Marketing Roadmaps

Marketing

The Mommy Card

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Last week while listening to Pandora, I heard a commercial for VistaPrint promoting “mommy cards” (along with networking cards and dating cards.)

What exactly is a “mommy card,” I wondered (and tweeted.)

Now before, you jump in and think, “how stupid are you, Susan, to not know what a “mommy card” is,” rest assured, I had a pretty good idea of what was intended.  I just thought it was a bit silly and more than a bit sexist.

Unless you also have a separate line of  “daddy cards,” promoting the “mommy card”  associates the act of parenting entirely with one gender. And that is sexist.  Undoubtedly inadvertent but still….

The term “calling card” seems perfectly suitable if you don’t want to call it a business card due to the more personal nature of the information.  Or if you need to be more descriptive, call it a Family Card or a Parent Card, since it lists important family information that a parent might want to share with a babysitter or the parents of their children’s friends.

But this isn’t a post about sexism or gender bias. If I was going to stop at my rant about “the mommy card,” this post would be over on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

Here, I write about marketing and social media. And I’d like you to take away two marketing lessons from my Twitter exchange about “mommy cards.”

First, if your brand is criticized online, you need to figure out if the critic is a rational individual or a wing-nut. Ignore the wing-nuts and engage with the rational ones. VistaPrint figured out I was a rational human being, and reached out to me on Friday.

The company Twitter persona told me  why they promoted them as “mommy cards” and promised to share my feedback with the product team.

 

As I said in my tweets, I like the company. I’m a customer. I just didn’t like the concept of the “mommy card.” Full props to them for monitoring the Twitter stream and actively engaging with a customer. Makes it that much more likely that they’ll get my Christmas calendar order again this year.

Lesson number 2: VistaPrint told me that they used the term “mommy card” because the research indicated they should. My reply was that research didn’t make the term any less sexist.I firmly believe you can market calling cards to mothers without calling them “mommy cards.”

Now, you may disagree with me on the “mommy card” point (and I fully expect someone to do so), so don ‘t get too hung up on whether you agree with me that it is sexist. What I really want you to remember is that sometimes the research is wrong. Or more accurately, it is right, but you still shouldn’t do it.

This is particularly true when marketing to moms. Just calling a product “for moms” doesn’t make it so.

Be very careful about playing the mommy card.

 

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Smells like Social Media

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I have some serious topics on deck to share with you, including my thoughts on the state of  “earned media,” but today we have to take a little detour.

Because the press release I received this morning for the “Made for Social Media” attraction fragrance  is just so good bad, in a good way, that I have to share it.

As a friend said in a private email, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

But I’m not going to tell a bunch of jokes about the product, which apparently contains “a combination of human pheromones that have been clinically proven to increase feelings of arousal, excitement, social warmth and friendliness in both men and women.”  You can do that all on your own with no help from me.

I’m not even going to wonder about why I received the release, having never written about fragrances or pheremones, on any of my blogs.

Those two topics are such low-hanging fruit they are reseeding themselves as  I type this post. And I do write about social media, so I guess I’m fair game on that score.

Nor am I going to name the company, an aggregator of online forums, or delve too deeply into the value proposition of the scent, the subtext of which seems to be that social media types are so desperate, we need special help to attract a mate (and yes, I know that sentence will probably resurface the troll that drops in to insult me about once or twice a year. So be it.)

In the release, the company claims this endeavor will launch an entirely new business model for productizing through its online channels. And here’s where I go “What?”

They are going to sell a fragrance — a product that generally buyers like to smell before they fork over their cash — through forums, user bases that are notoriously defensive about any form of commerce occurring “on the boards?” Really? It seems like a commercial mis-match in the making.

Maybe they are just hopping on the social media bandwagon, figuring that all you need to do is slap a little “social media” on the front of the product and the news will just go viral (option 2).

Not to get too meta on you, but maybe they DID read my blog and know that I tend to comment on absurd things. Maybe their goal is to make us laugh? And they just couldn’t get the release finished in time for April 1? Option 3.

Whether they are serious and just misguided (options 1 and 3) or opportunistic (option 2), it seems like a real long shot to me.

And that’s what I want YOU to think about when you are percolating your really awesome breakthrough social media idea that is so groundbreaking it just has to go viral RIGHT AWAY.

