Look What I Found… January 2, 2009

Sharing is a good thing, and I think I need to do more of it.  So, once every week or so I am going to put up a quick post sharing some of my favorite findings from across the web.  Look What I Found… I hope you enjoy.

• An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth - Thanks to John Moore at Brand Autopsy for pointing me to this great manifesto by Bruce Mau.  The article offers up some great tips on how to live life more fully.  Some of my favorites are #1 Allow events to change you, #3 Process is more important than outcome, #10 Everyone is a leader, #41 Laugh.  More than worth the couple minutes it will take to read.

• Diary of A Self-Help Dropout: Flirting with the 4 Hour Workweek - Follow along as Wired Magazine’s Chris Hardwick humorously explores  3 popular time management theories - Getting Things Done, Never Check E-mail in the Morning, and The 4 Hour Work Week. Having experimented with these and other systems, I found it fun to follow Chris’ crash course experiment.

• Happy new year - Seth Godin has a great take on the silliness and potential surrounding the new year.  Love this line… “Like an empty Moleskine notebook, the possibilities are exciting. Why not exceed them?”

• Presentation Zen: Structure and Spontaneity: Lessons from the Art of Jazz (part II) - Garr Reynolds discusses the masterpiece that is Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

• 27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community: Chris Brogan offers up some easy to implement tips on how to improve your blog, increase your readership, and be a more effective contributor to the ongoing online dialogue.   Much of this stuff is common sense, yet not common practice.   Chris always offers up great suggestions on his blog.  It should be required reading for anyone looking to improve their game.

More Blood…

Not all blood is the same.  Yes blood is red and carries oxygen throughout your body, but blood has different characteristics or types.  As a result, there are sometimes issues with compatability.  Your blood may or may not be able to function properly in another human being, depending on your respective blood types.  There are over 30 types of human blood systems, going far beyond the familiar A,B,and O & +- nomenclature taught to us in high school anatomy class.  Blood type is important.

In a recent post, I equated the customer to blood - the sustaining source of life to a company.  It is important to realize that just as there are blood types, there are customer types as well.  Different people seek different benefits from a business.  Some may desire low price.  Others may care deeply about selection or service quality.  While some may care more about quality, image, or speed.  For most it is probably a unique combination of several factors.  What is important to understand is that not everyone is going to be the right type of blood for your business.  That does not mean you should dismiss people or treat them poorly if they are not your “ideal customer,” but rather to acknowledge that you can’t please everyone.  Choose a blood type that fits well with your body (business), and that is available in sufficient supply to sustain life.

If there are 50 competitors vying to be the “low price leader,” you may want to focus on innovative new products, amazing customer service, or fast delivery instead of trying to be the 51st low price leader.  The people seeking low price will not be impressed with you, but they are not the right type of blood for you either.  Low price is incompatible with what your body needs to live.  Ask people what they want.  Find out what type of blood flows through the veins of your best customers, adjust your approach accordingly, and seek out others like them to provide you with more blood as your organization grows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type

Blood

Blood sustains human life.  Oxygenated, healthy, red blood.  Without it we die.  Yet, oddly enough many people pass out at the site of it.  They are terrified of the very thing that sustains them.  Even the thought of it makes some queasy.  But, afraid of it or not, blood is vital.

Customers are like blood.  I have even heard it said that customers are the lifeblood of an organization.  Without them, and the money they spend, a company will die.  Yet many employees and entire companies are afraid of blood - afraid and resistant to really talk and listen to their customers.  Afraid to see the blood that sustains them.

When something goes poorly and things deviate from the plan, blood is spilled.  What happens next is vitally important to marketing.  The cut may be a minor scrape or a gaping wound, but both reveal blood.   If the response is to “look away” the wound will fester.  It may continue to bleed out over time, sapping the life of a company with it.  It may heal up, only to become infected because no remedy was sought.  It is not a good idea to be afraid of blood if you hope to stay in business.

