Be Different or be dead

March 1, 2021

Has the marketing profession really improved over the past 10 years?

Source: Pexels

Has the marketing profession really improved over the past 10 years?

I wrote this piece originally on Oct 28, 2010 under the title of ‘Marketing is an absolutely boring bust’.

And the reality is that in 10 years, some things have definitely changed in terms of how marketing is practiced but equally, there are many things that remain unchanged that I expected and hoped would change.

Marketing has been victimized by momentum thinking, comfortable with traditional marketing practices and satisfied with applying new digital tools to old thinking.

This is my current view of marketing.

#1. New product and service development

Marketing continues to provide what technology offers; the cool things technology can do via the features inherent in its platform.

There continues to be little new product innovation and invention driven by what people want and crave; the focus remains on trying to match customer needs with current products and services available in the marketer’s kitbag.

People do not buy goods and services . They buy relations, stories and magic. — Seth Godin

New product marketing — discovering people’s secrets, creating value packages and personal offers — hasn’t arrived to any significant degree yet; marketing existing products occupies 90% of what marketers today do.

The answer to the question “Where is the customer in all this?” remains a mystery. They should be the main input to the marketing process but they’re not.

AI tools are touted as the ‘magic’ solutions to improve the customer web experience.

Typical AI applications include:
— consumer behavior forecasting.
— product recommendations to individuals based on previous browsing or purchase behaviour.
— personalized advertising.
— marketing messaging.
— customer service via telephone or chatbot.

In addition to applications that involve behavioural algorithms such as these, it is important that AI technology development be channeled to provide input to the new product development process.
Gathering behaviour information on individual’s questions and purchases should be used to gain insights that feed product innovation and to create new personal holistic packaged offers for each of them.

#2. Flogging products and services

The infatuation with pushing products at people continues to dominate mainstream marketing even though new web personalization tools are now available, all claiming to make web experiences more personal and relevant for visitors to entice them to buy.

This is, however, a disguised attempt to present the flogging agenda in a more acceptable light.

ME marketing has progressed very little as marketers are content to continue flogging existing products and worrying about conversion rates.

These new digital tools — which leverage previous browsing and purchase behaviour — are intended to increase the productivity of flogging products.

Further, tracking an individual’s browsing habits and feeding products back to them in subsequent browsing sessions (or sending them email offers) under the guise of personalization is misleading because it assumes I’m interested in what I’ve clicked on or previously bought, ergo it’s contributing to a more personal experience.

Curiosity shouldn’t be confused with interest.

Pushing products on me based on my behaviour yesterday may produce some positive results but I find it intrusive and annoying. When my screen is literally pasted with ads based on what I’ve clicked on in the past and my rudimentary demographics, it’s anything but a pleasant experience; in most cases the experience is frustratingly irrelevant and takes away from the advertiser’s brand currency.

Under the guise of creating personal experiences for people, marketing has chosen the path of using technology to do a more efficient job at flogging products at them.
And now, a person’s screen is barraged with numerous suppliers all trying to do the same thing. How can this enhance one’s overall experience? It can’t.

#3. Price

Price continues to be the prime element of the marketing marketing and selling proposition; it dominates the marketer’s reasoning as to what motivates someone to buy.
And the irony is that this price focus adds very little — if anything — to the strategic positioning of the organization; price is easily copied by the competition and therefore no competitive advantage is achieved.

The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. — Seth Godin, marketing genius

And so you see a myriad of special pricing and promotion deals with giveaway incentives to attract new customers (and increasing acquisition costs in the process), discounted product and service bundles, and points-based loyalty programs on the marketing agenda.

Marketing has a long way to go to pivot from price to value; to market distinctive and unique value created by their products and services rather than the prices paid.

#4. Differentiation

Market players continue to look alike for the most part with little differentiation among them even though the intensity of competition continues to grow.