Just because you call it social, doesn’t mean the community will agree.

Use social media to engage your audience in an authentic conversation about mutually interesting topics. Not just as a label to capitalize on a popular trend. It’s a bit like greenwashing, and just as offensive.

Who owns social media (redux)

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Photo from Flickr user toffehoff. Used under a Creative Commons license.

When I wrote about who owns social media last May, I couldn’t believe THEN that we were still asking this question. I’m both surprised (and yet not) a year later that we are *still* asking. As though there were a simple, and only one, right answer, and if we ask enough, eventually we’ll get whatever answer we want to hear.

Um no. Not going to happen. Social media involves people, and people are messy. Social media engagement also depends on our expression of both our individuality and the collective mind. Try to fit that neatly in a demographic box. The mass market still exists, it is just influenced by multiple micro-markets and their denizens.

No simple answer then.

In the column I wrote last year, I concluded that the company and the consumer were the “owners” of the relationship, and ad and PR agencies were facilitators. I’d like to take this a step further and advocate for an integrated marketing approach that I think will ultimately be more successful and productive.

Don’t tell anyone, but good social media marketing is simply good marketing. Just as in the “old days,” you wouldn’t limit yourself to a single tool in the marketing toolkit – advertising, PR, direct response, loyalty programs etc., no matter how successful it was, in the “new days,” you still need to deploy multiple tools. You can’t get seduced by the flavor (or Facebook) of the month and shift all your spend because “that’s what the cool kids are doing.”  You need an integrated approach to reach your consumer, because that’s how she consumes the information she gets. It’s not a different brand before and after we buy, in an ad versus a news article versus a blog post.

People use information from different sources in different ways.  A personal referral – our old friend word-of-mouth – is treated differently than the information conveyed in an advertisement or a magazine article. But we use all the information we collect to make a purchase decision, and we generally require more than one. No matter how much Aunt Sue loves her car, we look for independent reviews and probably consult the brand website.

Our marketing message needs to appropriately be in all the important places a consumer might look for it. Do we spend more of our budget in the most productive places? Absolutely. But smart marketers don’t make the mistake of limiting the plan to a single tactic. It’s marketing suicide. Even infomercial brands like OxiClean have distribution strategies in addition to the commercials, and do not get me started on all the failed high-tech start-ups that thought they could make it on PR buzz alone.

Smart marketers also don’t let functional silos, whether internal departments, outside agencies or a combination of both,  derail the story. Especially now, when customers have such a strong voice and will more easily see if the emperor has no clothes.  It’s not enough to hand out a messaging document and timeline to the various functions and allow them to go forth in their independent silos, with their independent strategies.

This of course brings ownership of strategy back to the brand, which is where it belongs. Agencies advise, and yes, strategize. But the brand owns it.

What does that mean in practice?

Agencies that take an integrated approach to strategy, either by vertical integration or actively seeking to work with in tandem with their counterpart agencies on the brand account, are going to be more attractive to brands than those that take a more silo’d approach. We already see this happening. Some will do it well. Some not so much. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that score.

Social media expertise will continue to shift in-house. It has to. To navigate the organizational boundaries, foster cross-functional and inter-departmental cooperation at the level required, the person responsible for social media engagement has to have the internal knowledge and ties that only a full-time, bottom-line driven employee can. And once social media moves in-house it will have multiple flavors. The best description of what this may turn out to look like is from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group in his piece on the two career paths of the corporate social strategist.

Warning: This integration will not be an easy road. It requires that everyone check their egos (and worries about budget) at the door. This is not easy if you run the PR agency and are worried about the ad agency getting your budget or vice versa. And within the organization, this social media “thing” is still considered a bit “squishy.” Internal champions have to navigate many hurdles, often including not having the budget for social media, just the mandate.

But I just don’t see any other way. The consumer views a product as a whole. We want a consistent experience across our interactions with the brand, whether it be functions (customer service, sales, finance) or marketing (ads, PR, coupons, sampling etc. ). And we expect to have those interactions across multiple channels – mass and micro media, new media and old.

Consumers see us as one “thing.” It’s about time we did as well.

What are you going to do to break down a silo or foster cross functional cooperation in your organization?