If the response is to carefully cleanse the wound, taking every effort to heal it and taking steps to avoid another cut,  blood will continue to properly flow and life will likely be sustained.

Things go wrong from time to time.  Cuts and scrapes happen.   Don’t let the fear of a little blood keep you from improving what you do.  Your life depends on it.

Dayton Marketing Community - A Social Network with a Local Focus

Several years ago, I created a Squidoo site titled Dayton Marketing Community.  The site was designed to serve as a central hub for Marketing Professionals in Dayton to find information about networking opportunities, job openings, social functions, professional development, and other interesting items about the community.

I was inspired to build the site by Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo and my favorite author.  I decided to focus on Dayton and Marketing, because I had just gone through a job search and was frustrated by how difficult it was to find good information about the opportunities in the community.

The site is still up, and has been very successful over the years in connecting people with opportunities. Don’t believe me?  Go to google and search Dayton Marketing.  As of this post, the site is the number one result.  (Of course that may change over time, but needless to say, it has done well.)  Still, one element, a very important one, was missing.  People.

While the site was about the community, it did not contain a community.   It was flat.  Don’t get me wrong, the site has great information, does fantastic in search, and has helped countless people find opportunities.  Still, I had always hoped that I could somehow build in the element of conversation into the site.   After reading Seth Godin’s book Tribes, I decided that it was time to bring this idea, and the Dayton Marketing Community to life… and now I have.

If you are a Marketing Professional in Dayton, Ohio I encourage you to join the new social network Dayton Marketing Community. I am really excited about this project.  It launched just over a week ago, and already the site has over 60 members.  People are beginning to add events to the calendar, start discussions, upload video and photos, search for jobs, create vivid profiles, make friends, and engage one another in new and meaningful ways.

My hope is that the site can serve to connect our community in new and exciting ways.  From helping people to find job to helping local employers to fill them.  From encouraging people to share their thoughts through integrated blogs to sharing know how through the forums.  From connecting old friends in new ways to making new friends, to creating mentoring relationships and on and on.  The potential of the site is vast.  All it requires is people to care enough to make it something worthwhile and remarkable.

I know that personally, I get multiple emails every week from people looking to fill jobs and people looking to find them.  How great would it be if that connection could be made quickly through Dayton Marketing Community?

This city is a great place, filled with great people.  Now more than ever, we must seek out ways to help one another succeed.  Perhaps this site will further that cause just a little.

Join the community!

Dayton Marketing Community

The Physics of Marketing - Snell’s Law

Willebrord Snellius saw the light.  Well actually he saw the light do funny things, and then went on to describe why it was so.  The output was Snell’s Law, which describes how light travels at different speeds through different substances.  Ever wonder why that drinking straw looks different in the glass of water than it does above the glass -   Snell’s Law.  How about why on hot summer day there appear to be puddles of water on the road off in the distance, yet when you get to where they seemingly were you find nothing but blazing hot asphalt - again Snell.  It is all about refraction, or how light bends.

Different materials have different refractive indices, meaning that light travels at different speeds through everything.  A high refractive index indicates that light bends a lot as it passes through.  Conversely a low index means that light moves more quickly.

So how does this idea apply to Marketing?  Well there are about 50 ways to go with this one.  I am choosing to go with the following, but encourage you to choose one of the others and leave a comment.  So here goes my take.

In marketing, there is often the concept of the great idea.  You know what I mean… “How about we try __”  or “What if we make ____”  Internally a few people discuss the idea, and quickly it turns into a product.  Note that for this example we are going to assume that this idea makes its way through the process of becoming an actual product or service - most never get that far.

Okay, so the idea hits the market in the form of a product and it is a huge disaster.  What happened?  We thought it would be great.  It did everything we wanted.  Everyone will love it.  We knew it would work. One problem.  The consumer, or at least the one’s whom you approached, did not want it.  Things are received differently by different people just as light moves differently through different substances.  So making the right thing for the right people matters.