The irony is overwhelming. This is exactly the opposite to what you would expect. When competition increases, you would expect the players to get more competent in terms of differentiating themselves from others. But this has not happened. In fact the opposite is true; competitive differences are declining and sameness is proliferating.

The same old platitudes and competitive claims that pervaded the media a decade or more ago continue to live on:
- We provide the best network.
- We have the best people.
- We exceed customer expectations.
- We create memorable experiences.
- Our goal is to delight you.”

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible. — Seth Godin

Marketers today seem to be willing to let the innovators of the digital toolset do their thing, but they are unwilling (or incapable) of defining a new relevant marketing context (based on striving for uniqueness and remarkability) to make these tools relevant.

Relevance today should be based on carving out an edge that is pure and unique, not vague and bland.

Where the hell is marketing leadership?

#5. Benchmarking

Google “Why is benchmarking so important” and this is some of what you get:

Benchmarking helps organizations overcome complacency. They continuously strive to improve their performance standards in order to stay relevant in the market. ... Benchmarking helps organizations to identify the areas where the gap between their standard and that of the industry is the largest.

Ok, so the objective is to improve, to get better, to incrementally move forward and to get closer to the ‘best’; striving to copy them.

Hmmm… I’m not sure that being the same as someone else is the marketer’s end game.

Surely you want to be unique and remarkable with the ability to capture their imagination and forever gratitude. Right? Of course, because it’s the only way to guarantee a sustainable position in the marketplace and stay healthy.

Benchmarking is the antithesis to achieving a long term strategic advantage, and unfortunately it’s still alive and well. I’m witnessing more of it than 10 years ago.
Organizations tag best in class copying as innovation more today which implies that the rate of true marketing innovation is on the decline.

There has been literally no progress in using benchmarking as a baseline tool to create distinction and separation from the competitive herd.be different from.
Truly disappointing that marketing is still stuck in the benchmarking rut.

#6. ‘Creeping incrementalism’

The priority for marketers continues to figure out how to incrementally improve, rather than take bold action to be different and stand out from other players.

Increment rather than invent; change rather than create continue to be the marketer’s priorities.

WOW! power to separate market participants still takes a back seat to product augmentation based on what others do and what new technological capabilities are currently available.
With every marketing organization doing this, it’s little wonder that no single organization stands out.

A main component of the incremental marketing mindset remains the need to ‘round-the-corners’ on products that are introduced; small compromises made by the marketer to try and make a product appeal to a wider audience.

Unfortunately, taking the edge off a product in an effort to try and satisfy more people reduces any uniqueness it may have had and increases its blandness.

Marketing priorities for the next decade

Yes, marketing has definitely made some improvements in the past decade but there are specific areas that marketers need to keep working on as we look forward to 2031.

▪️ Set the objective of being different as the context for all marketing activity. If it’s not different then don’t do it.

▪️Stop bundling and start packaging.

▪️ Create the ONLY statement as the way to express your distinctiveness in the marketplace and define your competitive advantage.

▪️Focus on keeping current customers not on acquiring new ones.

▪️ Refocus AI to help identify insights in people and organizations; use the intelligence gained to create personalized packaged solutions.

▪️ Shape web personalization tools to do more than just increasing the effectiveness of pushing products. Use them to perform functions the individual has demonstrated they want.

▪️ Add customer learning as a critical marketing value and core competency.

(Hopefully) see you back here in 2031 for another report.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 3.1.21 at 06:59 am by Roy Osing
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February 26, 2021

Why ‘bait marketing’ is a crazy way to attract new customers

Source: Unsplash

Why ‘bait marketing’ is a crazy way to attract new customers.

Bait marketing is crazy; it’s intellectually dishonest; it makes no sense.

I think one of the travesties of today’s marketing is the special promotion designed to bait or attract new customers. I believe it’s a dishonest marketing tactic which works against customer loyalty.

Most companies use special offers or promotions to bait or attract new customers with the belief they will kick sales up a notch and increase revenue.

For the most part, special deals use price as the hook and are time based to encourage people to make a fast purchase decision.