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Customer-centric marketing, the power of personal testimony and getting your listening ears on

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This past summer, when I was interviewing for jobs, I drafted the notes below for a follow-up meeting with a tech company (that ultimately did not happen.) Re-reading them recently, I realized they would make a decent post about the marketing process, so I stripped out the specifics.

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Marketing is a process that combines art and science. The more grounded your art is in your science, the more repeatable the process and the more successful you will be. The marketing plan also relies on many different inputs — including the expertise and experience of all the members of the team, past results, market research, data from the field and customer feedback. You can’t develop a marketing plan without the data and the team contributions.

Budget and timing are also factors.  When it comes to marketing tactics, there’s fast, cheap and everything in between. Typically, the most cost effective tactics take time to build before bearing fruit,  and when the situation demands fast results, it usually comes with a higher price tag.

To answer the question, What would you do?, you need to start with some more questions.

  • Who is the customer? How many of them are there in market?
  • What is the product she needs/wants? How well does the product we have match up to what she wants? This helps us understand market potential of a segment. We’re looking for the best fit with the largest possible number of customers. A perfect fit for a very small number of consumers is not sustainable, unless you’ve got a luxury product with high price tag and great margins.
  • What is the emotional driver for the purchase? How can we find a way to differentiate our product based on a dimension that matters to the customer? This is especially critical when you are trying to expand into a new market segment. You may have a very clear understanding of how your product fits the emotional needs of the your initial  customer segment, but no clear idea of how to appeal to a new group, even though you understand that there is an appeal.

For example, take end user security software like anti-virus and spam filtering. For the core customer of these products —  the 25-50 year old technology enthusiast  — the emotional purchase drivers are met by feeds, speeds and features.  He knows he needs security software for his PC  and can be swayed by product excellence, even at a higher price, because being the smartest guy with the best product satisfies an emotional need.

However, if a product is perceived as a commodity, the consumer is likely to be very price sensitive. That one product is better than the others won’t matter as much, unless it also happens to be the cheaper one.

Other segments, like retirees or moms, are less interested in the technical aspects of these products. They need to understand the benefits to them  AND that it won’t be difficult or expensive to obtain the benefits. Their emotional satisfaction in computer use does not come intrinsically from the computer and its operation. They use the computer to do something, and it is in the “something” that we find the emotional driver upon which to base messaging.

  • Where and how does she buy? Who does she trust when making a purchasing decision? We know referral is the best advertising. What referrals matter to this customer? Consumer electronics sales people ( a la Best Buy)? Friends and neighbors? How does this customer weigh testimonials from experts versus “people like me.”

This approach is a customer-centric marketing approach. You’ve got to put the process in place to find out what motivates and excites the target population, and then use this learning in marketing strategy and product development.

Once you have process in place, it is duplicable market to market. You still need creative ideas and the flash of intuition that reveals the killer idea for a specific marketing campaign, but you can’t get to those without the base.

The customer-centered approach is the first leg on the marketing “stool.” The other two are the power of personal testimony and listening posts.

The Power of Personal Testimony

Product messaging should always be grounded in customer experiences, but from their frame of reference, not the product. Consumer product goods companies understand this. In their mass market advertising anyway. No one tugs at the heartstrings better. A brand of laundry soap gets your clothes cleaner, but what it REALLY does is make you happy. Technology companies have a harder time understanding that it’s not the product that matters. It’s what the product lets us do, feel, understand etc.

And when I say customer experiences, I mean the real customers, not the hypothetical customers created in ad and PR agency conference rooms. The consumer has many ways to make her voice heard, from traditional customer service channels in your company to online reviews, social networks and blogging.

Tap into the real personal testimony.

For example, back to our spam filter example. Instead of advertisements in which the consumer thanks the computer security company  for protecting her computer, have her talk about how her life is easier/better now that she has the freedom to shop online and let her kids use the Internet without worrying about viruses, stalkers and identity theft.

Brand evangelist programs and user-generated content (especially video) are another effective way to tap into the power of personal testimony.

Of course in order to really tap into your customers as endorsers, you have to be listening to them.

Getting Your Listening Ears On: Establish online listening posts

You need an active online listening program to understand what is being said about your brand and the overall category online. Capturing online reviews, and feedback from customer service and your sales channels only scratches the surface. These channels capture the folks who really like you or really hate you.