Successful marketers realize this principal and attempt to use this to their advantage.  For a product to become successful, marketers must find the innovators and early adopters for their idea.  Target them.  Talk to them.  Find out if they are influential with others.  Satisfy their needs.  Dazzle them.

Again, these ideas spread at different speeds.  Successfully getting through the innovators and early adopters moves you into the early majority of people.  This group is slower to respond, but just might come around with some coaxing from the other two groups.  This process might then continue onward through the late majority of buyers and into the laggards before your idea is replaced by another.  As the pool of people spreads, your idea becomes more commonplace, and the impression it makes distorts from the original image.

Again, the key is to realize who you are trying to target, how their response may be different from others in the market, and what the implications of those differences might be.  Making something for everyone from the start is a surefire way to fail.  Making something remarkable for a few people, who might decide to share their passion for your idea with the world is a much better choice.

How would you use Snell’s Law in the context of Marketing?  There is certainly something out there along the “Things are not always what they seem / All Marketers Are Liars” angle.  (Seth Godin, if you read this, please share a thought with us.)  There could be something along the lines of the Pete Blackshaw “An Angry Customer Tells 3,000 People” angle of what happens when you buy that water puddle and actually get hot air. (Pete, if you read this,  please share a thought with us.)   Or maybe you have a completely fresh take to add.  Give it a shot and leave a comment. (Please share a thought with us.)

Take Me To Your Leader… Tribes by Seth Godin

Seth Godin has done it again - written an amazing, fresh, relevant, and useful book I love.  This time it is Tribes - a book about the importance of leadership.  The book is probably the least “marketing” oriented book Seth has written, focusing instead on addressing the much broader topic of leading other human beings.

The book talks a great deal about the importance of overcoming fear in the pursuit of innovation.  In today’s world, I am fully convinced that the old ways of “go along and get along” can only lead to a slow death - whether that applies to education, business, marketing, non-profits, or any other facet of life.  Today, the rewards go to the risk takers, the creators, and the innovators who are willing to step up with a vision and lead others toward realizing it.

Here is an excerpt from one of the passages on The Elements of Leadership:

• Leaders challenge the status quo.
• Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others.
• Leaders have an extraordinary amount of curiousity about the world they are trying to change.
• Leaders use charisma (in a variety of forms) to attract and motivate followers.
• Leaders communicate their vision of the future.
• Leaders commit to a vision of the future and make decisions based on that commitment.
• Leaders connect their followers to one another.

The book also discusses numerous ways that individuals can levarage the web, blogs, and tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Squidoo, and others to build a tribe of followers.  Seth outlines numerous examples of others who have successfully built a tribe, and highlights simple strategies for following in their footsteps and leading with yours.

Not only is it a great book, but I even got a free copy of it.  I had pre-ordered the book on Amazon a few months ago.  Two weeks ago, a surprise advance copy showed up on my doorstep.  Seth sent them out to people who ordered early so that we could have a sneak peak at the book.  Talk about engaging the Tirbe.  The one I paid for showed up last Tuesday, and I quickly gave it to a friend to read… and the Tribe grows.

Thank you to Seth for continuing to be an inspiration to me, for providing me with countless great ideas, and for motivating me with your words and actions to be a leader with mine.

Amazon.com: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us: Seth Godin: Books

Crash Course in New Marketing at UD

Professor Irene Dickey, one of my favorite instructors from the University of Dayton, emailed me earlier this week to inform me about a very interesting upcoming event at UD - SPEED Marketing: 10 HOT Marketing Ideas Presented to YOU by Senior UD Marketing Students.

The event sounds like it will be a lot of fun and a great chance to learn about some of the emerging trends in Marketing.  It sounds like anyone can attend, provided you let them know you are coming.  I am planning on being there, taking in some great information, making some connections with some of tomorrow’s marketing thought leaders, and having a great time.  I hope to see you there.