“For the next three months subscribe to our wireless service and get a free LED TV” is a common promotion offered by many as a way to acquire new wireless customers.

These offers are dangled in the face of a potential NEW customer; THEY receive the free TV.

On the other hand, someone who has been a loyal wireless customer for 10 years gets NADA even though they have supported the company to the tune of thousands of dollars.

This is crazy.

There are two main issues I have with this bait marketing approach.

Lazy marketing

First, it’s lazy marketing. The easiest thing to do is to give stuff away with the mistaken belief that if you do, the recipient of the gift will somehow feel obligated to enter your loyalty tent and remain dutiful henceforth.

Not true.

Despite the studies marketers trot out, people value what they pay for, and if they pay nothing to move from another supplier to you they laugh under their breath and wait for the next juvenile marketer who comes along and makes you a better offer. And when they find one, bye-bye.

Intellectual dishonesty

Second, bait marketing is not only an insult to the loyal customers who have given themselves to your organization for years, it’s also intellectually dishonest.

Existing customers rarely qualify for the bait deal. The free TV is NEVER offered to the customer who has been loyal for 5 or 10 years!

They have steadfastly paid their bill on time every month. They have put up with the odd price increase and policy change but their loyalty has been resolute.

And they have rarely been offered a deal on anything. They may have been thanked for their loyalty with words or an annual free calendar, but certainly nothing as substantial as the person being baited.

And when they discover that a special promotion is being offered to new customers and ask for the same deal they are told “I’m sorry you don’t qualify for this promotion”.

How do they feel? Second rate? Third rate? Don’t rate?

Special offers should be placed at the feet of your loyal customers fIrst. Reward or retention marketing may not be as sexy as its bait cousin, but special deals should be extended to existing customers FIRST!

It’s an awesome way to thank people for their ongoing support and return the favour with a token of your appreciation. Think about it as re-investing (in them) some of the revenue they have generously given you over the years.

But companies rarely use promotions this way.

They’re afraid of losing money

They actually believe that if they offer the new customer deal to an existing loyal customer they will lose money; they don’t want to take the revenue hit from current customers taking advantage of the savings.
They don’t feel it is necessary to offer the promotion it to loyal customers to encourage them to stay. And if an exiting customer takes the deal they don’t believe it stimulates new sales.

These are bogus arguments for a number of reasons:

▪️Offering something special to your loyal fans will surprise and delight them.
They will stay loyal to you as long as you serve them well. And they will act as your best advertisers by telling the story to others about how great you are. Revenue will grow as a result.
Ever done a Net Present Value calculation on a customer who has been with you for 10 years? Is it a big number or small number. Right!

▪️If you don’t include them they will find out.
They will know that they are not included in the deal and they will be angry and feel neglected. They might leave you, but for sure they will talk you up to their friends and family as a selfish organization that does not care about their loyal customers. They will slander your brand; shouting out your lack of integrity and honesty.

▪️If your special deal attracts someone because of their thirst for your low price, what makes you think they won’t leave you for a better offer? A special targeted at ‘switchers’ is also fuel for more switching. Then you have realized zero return on your promotion investment and you have given your current customers reason to leave.

▪️Investing in your loyal customer base always makes sense.
You’re not reducing your margins by offering them the special deal, you’re reinvesting some of your margins in them to maintain their loyalty. Why do companies buy back their own shares?

Read the fine print. This offer is for ‘new subscribers only’!

It’s time organizations re-think the strategy behind ‘the special deal’ which is unethical and dishonest.

Any way you cut it, the deal strategy for new customer acquisition is risky.

Baiting people to become new customers for you is crazy.

Show customers why they should stay with you; invest your resources accordingly.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.26.21 at 10:37 am by Roy Osing
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February 22, 2021

5 proven reasons benchmarking won’t give you a competitive advantage

Source: Pexels

5 proven reasons benchmarking won’t give you a competitive advantage.