A company needs to grasp the  “muddle in the middle” — what average folks say about a company, competitors and the product category in online forums other than the company’s own.  What they say about their lives and needs even when they do not mention products at all.

This acts as an online focus group and gives valuable  visibility into what the consumer really cares about.  This information can then be used to develop marketing programs, customer service offerings and new products.

Does active listening replace the need for things like focus groups and market research? Of course not. Traditional methods still offer tremendous value to the marketing task, particularly when it comes to measurement. Monitoring is largely dependent on the organic conversation. We’re just eavesdropping. To find out whether we’ve been successful with our programs, we need to ask specific questions, and the old research stand-bys are very relevant to that task.

If you don’t listen? It’s like a child sticking his fingers in his ears. You may not look as ridiculous but it’s just as stupid. And ultimately ineffective.

Brands & companies getting it right at BlogHer ’10: Liberty Mutual, Pepsi, P&G (BlogHer Marketing Lessons part 5)

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O Pepsi
Image by Lel4nd via Flickr

The comments, both here and on Facebook, on the previous marketing lessons posts have been terrific and chock full of examples, some of which we should strive to emulate, and others that we definitely want to avoid.

In this post I’m going to share my three picks for official sponsor companies that got it right at BlogHer ’10. These are by no means the only ones that did, but I have some specific learning points in each example.

Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project

I’ve been aware of the Responsibility Project since they reached out to me just before last year’s BlogHer. I don’t get many pitches and respond to even fewer but given my interest in ethics, disclosure and responsible blogging, I’m a good fit for their message of  “do the right thing” and have written about the Project a few times over the past year. I was delighted when I received an invitation to its outing to Ellis Island the day before BlogHer. I’ve been to New York many times, and seen most of the main tourist attractions, but never Ellis Island. So I RSVP’d yes, and made my initial travel plans to get to NY that morning in time to join the trip.  (BTW in the end, my plans changed and I went to NY on the Tuesday to film a roundtable discussion on celebrity worship, also for the Responsibility Project.) The Ellis Island trip was terrific as a sightseeing excursion and I highly recommend it. Details for organizing your own visit are on SCR.

Here’s why it worked as a blogger event.

Unique – The Ellis Island venue was a nice change from the usual meet & greet cocktail party/luncheon accompanied by swag bag that we’ve come to expect from blogger events. It also fit well with the theme of responsibility, although I admit that I nearly laughed out loud in the brief luncheon presentation by Peg Zitko, VP of Public Affairs at The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation when she tied the concept of responsibility to President Reagan’s decision that the American people should be responsible for restoring the Statue and Ellis Island through private donation rather than federal subsidy. Nothing against her message about the importance of the public contributions to the restoration — that’s an important story —  but responsible is not exactly how I would describe Reagan’s policies. Oh well, never mind…

The group was small, about 30 women. This made it easy to mingle and chat, and actually get to know each other. Liberty Mutual PR agency Ketchum told me they invited bloggers who they have been working with already, like me, and others who they wanted to get to know better because they thought the Responsibility Project themes would resonate for them.

Here are posts from:

The swag bag was appropriate and thoughtful — sunscreen, lipblock, bottled water, some snacks and an autographed copy of the Ellis Island cookbook written by our tour guide Tom Bernardin.

Limited lecturing – Because the trip was sightseeing, it seemed likely that the company presentations would be brief so we could enjoy the venue. They were. Senior Vice President, Communications Paul Alexander greeted us after we boarded the bus at the Hilton, said a few words and showed a brief film of clips from Responsibility Project commercials and media coverage. At lunch, we were treated to the afore mentioned brief talk from Peg Zitko and a screening of Second Line, a short film directed by and starring Danny Glover. That’s about it. Instead of bombarding us with presentations (or crafts) the Liberty Mutual and Ketchum people mingled and enjoyed the trip with us.

Executive commitment –– Major kudos to Paul Alexander who joined us for the whole trip, and managed to still look cool and crisp in his suit and tie at the end of the day, when we all looked a bit frazzled and fried. This is the kind of commitment from company executives that bloggers want to see. Not a few words and a hand wave as he or she is escorted from the room, and on to presumably more important things. I was most impressed by this, although perhaps I should have expected it. It is after all the right thing to do, and I have come to believe that Liberty Mutual walks its talk.