The details are as follows:

Please forward to your Marketing Colleagues; send your Marketing Team…be our guest!
SPEED Marketing:  10 HOT Marketing Ideas Presented to YOU by Senior UD Marketing Students
The most efficient, interesting hour & 15 minutes you can spend to learn more about MKT

New Marketing Ideas 2008:
In today’s ever changing marketplace, there is a continuous need for good ideas.  So what are some of the hot new ideas in 2008?

Come to a unique “SPEED Marketing Bootcamp” presented by Sr. University of Dayton Marketing Students.  Marketing professionals identified 10 New Marketing Ideas for 2008 and these students researched them, applied them and will present them to you efficiently, thoroughly and in ways that are sure to be interesting and relevant.   These ideas might not all be right for every brand, but each contains the ingredient critical to any good marketing, cleverness, which might solve a problem you’ve got. Greenrating, Petro Marketing, Dark Marketing, Text Messaging Gets BIG…and more

Who Should Attend:
This is a fast paced series of 10 six to seven minute presentations strategically researched and developed by senior level marketing students in their capstone marketing experience course.   From those who are new to the marketing profession to those who are in positions with responsibilities such as marketing, sales and sales management, advertising, promotion, brand building, and even those who own their own business would find this unique Boot Camp useful and interesting.

When & Where:

Bring your colleagues and or tell a friend!
RSVP Back to Irene Dickey & irene.dickey@notes.udayton.edu; parking & other information!

The Physics of Marketing - Huygens’ Principle

You would think that if you did something like discover the rings of Saturn, discover Saturn’s largest moon - Titan - and then go on to invent and patent the first pendulum clock, that you would be a household name.  Now assume you not only did all those things, AND also collaborated with Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and Rene Descartes during your career.  Pretty impressive resume to say the least.

The person I am describing is 17th century Dutch Physicist Christiaan Huygens.  To say this guy was smart and influential is like saying Jimmy Hendrix was a pretty good guitar player who had a few good songs.   Huygens was a thought leader of his time, with a very impressive body of work.  One of his primary discoveries was that of Huygens’ Principle which predicts the progression of waves.

Huygens stated that “every point on a wavefront acts like a new source of wave energy, with matching frequency and phase.”  Thus when you drop a pebble in water, the wave front each of the ripples that spreads out in a circular expanding fashion represents a new set of waves.  Another example of this is observed when you hear someone in an adjacent room shouting, the sound actually enters the room you are in through the doorway.  So to you the sound, the vibration of air via soundwaves, originates at the doorway.

In Marketing terms this seem to equate nicely to the concept of word of mouth marketing.  Suppose you were to have an awful service encounter with a business, the initial wave would then be created.  If for example, this were in a restaurant where the food was bad, the service poor, and the experience was very disappointing, the initial wave might begin with those seated at your table and others within the restaurant.  If the experience were bad enough, this wave would quickly spread as you left the restaurant and told your friends “Don’t Eat At That Place!  Listen is what happened to us!”

Now all of those friends you told about your experience represent a new source of wave energy, spreading the message outward yet again. God forbid this is not an isolated incident.  In this case, as waves continue to spread and touch consumers, the results to a business are devistating.  Imagine when you told your friends about the bad experience if they responded “you are the 10th person I have heard from who had a bad experience at that restaurant.”   Now think about what happens when you get on the web and voice your complaint to the world.  Your experience is viewed by others, Google picks up on a new trend, and the wave continues onward…

Pete Blackshaw articulates this scenario brilliantly in his book, Satisfied Customers Tell 3 Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.  He brilliantly describes the importance of word of mouth in a digital age, how to monitor and participate in what is being said, and ultimately why companies need to realize the fact that angry customers can make Tsunami sized waves that can literally destroy a business.

Returning to Huygens, it is imperative to realize that the transaction transcends the immediate and present set of circumstances.  It radiates outward.  No, losing one sale due to poor service might not cripple a business, but the resulting wave that this dissatisfaction generates might - especially if the event is systemic as opposed to an isolated incident.  The interconnected world in which we live makes it nearly impossible to do people wrong and live very long.