Benchmarking is viewed as a necessary process for most organizations as they do their business planning. There are benchmarking consultant experts and courses you can take to learn how to benchmark proficiently and gain the maximum benefit.

In my view, benchmarking is a simple concept as is its process:

▪️Identify the organization that excels in some aspect of your operations that you believe requires improvement — customer service, business planning, customer engagement, sales management, accounts receivable, advertising planning and so on;

▪️Map (understand deeply) their system or process to understand exactly how they perform the operation;

▪️Define the actions you must take to incorporate their operating system into your operation with the objective of replicating their level of efficiency.

Benchmarking might help you improve your operations efficiency but it won’t make you stand-out from your competition.

Benchmarking can be problematic on several levels:

1. Benchmarking is nothing more than copying someone else’s ideas

It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

2. Benchmarking won’t make you unique in any way

The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

3. Benchmarking makes you conform

Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate — subordinate — yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

4. Benchmarking won’t make you special and differentiate you from your competitors

It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar.

5. Benchmarking prevents you from trying new things

If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and stick copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
— Start thinking about being different than best in class, not copying best of breed.
— Covet being ‘different than breed’, not best of breed.
— Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes.
— Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
— Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate.
— Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

Benchmarking is absolutely the wrong thing to do when the end game for most organizations seems to be uniqueness and remarkability, but there are ways to ‘bend the curve’ and go in the right direction.

Start the change now, though, because time is not your friend.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.22.21 at 05:26 am by Roy Osing
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February 15, 2021

How ‘feet-on-the-street’ sales can be way better than online sales

Source: Pexels

How ‘feet-on-the-street’ sales can be way better than online sales.

Online sales is beating offline sales; here’s how ‘feet on the street’ can get their mojo back.

The traditional role of offline sales is pushing the profession closer to extinction

It’s interesting to observe the evolution of sales over the past several years.

Technology affecting the online marketing and sales function has evolved at a blistering pace over the past 5 years.
Artificial Intelligence and web personalization tools allow organizations to track what individuals have researched and purchased and to present them with an array of buying options during their subsequent browsing sessions, and much more.

All under the guise of improving the customer online experience by making the suggested choice more relevant based on their past behaviour.

I personally find the experience anything but pleasant. Irrelevant ads pop up when I’m browsing and despite the claim from marketers that the digital tools they use are improving the customer experience, I find the process intrusive, annoying and frustrating. My reading experience is diminished with advertisers disrupting me with totally irrelevant product offers.

Notwithstanding the fact that the objective of enhancing the online customer experience is being met with varying degrees of success, this aspect of online sales is ahead of its offline cousin by an order of magnitude.

The online salesperson is nothing more than an algorithm devoid of emotion and ego; the offline one has all those constraints.

How can offline sales morph to what online sales is trying to achieve?

It’s all about context. Online sales is trying to improve the customer experience, and be more effective in anticipating products and services an individual might be interested in buying, so why doesn’t the offline sales world attempt the same?

I know offline sales aspire to build deep meaningful relationships with customers, but when you look at what motivates them it’s hard to believe.

My observation is that offline sales remains in the doldrums, holding on to its traditional role, motivated by:
— improving conversion rates.
— managing the sales funnel more effectively.
— get the sale.
— keeping the pressure on and don’t let the person say ‘no’.
— getting (and staying in) the faces of potential buyers.
— terminating the customer meeting if it looks like no sale is in the offing.
— pushing the product and make it fit what the customer wants.
— improving how to make a cold call.
— achieving quota.
— outperforming colleagues.
— winning the annual sales contest.
— earning salesperson of the year award.

With these motivating factors, it’s not believable when they say that relationships matter; their behaviour speaks otherwise. And certainly, without a strong relationship-building bias, the ability to anticipate customer purchasing behaviour is restricted.

So, what’s the solution? How can offline sales be better than their algorithmic online sales cousin?

We need to redefine the function as ‘un-sales’ and describe it as the folks that don’t sell; taking the focus off selling and putting it on building relationships. And change the way sales is compensated.

