Fastest, Cheapest, Brilliantest - or perhaps a little honesty might be better?

Being a bit of an obsessive marketing geek, I spend a lot of time looking at the way companies present themselves to the market and promote their products and services.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few years is the rise and rise of the super superlative in every field of marketing serving every marketplace. You know the kind I mean if you think about it:

•   Eat one of these pills and lose half your body weight.
•   Our Internet service is so fast it delivers content before you even knew you wanted it.
•   Our service is so wonderful a Celebrity endorsed it

You would honestly have to live in a cave with no access to any form of media not to have noticed this. But the big question is why do companies feel the need to promise things they can’t realistically deliver on.

Not sure what I mean, well think about these few examples:

• Mobile telecoms companies in the UK are absolutely adamant that they cover 99% of the population, yet spend five minutes looking at the comments about coverage on social media and you would think the reality is exactly the opposite?
• Utilities claiming that their deals will save you money if you just sign up to one of their 'simple' tariffs that trap consumers into complex and often very expansive contracts – not sure if I am right about that, well why is OFGEN spending so much time investigating it.
•  Lets not even go near the financial services sector with PPI, mortgage miss selling and many, many other examples of big promise, no delivery. 

A very brief and not terribly exact piece of research I carried out with about 30 random contacts showed that around two thirds of those I spoke to pretty much know that the increasingly outlandish promises being made by big businesses don’t amount to a hill of beans (whatever that means) but they still buy from these big players.

So here is a question for you. Does this world of super superlative but mostly empty corporate marketing promises present an opportunity for the rest of us?

Remember Roy Brooks the Honest Estate Agent from the 1960s who made it big by being almost ruthlessly honest about properties he was selling?  What about AG Barr the Scottish soft drinks manufacturer that never uses anything other than humour to market its drinks?

In both cases taking a different approach has paid dividends time and time again, while everyone else is still playing the same old game.

In neither case do they make outlandish claims (except humorously) or over promise on something they can’t deliver. As a result we trust them.

Anyone that has read the book or done any work with me knows that in a connected market feedback – good or bad – is often instantaneous and entirely public through social media, not to mention costly for some companies reputations. So isn’t it maybe a better idea to just set expectations properly and then deliver on them, rather than trying to promise the earth and then deliver a small egg cup of sand?

I’ll leave it to you to work that one out for yourself in the context of your own business but it would be great to hear other’s views on this.

Author – Tim Sandford

You're Not a Marketing Guru?

This article has been bouncing around in my head for a little while. Mostly because I haven’t found time to tell you about the meeting I went to where my client was surprised when I said, "No, I am not a marketing guru."

I have been working in sales and marketing for more than 20 years and enjoyed considerable success in my work as a marketer, but I do not claim to be an expert or guru - I'm still learning new things every day. Then again, how could anyone credibly claim to be an expert when you take a look at the diagram below?

The marketing communications channels shown in the diagram do not represent a complete picture by any manner of means – if I had put everything down, the diagram would have become so complex that it would have been almost impossible to understand.

In the old days, Marketing was much more straightforward with only a few ways to communicate with the market. Now we count more than 60 ways to engage with your market and thousands of individual branded variations in the mix. 

So the question is, how do you get your message in front of your target decision makers and noticed? 

This is where a lot of CEOs, accountants and technicians from medical types to IT entrepreneurs that I’ve met over the years haven’t quite realized yet that it is no longer just about a bit of PR and advertising with a bit of social media chucked in on the side. Its much more complex these days.

In today’s fast moving, connected marketplace, the sheer number of channels available makes it almost impossible to be an expert in all of them, especially some of the more arcane ones.

Setting aside things like the message, its quality, its focus  and so forth, these days our experience shows that a key part of success lies in identifying which of the many communications channels is relevant to your market.

For example, there is absolutely no point in investing a fortune in marketing on Facebook if your target market doesn’t use Facebook as a way of finding out about the kind of products and services you sell. That would be a bit like trying to sell premium beef burgers to vegetarians.

This is something we recommend strongly that you do as part of the development of your relationship with you market - not the selling beef burgers bit. We mean finding out how your target decision makers look for information on the kind of products you sell and concentrate on those channels because they are where you are most likely to get the best return for your marketing buck.

If you do, take the time to do this, experience shows that you increase the chance of your campaigns being successful and generating the demand your business needs - at least a 50 better chance in our experience. 

As for the client I mentioned at the beginning? Well their team is doing well communicating across just 4 channels and generating a much greater volume of enquiries than they had been before using more than 10 channels.

As always we're happy to answer any questions you might have and it would be great to hear your views.

Author - Tim Sandford

(Bye the bye. I'm working with the design guys to publish the full channels diagram, if you'd like a copy get in touch and we'll send you one when its published in a couple of weeks)