Procter & Gamble

I didn’t spend much time on the Expo floor. In my early career, one of my duties was tradeshow coordinator and I spent my fair share of time setting up, working and dismantling trade show booths of all sizes. As a result, I have a love-hate relationship with trade shows. I love the customer contact and the energy when you have a great conversation with a prospect or a reporter. However, the very venue reminds me of endless hours manning show booths or waiting for freight to be delivered etc etc. As a result, unless there is something I am specifically interested in, I tend to cruise through as fast as possible. In the case of cleaning products and groceries, my family will tell you straight up that I am not the buyer 🙂 so I also don’t want to waste the booth staff’s time chatting with me.

However, I was impressed by the sheer size of the P&G booth, and heard many good things about it from folks who spent some time with the P&G reps. Even if all you did was walk by, you got the idea the P&G had made a serious commitment to BlogHer.

Other things P&G did right:  In addition to the show floor, it had suite space for its new brand Align. The reflexology massage was awesome! More importantly, though, it was paying attention before BlogHer. As I’ve mentioned previously, it offered (and I accepted) free samples of Align for the attendees at the pre BlogHer BBQ. That gives the brand some mindshare even before people get to the conference. Given the noise and competition for attention once BlogHer starts, this is smart marketing.

Pepsi

Pepsi had a lot of things going on during BlogHer but I’m going to single out one, because I think it is very important, not just as a marketing lesson, but as an example for anyone interested in gender equality. Or parity if you prefer.

It is a well known fact that there are not enough women elected officials in this country. Not enough women run, and of those who do, not enough win. The day before the main conference, BlogHer partnered with the White House Project to hold a workshop for women interested in running for office. NY York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also held a brief meeting with political and NY bloggers during the conference to focus attention on women as candidates.

However, I believe our political reality won’t change, or change enough, until the business world changes. Until more women are in positions of business power and choose to use those powers for good. To make change in the world. And to support women candidates.

Pepsi, helmed by a woman, CEO Indra Nui,  seems to be doing just that. The company took the opportunity at BlogHer to showcase some of its senior executive women. It brought a panel of senior executive women to BlogHer for a “Sofa Summit” moderated by Campbell Brown to talk about Pepsi’s forays into social media, being a senior executive, nutrition and yes, even their families. I was privileged to be invited to this breakfast session attended by about 30 women bloggers, many (but not all) of whom write about gender issues.

This is important — to see  women in senior executive positions at top brands.We need more of it.

Now you may have noticed that I didnt include any of the entertainment brands in my picks. Does that mean I don’t think Ubisoft got it right with Let’s Dance 2? Of course not. The dance-offs in the booth were brilliant, and many many bloggers tremendously enjoyed this booth. It’s also a slam dunk. Nothing in marketing is ever easy, but it is a lot easier to come up with fun ways for customers to engage with entertainment brands. Fun is already the point.

It’s a whole lot harder to make insurance, soap and soda sexy. That’s why Liberty Mutual, P&G and Pepsi are my top picks.

Unrelated to BlogHer specifically, but apropos of brands getting social media engagement with their customers “right,” brands that have a track record of positive engagement with customers in other venues tend to hit more than they miss when deploying social media tools. They aren’t perfect — no one is — but they already seem to understand the importance of connecting with customers over shared values, not simply products.

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On October 14, I will be speaking at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women in Pittsburgh on using social media to build your brand and advance your career. Early registration price is $135 and expires Sept. 1oth. But… courtesy of the conference organizers, I have a pass to give away . Just leave a comment on this post by noon eastern time on September 14th. I’ll use a random number generator to pick a winner.

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Disclosure: Liberty Mutual hosted us for the day, providing transportation to/from Battery Park and the Hilton, the ferry ticket and guided tour of Ellis Island and lunch, plus the afore mentioned swag bag. I also participated in the celebrity worship roundtable; my extra hotel costs for Tuesday and Wednesday nights were covered and the participants received a small honorarium for our participation. I attended Pepsi’s Sofa Summit breakfast on Saturday. P&G sent samples of Align for the attendees of the Boston pre-BlogHer BBQ at my house, and like many attendees, I received a reflexology massage at its BlogHer suite.

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