Marketing Pointers

Social Media presentation

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Has marketing got anything to do with customers?

O2, the mobile telecoms provider, has just announced that it is axing 40 marketing jobs as it "aims to put the emphasis back on the customer."

If that's the case, can I ask what the heck those 40 so-called "marketers" who are losing their jobs have been doing up until now - presumably, ignoring the customer?

The story reminded me of a recent article on MarketingProfs.com entitled Dear Marketing: An Open Letter From Your Customer which should be required reading for any marketer. And, of course, it also reminds me of one of my favourite marketing books - It's All About Customers by John Frazer-Robinson. Need I say more?

Who is your customer?

I know what the obvious answer to that question is: "it's the person (or company) who buys from us" and no one can argue with that definition, but a deeper understanding of the existing customer base is an important step in the marketing programme for any business. Understanding more about your current customers helps you to:

§ sell them more of what they're looking for

§ communicate better with them

§ attract more like them

One way to understand you customers is to "segment" them -- for example, if you sell direct to the public you might segment your existing customer base by age, lifestyle, occupation, income, or a host of other criteria: which ones are relevant will depend on your business and the products or service that you sell.

If you are in the business-to-business market, you might "segment" your customers by size of business, type of business, location or, again, a host of other criteria depending on your products or services.

But there's another way of looking at it: ask yourself these three questions

§ Who pays the invoice? 

§ Who places the order?

§ Who benefits from the product/service?

Now, these may be three different individuals within a customer company -- but by asking yourself the question is, it may help you decide how to communicate to with that company - it may need different communication messages to each of the three people for example.

To illustrate the value of this sort of analysis, consider the marketing communications carried out by Intel, manufacturers of the Pentium processor (computer chip).  We’ve all seen their recent TV advertising (aimed at us as consumers) for a product that is simply a component within the product that the consumer actually buys (i.e. the computer)

But what Intel realised was that "who pays the invoices" (i.e. the computer manufacturers like Dell or Compaq) had other chip manufacturers they could buy from; and maybe they’d make their decision chiefly on the price of the chips (and Intel aren't the cheapest in the market!).

So who places the orders?  Well, again, the computer manufacturers - but could Intel find a way of influencing them?

YES - through "who benefits from the product": in other words you and me, the computer users.  Hence the high-profile (and expensive!) consumer TV advertising campaigns convincing us to look for the "Intel inside" logo on the computer we buy.

So even though we may never actually buy anything from Intel (in terms of ordering from them or paying one of their invoices) we're certainly a "customer" in Intel's eyes and by successfully communicating with us through their TV campaigns they have maintained their dominant position in the highly competitive computer chip market.

So try looking at your “customers” in these different ways - you might be surprised at the ideas that suggest themselves to you!

The A, B, C, D, E of effective promotion

Promotion of your business, or any of its individual products or services is a process of communication, so the same rules apply as would apply to any other form of communication. Let's take, for example, the situation where you decide to invite friends over for dinner one evening. Here are the likely steps that you would take:

Step A
You decide who you want to invite
Step B
You decide on how much money (and time) to spend on the invitations - is this an occasion that justifies splashing-out on printed invitations or just a low-key evening with costs kept the minimum?
Step C
You decide on what you want to say to your friends - is this a special occasion, for example, or perhaps just a long time since you saw these friends?
Step D
You then decide the best method of conveying the message - is it by phone, by letter, by e-mail, or by printed invitation?
Step E
You need to know your friends’ response - are they going to come? An "RSVP" on the invitation, for example, would let you know.

Now, let's go through the same sequence for your next business promotion:

Step A
Decide who your target audience is - be as specific as you can. Get a mental picture of the typical person you want to communicate with.
Step B
Decide on a budget! Be realistic; relate it to the likely returns from your promotional campaign. And don’t forget to “budget” for the time needed to carry out the campaign as well!
Step C
Decide on the message. You know what you want to tell people - but having got a mental picture of your audience in step 1, try to think what they want to hear, and how they expect to hear it - in other words, what tone to use in your message.
Step D
Decide on how to deliver your message - in other words what media are you going to use? Again, with the mental picture of your potential customer from Step 1, you should be able to imagine what papers/magazines they might read, what radio station they might listen to, and what else influences their decision-making.
Step E
and this is this step that’s so often forgotten! But, just as you want to know the response of your friends when you invite them to dinner (and for example, if you invite them several times but they always seem to have a reason for not coming, you'd maybe begin to get the message about them as "friends"). Well, isn't it the same with customers? Don't you want to know what they think about your business and the promotional messages you aim at them? Remember what we said at the beginning of this article - "promotion … is a form of communication." Any good communication is a two-way process and therefore needs feedback from recipients of the original message. And in promotional terms, eliciting response also gives you a means of measuring how effective the promotion has been.

So, here’s the summary of what the A, B, C, D, E of successful promotion stands for:

A is for Audience: who do you want to speak to?
B is for Budget: how much (money and time) are you going to spend?
C is for Content: what do you want to say and what does your audience want to hear?
D is for Delivery: what is the most appropriate medium to use to reach the your audience?
E is for Evaluation: have you built in a means of getting feedback, so you can judge the effectiveness of your campaign?