out the fickle viewers and for the power users it would make them realize how much they actually value the content they are consuming. The goal is always to hook your dedicated power users.
There are clearly some challenges to something like this, but from a psychological point of view Pandora has put me in a position where I understand how much I value their service and the great benefits I will receive if I subscribe. Regardless if I end up paying a subscription fee or not, they have made a compelling offer, and no matter what, that’s what content producers and service providers need to do. Make compelling offers and show consumers how much they value the content or service that’s being provided.
Bryan Formhals — la pura vida: You Are Running Out of Free Hours
The $6 purchase price of the McSweeney’s iPhone app comes with delivery of free iPhone formatted web content everyday forever and six months of exclusive, bespoke (designed) content once a week. It’s totally worth it. If they keep up the good job, I have no qualms about renewing for another $6 (from within the app, charged to iTunes!) when my subscription lapses…I’ve been hooked.
I jotted down some thoughts on the night of the iPad announcement about why it’s awesome but my opinions have basically been reiterated across the web. This is an incredible opportunity (big screen, touch based, app store, always online) to design interactions!
I was skimming through Apple’s iPad Human Interface Guidelines last night (Google it if you want to find a leaked PDF) and one part that struck me as particularly interesting was to let users play with your application before asking them to provide any more information than the system provides. If it’s still necessary later, do it as soon as you can, but not until the user has gotten a test drive and run into a situation that requires filling out a form—or in this case, buying a paid subscription.
People, both women and men, should be so fiercely passionate about good ideas that self-promotion is a natural extension. Otherwise, why is it worth doing in the first place? It’s when confidence and self-promotion are obfuscated from passion that the claims become flimsy and empty. Confidence can bridge the gap between desire and outcome as long as the integrity for what we believe and the authenticity of what we create remain in place. We have the ability to both do good work and to recognize it — the choice is ours to make. Confidence is good’s natural extension.
Liz Danzico (Bobulate: Confidence for good)
There, the debate has been settled.
While the rest of the publicists in her company were sending out mass emails to everyone, hoping to get bites from Perez Hilton, Gawker, HuffPo, or wherever, this publicist focused on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the internet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones. A site can be enormously influential without having crazy eyeballs, because all eyeballs are not equal.
Lindsay Robertson - The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity
Lots of good advice here.
There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!
Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts.
What if every product shipped with a story?
It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.
Robin Sloan Story shadows (and a quick Friday read) on Snarkmarket
Some choice excerpts from a great post on Snarkmarket.
A New Old Freebie - Matches Surge as Restaurant Giveaways - NYTimes.com
Their overriding utility, aside from lighting the odd candle, is promotional: “They go out into the world, and they bring people back.”
“We view our matchbooks as advertising, and what they are advertising is a memorable experience someone had,” he said.
Advice on What to Do as a New/Unknown Artist by Trent Reznor →
Very good points and, as Powazek notes, all applicable to print media as well.
Imagine Greater. The brand evolution of Syfy (the soon-to-be-former SciFi Channel) takes another leap forward in this playful video tour of their House of Imagination.
When the SciFi network announced it was rebranding as Syfy, pretty much everyone in the world who wasn’t involved with the change thought it was a bogus idea. However, I actually like this new-and-expensive-looking-subtly-a-promotion video for the new brand. I am starting to see this working alright.
(via bauldoff)
Theresa sent me this super effective infographic-in-action at Trader Joe’s. Excellent! It looks low key, but it’s got subtle and effective details such as the Trader Joe’s side written in handwriting to make it more human, and the corporate side looking like some PowerPoint nightmare.
Once I tried on the pants, I became an implicit owner of them. I stared at myself in the mirror and admired the fit, the wash, etc. I thought about how good they would look with my shoes. I contemplated wearing them to various upcoming events and all the strangers who would look at my pants and think “Those are nice pants!” In other words, I spent a few minutes imagining my life with these new jeans and, once that happened, the pants suddenly became much more valuable. I mentally endowed myself with the object and didn’t want to lose something that I didn’t even own. As a result, the ridiculous price tag ($170 for Levis!) no longer seemed so ridiculous. The lesson? Don’t try something on that you don’t want to buy.
The Endowment Effect : The Frontal Cortex
Or, alternately, make sure you make it easy for people to “try on” things that you want to sell.
The Anti-Advertising Agency » Virgin America goes “street” - why?
Steve Lambert of Anti-Advertising Agency blog on Virgin America’s new street art ad campaign:
Graffiti is polarizing - it puts people in two groups. People who like graffiti and stencils don’t like corporate stuff. They really, really don’t. The other group is people who don’t like graffiti: they don’t understand it and they despise it.
