Holiday thoughts on marketing

Just back from holiday during which I had time to reflect on fundamental stuff while horizontal and sunkissed. In fact I had some great “being marketed to” experiences, which just confirmed the basics in market. (Context: tourist volumes are down by (some say) 30% in Tenerife.)

1. Have a great product. Let people try the great product, for free. If it’s truly great they’ll buy it. Example: every restaurant along the beach front is touting for business, showing their menus and encouraging reluctant holidaymakers to venture inside. One restaurant, not even on the beach front, is full. That’s the one that’s handing out free samples of fried cod. It tasted great. There was a queue just to get the free samples. Why did no other restaurant try this, and hand out samples of paella? Near-zero incremental cost, ROI in one order.
2. You can differentiate in a commodity market. In Tenerife, all the resorts look basically the same. All the beaches look the same. All the restaurants serve the same food. All the shops sell the same stuff. Differentiation comes through service, through care for customer needs, through creativity. (Note to self: not everyone will appreciate attempts at differentiation. Elvis impersonators appeal to a niche market.)
3. If you have to lie to your prospects to get their attention, there’s something fundamentally wrong in your approach. I’m not sure exactly what the young people offering prize draw scratch cards were selling (timeshare?) but after the fifth time of being accosted even my kids recognised the script. No, you cannot hand the winning ticket in to the tourist office. There are not only three winning tickets each day (or I am improbably lucky, since I won five times). No, I haven’t possible won a cash prize, but I’ll bet you a tenner I’ve won the “free” holiday.

And they say holidays are relaxing…

PR votes to carry on lying

I’ve recently been writing and blogging on the Insanity of Marketing. But can there be a more insane branch of marketing than PR?

Martin Moore’s blog directs us to a debate held at Westminster University, the motion of which was that “PR has a duty to tell the truth.” I don’t know whether to laugh at the fact that the motion was defeated, or at the fact they had to debate the issue at all. Can anyone suggest another profession that would hold such a debate?

The majority view amongst PR is that their duty of care is towards their clients, and that this sometimes (often?) conflicts with the truth. In these cases, it seems permissible to lie.

The trouble I have with this admission is not that PR has to wrestle with conflicts of interest and ethics. It is that, once you know a PR firm lies, how can you ever tell if it’s telling the truth? And if the majority of the industry admits to the practice, doesn’t this undermine the whole industry?

As it happens, I know many PR professionals, and professional they are. I’m sure they’ll be dismayed by the results of the vote, and hopefully of the debate itself.

I think that PR has shot itself in the foot. It could do with appointing a PR firm to limit the damage, lie a little, and put PR in a positive spin.

Paying for influence – don’t do it!

I’m surprised that this issue is up for debate. Yet Joel Spolsky, a credible blogger on software markets, relates his thoughts on being offered a free laptop in return for reviewing Microsoft’s Vista.

My surprise is doubled when I read that Robert Scoble, a blog hero of mine, endorses the practice. Notwithstanding Scoble is these days a MS employee, he often takes a position contrary to the corporate thought police. But not this time – Scoble thinks paying reviewers (in kind) is okay.

Scoble seems to think it’s purely an ethical issue, and that if you disclose the bribe you’re off the hook.

Not so. Influence isn’t just about ethics. It’s about credibility. How credible is a reviewer if it’s known they’ve been given a freebie worth several hundred pounds? Or that they were flown, expenses paid, to Seattle?

It’s really, really tempting, with a huge marketing budget at your disposal, to spend it on this type of stunt. “If you can, you should” as the advert goes. It’s this sort of act that gets marketing a bad name. Resist, please.

I also have a more general concern, and that is that bloggers’ influence (at least in the US) is rated higher than it actually is. Some bloggers do have influence, but not many and only in certain markets. Has Microsoft any sense of who the truly influential bloggers are, and why?

I thought not…

Influence and the “Derren Brown effect”

Over the festive season, I had the chance to watch Derren Brown’s act onTV. For those unititiated, Derren Brown is an illusionist capable of getting ordinary people to do strange things. Some of his act involves hypnotism, but much of it is based on suggestion and misdirection.

I was gobsmacked by his finale. This involved random members of a live audience selecting a newspaper at random, then choosing a page at random, then selecting a word on that page. Derren then reveals the contents of previously-sealed envelope and, of course, the chosen word matches.

The word was “Influential”.

This act, impressively performed, got me thinking – does this have anything to do with Influencer Marketing? At first blush, the answer is “little”. This is trickery, illusion for the masses, set in an artificial environment (a theatre) and the audience, even if professionally employed, are out of their business mindset.

Derren adds a key element to his act that sets him apart from most other performers – he shows how his illusions are done. Derren films the whole show secretly, then at the end plays back to the audience the key directions and suggestions that pepper the act. We can all see how the audience was led into choosing the word that was anything but random.

This is precisely what Influencer Marketing is about, except that it’s done overtly as a professional practice rather than a covert illusion. And the process of influence takes months and years, not a couple of hours.

I bet you’d spend your entire marketing budget to establish an environment which led your prospects, unanimously, to the conclusion to buy from you.

Derren Brown is often criticised for demonstrating his talents in allegedly unethical ways – persuading respectable businessmen to conduct a robbery, for example.

Influencer Marketing can be criticised as unethical manipulation too. As always, it’s up to the practitioners to ensure they stay on the right side of the line.