Category: marketing

Elements of value

Fabrizio1 Comment

It is not enough to say that your company focuses on delivering values to customers.

What is value?

If you don’t stop for a long moment considering this question, you are not focused on value. Value is economical, and it is also technical, social, personal, functional, aspirational. Value takes into consideration material costs, and also possible issues, adoption, expansion, scale. Value is transactional and relational. Value is co-operative.

And once you have identified all the elements that make up your value, you still have two steps to take.

First, you have to understand the why of value. Why does it matter. Not tomorrow, not one year from now, not one day maybe. But now.

Then, you have to build a system that constantly delivers on the elements across the various departments, that captures and measures the elements, that continues assessing them, that creates incremental evidence for them, and that ensures that they are not replicated by competitors and new entrants.

Value is a complex concept, not another organisational buzz word.

The marketer’s dilemma

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Got an interesting newsletter from Peep Laja at Wynter.com this morning, that got me thinking of the marketer’s dilemma.

If a marketer does boring and safe, nobody will object. If they do as it’s always been done. If they use terms like productivity, efficiency, streamlined, best-in-class, seamless. Even when every one at the table has a different understanding and a different experience of what those terms mean, nobody will object. Because who is going to stand up and say “what is productivity?”.

If a marketer does specific and unusual, on the other hand, everyone will panic.

Of course, boring and safe will bring you nowhere, because boring and safe is what 94.97% of companies do. So, the marketer’s dilemma is really between being accepted among their peers in the short term and being well received by the market in the long term.

It is a difficult choice.

Overestimating

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are bad at communicating in written form.

We overestimate our capability to share meaning via a written message, and most importantly to share the underlying emotions, mainly because we fail to understand that our audience is often in a different state of mind.

Two considerations.

If you are about to send a written message, and even more so if you do that for a living (as is the case for marketers), you will increase the chances to be effective when you spend enough time understanding who you are sending to. Also, if you plan to add some color to the message (anger, sadness, sarcasm, humor), use visual cues (emoticons, GIFs, images).

If you are responsible for the internal communication of an organization, you will increase the chances for your employees to be effective by providing more training and tools that support visual communication rather than written communication.

Templates

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I used to start working on presentations by opening PowerPoint (or Google Slide). Now I start on a piece of paper, perhaps with the aid of some post-its.

The reason is simple. When I started planning my presentation on a set of slides, or on a template, I always ended up twisting the message to make it fit. Of course, I could always change the slide or the template, but the reality is that by approaching presentations this way I would always always tend to have the visual dictate what I would say.

If you start on a piece of paper, instead, you have the freedom to choose the topics you want to cover, the points you want to make, the pace you want to sustain. You can jot down ideas, scratch them, link them, expand on them, and already come up with a pretty solid backbone for what your telling is going to feel like.

From there on, it is all details. And that is when templates, slides, pictures, styles, animations should come into the scene.

The outcome of your presentation will depend a lot on your audience, your message, and the change you seek to make. None of that is accounted for in any PowerPoint template.

Positioning Bernie

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If you have been around the internet in the past week, you have certainly seen it.

One of the greatest example of positioning in recent times.

The informal attire of Bernie Sanders to last week’s presidential inaguration, the meme-frenzy that followed, and the way him and his team promptly reacted. All of it has put on display a fantastic positioning exercise.

  1. It has set the product clearly apart from the competition (in this case, other personalities or politicians). Just look at this picture to see what I mean. Or this one. Sanders has built his brand on being against the establishment and close to the average Joe, and spotting him at the inauguration was just a clear, immediate confirmation of exactly that.
  2. It has demonstrated a wonderful knowledge of the target market. Many commentators might have said that he was out of place, that it was even offensive to show up at such a formal event dressed like that. And the answer from Sanders and his team would have probably been: who cares?! Because the point of positioning, at the end of the day, is not to appeal to everybody, but to appeal to your best customer. Wearing mittens hand made from recycled material by a Vermont school teacher and a jacket by a Vermont outerware company sounds pretty on point for a progressive senator from Vermont.
  3. It inspired action. A part from the meme, the story has been shared, liked, commented infinite times on social media in the past few days (you can find a collection of the funniest Bernie posts in this article). And on top of it, Sanders’ team has double down on positioning by creating merchandise and selling it to support Meals on Wheels.

There is nothing better than great marketing, whether it is intentional or not.