There is no one else.
So when you spray your campaign all over the neighborhood, you piss off the street art people and you piss off everyone else. It’s a lose/lose situation. No one except the “creatives” who worked on the campaign and the people who signed off on it think it is cool.
It’s also illegal, but you clearly don’t care about that.
Please just stop with the fake revolution, stencil in the street bullshit. We’re all smarter than that.
(via FB friend Joe Riley, thanks!)
“Good Enough”
Seth Godin has some interesting thoughts on website design on his blog:
“Do you want the people visiting this site to notice it?”
It’s a subtle but essential question.
For artists, musicians and web 2.0 companies, the answer is probably yes. Yes we want people to see the interface or remark on our skills or cleverness.
For everyone else, it’s no. The purpose of the site is to tell a story or to generate some sort of action. And if the user notices the site, not the story, you’ve lost.
Essentially, Godin is saying that if you’re trying to tell a story, it’s not wise to let your presentation overpower your content.
Amazingly, this means that not only can’t the site be too cutting edge, clever or slick, it also can’t be too horrible, garish or amateurish. It’s sort of like the clothes you want the person giving a euology to wear. No Armani, no cutoff jeans.
That last paragraph in particular reminds of the Muji design philosophy of “enough”:
We would like our customers to feel the rational sense of satisfaction that comes not with “this is best,” but with “this is enough.” “Best” becomes “enough.”
To paraphrase a designer whose name I can’t remember: Form doesn’t follow function. Form and function are a balance. If one is out of balance so is the other.
Great design is clever, flashy, and grabs your attention, it stops you in your tracks and screams at you to notice it, while good enough design tells a story and gives you rational satisfaction. Finding that center between form and function, between content and presentation, and between Armani and cutoffs is how you hit that sweet spot of “good enough”.
In anticipation of its relaunch next week, The Evening Standard has launched this surprising new campaign, which aims to firmly distance itself from the newspaper’s previous incarnation.
The London newspaper, which was bought by Alexander Lebedev from the Daily Mail & General Trust earlier this year, has had a reputation for having a somewhat negative take on life in the UK capital. This poster campaign seeks to signal the changes on the way by apologising for various perceived sins, including complacency, predictability and the afore-mentioned negativity. None of the posters mention the newspaper by name, but simply carry its Eros logo.
(via CR Blog » Blog Archive » The Evening Standard Says Sorry)
Gallerist Edward Winkleman has an excellent post on “Getting a Gallery”:
The advice I offer, which directs artists to consider what they can do on an interpersonal level to get a leg up on their competition for the limited slots in the gallery system, is not at all meant to recommend “groveling.” It is meant to suggest, though, that artists approach this with the same formal courtesies they would a job application/interview. If you were applying for a position on the faculty at an art school, I don’t think calling up the dean who has never heard of you and insisting that she call you back when she has an opening would endear you to her.
In addition to this post, the comments are really interesting and definitely worth a read. It makes me wonder: when does persistence turn into groveling?
Don’t Be a Butterton - Margarine Ad
I can’t even remember the last time I was so offended by an ad on TV. This insidious ad parodies a 1950’s family eating food with ENTIRE GLOWING YELLOW STICKS OF BUTTER ON IT. Then a peppy-yet-motherly narrator says something along the lines of “back then we didn’t know much about saturated fat and cholesterol. Today, we know better, that’s why there’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” And then there’s a shot of someone spreading a little bit of margarine on a roll.
1) I don’t see them spreading an ENTIRE TUB OF MARGARINE ON THEIR ROLL, even though the other people had entire sticks of butter on their potatoes. First of all, potatoes never need an entire stick of butter, and secondly, if I’m having an inferior product (margarine) I usually need more anyway.
2) Butter, which is a dairy product, comes from cows milk. It’s basic and natural. Margarine is some crazy oil blend that comes in 15 flavors directly out of a factory. How is that supposed to be better than something real, like butter?
The problem with the ad is that it demonstrates a real, healthy food in an insane amount of excess, and then their crappy replacement in moderation. But my problem with the ad, as a consumer, is that it directly condemns a conscious choice I’ve made to eat natural foods, “Don’t be a Butterton,” says the narrator, like you would need to be insane to continue eating butter.
I’m surprised that with Michelle Obama’s new initiative on eating healthy/local/organic/vegetables they allow guilt-tripping crap like this to air on TV. I think that health being based purely on the number of grams of saturated fat is a misconception. Health is based on moderation, variety and eating mostly unprocessed food.
