Author: Fabrizio

What marketing is not

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The inability to listen. The idea that by interrupting and telling your story people will be amazed. The practice of segmenting into hundreds of small niches to feed them whatever they want today. The ideas of optimization, hacking, ranking, fans and followers. The belief that data is better than interactions. The effort to second-guess needs and wants to stay clear of the risk of asking. The easy shortcut of personalised and automated user journey. The unrelentless focus on growth.

Marketing is not ruining the world. The things above are. And at the same time they set expectations, both for marketers and customers, that cannot be met, leading to inevitable dissatisfaction.

Key insights and themes from the research include:

  • Data is a dilemma. But “big data” isn’t marketing’s biggest challenge. It is actually the “small data” – the data used to describe the small, specific attributes delivered directly from the customer through, as an example, the Internet of Things. 36 percent of respondents believe that small data will be the greatest challenge for the organization.
  • We’ve lost the ability to be human, and we can’t blame the machines. Some 41 percent admit that they are overly focused on driving campaigns, forgetting that they are building relationships. Nearly 30 percent admit they think of their customers in terms of targets, records and opportunities – interestingly an equal amount admit that they are also struggling to define and deliver returns from customer experience strategies.
  • Going small could bring our humanity back. Marketers believe small data will help extract better signal from the noise (45 percent), reveal the “why” behind customer actions and behaviors (41 percent), help focus on the people behind the data to deliver more human interactions (35 percent) and aid in filling key gaps across the customer journey (35 percent.)

CMO Council Research

 

When does feedback matter?

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Feedback is important, and as I wrote before the only thing to say when we get it is “thank you”.

Yet, we should not fall into the trap of taking action on every piece of feedback we get. Feedback is about the person who is giving it much more than it is about the person who is getting it. If I tell somebody “you should be more productive”, that simply means that the person does not fit into my idea of productivity. If somebody tells me “you should listen more”, that simply means that from where they stand, they are under the impression I am not listening enough.

Consider three things when you get feedback.

Who is giving it? Is that a person you care about, somebody important in your life? Is that your customer, or somebody your work is not intended for? Is that a friend, a family-member, somebody who knows you intimately?

What channel is it coming from? Did they bother picking up the phone, sharing their thoughts face-to-face, at least letting you know who they are? Or is it an anonymous feedback, something you are reading on social media, the starred opinion of a faceless and nameless reader?

What are they saying? Is it something you are hearing for the first time, or something somebody else has already noticed about you in the past? Is it a piece of advice you can act on, or just an opinion, a feeling, a thought? Are they sharing kindly, from the bottom of their heart, or are they being mean, malicious, trying to elicit any kind of reaction?

Once you have considered all this, of course still say “thank you”. And take action only if it makes sense. Otherwise, move on and continue delivering your best work.

Free throws

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Rick Barry was the best free throw shooter the NBA had ever seen when he retired. The last three seasons of his career were his best seasons from the line, he even registered a high of 94.7% in his second to last season. Even today, 40 years on, he is number seven in this particular all time list.

The fact is, Rick Barry had a very peculiar way of shooting free throws.

Sometimes, you can achieve excellent results by doing something new, something unexpected, something others might actually laugh at you for. If you persist and you are good enough, you can prove there’s another way, a better way, and pass it on as a sort of legacy.

For all others, there’s the way everybody knows. Both are fine, and it’s up to you to decide how to excel. The key is to be comfortable with what you choose to do.

 

When to get prepared

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When things are calm. When you are surrounded by people you love and that love you. When your job is solid, and you have the respect of your colleagues and of your managers. When waking up in the morning is a pleasure, and you find out you enjoy things that you generally do not notice. When you have everything you could ask for, you are peaceful and willing to extend a hand to others in need. When the greatest worry is something you used to not even consider a while back.

That is the moment to prepare for harsh times.

It does not mean you should not cherish what you have, just that you should keep training for what you fear the most, so that when it will come it will not be as bad as it initially seemed. Eventually, you will find that the human condition is quite bearable, even in its darkest times.

[…] it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs manoeuvres, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil.

Seneca, letter 18

Some things work

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Before you set out to change something, make sure it needs changing.

Elevators, for example, probably do not need dramatic improvements. Particularly in their user experience, they work fairly well. You are at a certain floor, you press a button to call the elevator, you enter it, you select the floor you want to go to, it moves and stop, you exit the elevator, done. It is a pretty well oiled dynamic, and trying to make it more efficient – say by asking people to select the floor they are going to at the same time they call the elevator – might create funny confusion and make the process slower.

Similarly, the process of listening to music on a mobile phone was fairly smooth without needing to remove the jack and forcing people to use bluetooth headphones. Of course, improving the user experience was not primary in this case, and so eventually the whole process now feels more clunky and unreliable.

Not everything needs changing, not everything needs improvement. And if eventually your decision is that yes, this thing does really need to be better, put the users first when designing the betterment.