Conversely, the little extras that make a customer experience great might not immediately translate into huge profits, but over time, as the waves spread, these differences can create a ripple effect that builds deep customer loyalty and lasting success.

How would you apply Huygens’ Principle to Marketing?  Please share your thougths by leaving a comment.

Complimenting My Guitar…

On Sunday, WalMart complimented my guitar, while Target did not.  Those who have heard me play would probably ask “why anyone would compliment my guitar?” No I am not talking about the “nice playing” type of compliment, but rather the idea of selling complimentary products.  This concept was illustrated to me over the weekend as I made trips to both big box retailers.  Allow me to explain.

Sunday morning the family and I headed to Target to pick up some groceries.  We typically pick up the stuff in cans and boxes at Target because it is substantially cheaper that anywhere else - not to mention Target often  has some cool new items to check out.   Well, as we made our way through the store, I remembered that I was in need of a new guitar cord.  The old one shorted out.  So, knowing that they have a few instruments in the back corner of the store, I assumed that surely they would have what I needed.  Alas I was mistaken…

Now the point of this post is not about Target, WalMart, or any other specific retailer.  I just use them to illustrate a point about something I observed.  Target had amplifiers, keyboards, electric guitars, tuners, and even guitar effects pedals, but they did not have a guitar cord.  This would seem to be an assumptive sale for anyone purchasing any of the aforementioned products, as they all require cords to work.  Thus Target is not only leaving easy money on the table by not carrying guitar cords, they are going to force me to go elsewhere to get it.

Now I have personally have a guitar, but if I were in the market for a low end, new guitar, such as the ones they stock, I would now be forced to comparison shop with Target.  Even if I bought the guitar and amplifier at Taret, the need for a cord would take me to another store.  The other store would then have the opportunity through pricing, salesmanship, and promotion to talk me out of the Target purchase.   Suppose I drove around the corner to Guitar Center and discovered a better guitar for less, a more sophisticated amplifier for roughly the same amount, and the cord that I needed to make them work.  Now, suppose the sales professional is good enough to ask what the cord is for, and I tell him about my experience.  If that person were smart they could say something like - “Why don’t you buy the same guitar and amp here and I’ll throw in the cord for free - just return the other one for a refund at Target.”  Now they built customer loyalty, made a sale, and screwed the competition in the process.

Back to my story about Sunday.  The family and I had to run an errand later in the day that took us to WalMart - somewhere I rarely visit.  Again, I thought to look for the guitar cord, assuming that if Target sold instruments, so would WalMart.  I found some instruments in the Toy Section and there along side them was a guitar cord… which I bought.

Admittedly it was a convenience purchase.  I buy most musical gear at a music store.  Still, this story highlights the importance of complimentary products.  What do you sell that requires a complimentary product to make it work.  Could you offer something additional to keep people from going elsewhere?

Voices - Episode 8: Artie Isaac

In this episode of Voices, I speak with Artie Isaac - marketing strategist, founder of Young Isaac, and professor at The Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design.  Among other things, Mr. Isaac teaches MBA students at The Ohio State University how to be more creative.

According to Artie Isaac, creativity is about living a better life, having a more fulfilling job, connecting more deeply with friends and family, achieving flow, being more mindful, and embracing the present moment.  Isaac claims that all of us have the ability to be more creative by making an effort to enhance our creative potential - much like exercise can improve your physical health.  It is work, but there are clear, positive results.

Some of the thoughts Artie Isaac shares in the podcast are his reasons for blogging, how he named his site, what inspires him, how he utilizes technology to increase day to day productivity, the 3 types of days and how to approach them, why he lives in Ohio, and what people can do to be more creative.

Thanks to Artie for being kind enough to take the time to participate in the podcast, for being open enough to share his wisdom, and for being brilliant enough to inspire others to achieve greatness.  It was a pleasure to meet him.

Listen and enjoy!

Net Cotton Content / On Life and Marketing, Creativity and Ethics

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