You are here: Home / Archives for service marketing

Snow Job

January 5, 2010 By davidebowman 2 Comments

I heard a great story by Jeff Brady on NPR while on the way home yesterday.  It was about the work of two researchers from Dartmouth who found it odd that ski resorts seemed to report more snowfall than surrounding areas and and steeper increases in snow amounts on weekends.  They also found that resorts close to major population centers exaggerated figures even more.  These scientists were skeptical about this “weekend snow” effect, and started collecting data about it.  Turns out that ski resorts were in fact inflating the snow fall amounts quite a bit, falsely using extra snowflakes as a marketing tactic to get people to come out and hit the slopes.

Michael Berry, President of the National Ski Areas Association, said that ski resorts had often been “optimistic” with their past reports.  However, he went on to say that this practice is quickly dying.  Why?  Two reasons  – the iphone (or any mobile device) and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  These tools and technologies are rendering snow reports obsolete, as users report conditions to their friends in real time.  The researchers stated that the number of exaggerated snow actually reports dropped off sharply with the release of numerous iphone apps enabling users to document conditions.  Mobile and social technologies are growing fast and empowering people to better understand the world.  Many of the techniques and tactics that “optimistic” marketers could get away with in the past, are now becoming problematic.  If you are not working on building trust as a core part of building your business, you are simply lying to yourself about your future prospects.

Berry had a great quote in the piece – one that transcends skiing.  “If you try and create a reality that you perceive to be the truth, it had better be consistent with the reality on the ground, because the consumer will remind you of it instantly.”

Service truly is the new marketing.  Every consumer is a researcher.  Every customer is a journalist.  Everyone is now what Mike Wallace or Consumer Reports once was – armed with flip cams, iphones, and 24 x 7 communication networks.  People trust the advice of their friends. so work hard to make friends, earn trust, and dazzle your customers.  Real people and their tweets, posts, and updates either represent your next great new ad campaign or a damaging expose on the truth about your company.

Filed Under FEATURED, MARKETING Tagged With , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Physics of Marketing – Simple Harmonic Motion

May 11, 2008 By davidebowman 1 Comment

Think of a pendulum steadily swinging from side to side and you are visualizing Simple Harmonic Motion. From children on play gound swings to highly skilled engineers, simple harmonic motion surrounds us. It involves the give and take between potential and kinetic energy. In the example of the pendulum this would be height and speed.

You could even use the principle of Simple Harmonic Motion to prove that the world rotates. If you were to place a pendulum on the North Pole on a sunny day, the shadow it created would move in a circle as the day passed – eventually returning to its origin 24 hours later. However, this motion would not be evident at the Equator. So while the principle of Simple Harmonic Motion is evident in both places, deriving meaning from it is dependent on perspective. Yes the pendulum swings back and forth in both places, but the change in perspective offered at the North Pole would yield unique meaning.

So, on to the Marketing part of the post.

Here is what I came up with. Treat different customers differently. Create simple harmonic motion with your best customers. Develop a predictable experience for them, innovate based on their specific needs, and create something so remarkable that so they want to come back time and again. Do it well, and you should even be able to add a cyclical nature to this pattern thus creating predictability – simple harmonic motion.

Why treat your best customers differently? It is as simple as this. You can’t please everyone. If you are doing something interesting than there will be many, if not most, who will dislike what you do. Try to please everyone and all you will accomplish is mediocrity. The perceived safety of “the middle of the road product or service” only sets up a business to get hit from oncoming traffic on both sides.

instead, create a unique identity. Establish a deep bond with the right customers. Listen to them. And then use your strengths to regularly develop new ways to help solve their problems and improve their lives. This ties in directly with the product life cycle. What to make, why, when, how many, and for whom all can be tied into simple harmonic motion. All of these ideas work best when done for a specific group.

So that is my take. What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on how to apply Simple Harmonic Motion to Marketing. I welcome your contribution and thank you for stopping by.

Filed Under FEATURED, MARKETING Tagged With , , , , , , , , , , , , ,