To get started, here are the rules for offline sales that must be put in place to build better relationships and experiences with the customer.

1. Pay people for relationships — If sales aren’t paid to exhibit the behaviours necessary to build relationships and create better experiences for their ‘target’ they won’t do it. Period.

So if leadership aspires to get closer to their customers but don’t put in place the infrastructure to enable it, nothing progressive will happen and the aspiration becomes an unfulfilled dream. And online sales keeps winning.

2. Stress (and micromanage) the conversation — Relationships and experiences get better when conversations between people are ingratiating and serve the needs of both parties.

Get rid of the one-way sales pitch. Make offliners the best listeners on the planet. Set a performance rule that the customer must occupy 80% of the conversation airtime. Have ego purging classes; strip dysfunctional ego-drive that prevents a productive two-way conversation (or remove the salesperson who can’t comply).

Make note-taking a compulsory part of the sales kit bag; it’s a vital element of giving someone a relevant, meaningful experience. No act shows that the salesperson cares about what the other person is saying than committing what is heard to paper. The act implies that one has been heard and that follow up is promised along with further action.

3. Find human insights — For the offline salesperson, behind every productive conversation (defined as a deeper relationship and a pleasant experience) is an objective; a specific intended outcome.

And for offline sales, the endgame of every customer engagement is to discover an insight on the other person that is useful in feeding the buying process. Further, if the insight is a rare find that no one else — i.e. the competition — knows, it’s a strategic gem that has the potential to achieve and maintain strategic advantage of the organization.

Knowledge is strategic power, and the offline salesperson is key in the process of learning what people desire and converting this knowledge into economic benefits for the firm.

4. Develop a serving culture — amazing long term relationships and memories can only be created by offline salespeople who like putting the needs of others before their own; they like serving people.

There are serving salespeople out there but in my experience they are rare because of the traditional role sales played and because of past hiring practices that reflected traditional sales values. Servants weren’t coveted; those with aggressive, pushy, and domineering attributes were given the priority.

As a start, how about devoting equal time to product and serving training? Teach the offliners what serving (to gather strategic insights) ‘looks like’ and why it’s critical to the future of the organization.

And, as an aside, if a serving culture were successfully created, offline sales would forever outpace online sales which depend on algorithms and predictive models produced by people who know the digital tool world, not people.

5. Follow up. Follow up. Follow up — Perhaps this might be viewed as a small thing, but it’s HUGE in terms of influencing experiences and relationships. If someone promises you something and you don’t hear from them for 2 weeks, how do you feel and what’s your conclusion? Most people would conclude that they lied to you and they really don’t care about your needs.

This is the one activity offline sales has the advantage. Yes, Amazon can inform us of the status of our delivery but it doesn’t fulfill any other follow up function. For example they don’t enquire on how we liked the purchase (relying on us to advise them if we were dissatisfied) and other more qualitative aspects of the buying process. Humans, only humans, do this the way it needs to be done.

6. Advocate for the customer — Wage battle for the customer inside your company.
There is nothing worse for a customer than having to battle the bureaucracy of an organization when they need something or when something has gone wrong and their expectations haven’t been met.

They are literally on their own to fight the rules and policies and other restrictions that make the experience extremely unpleasant and in many cases annoying.

The salesperson needs to put themselves on the line among their peers and bosses on the inside to represent the best interests of their customer.

Online sales cannot do this; only offline sales can. And it’s critically important to an experience and relationship. When a customer has an issue with their order and they have to deal with the ‘inside world’ of an organization, they feel alone. The offline salesperson can be their advocate to take the pain and suffering away; the organization is rewarded with loyalty and referrals.

Online selling has captured center stage because of the plethora of new digital tools available. But they have limitations that can only be remedied by offline sales.

The successful sales organization will learn how to balance online vs offline to optimize the strategic benefits of both channels.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.15.21 at 06:55 am by Roy Osing
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