Tag: social media

Breadcrumbs

FabrizioLeave a comment

Last week, Facebook announced its cryptocurrency Libra. The next day, The Verge’s Casey Newton released the second part of his report on Facebook moderators, those who are supposed to solve Facebook’s problem with toxic content.

This is a company that for a long time has been misaligned. While preaching connection and innovation, the platform is generating far more problems for society and communities than it is solving. The leadership is failing to address such disasters, dodging bullets and any sort of responsibilities, while focusing on metrics that very little have to do with “bringing the world closer together”.

There’s an important lesson here.

You can be successful, rich, important even by creating a product that gives a sounding board to 3,000,000 pieces of toxic content every day. That manipulates democracy and facilitates genocide. That steps on basic human rights and gives away users’ data for illegal purposes.

But at the end of the day, what do you want to leave behind?

A reminder

FabrizioLeave a comment

What would be of your marketing if tomorrow you would be left without behavioural information, pixels, tracking, preferences, and so on?

Just a reminder that the tools you use today to deliver your message are just tools. Much more important is what’s behind that: what you stand for, what your customers stand for, what your products stand for. Once you have that clear, the rest will come no matter what.

On-demand advertising

FabrizioLeave a comment

I am shopping for a new car, and only today I spent a couple of hours looking for a good option for my family and myself.

With all the content and ads we are exposed to nowadays, I find it puzzling that there is no single space on the internet where I can go, say what I am looking for and get a number of customised (i.e., based on the needs and wants I would state) offers from different dealers.

We have been sold the idea of behavioural advertising (i.e., ads based on where I have been and what I have done on the internet) and of contextual advertising (i.e., ads based on where I am on the internet). Businesses got lazy, and forgot about the arts of asking and (really) listening.

Of course, when you ask and listen, there are two things happening that possibly get businesses (and marketing departments) into troubles.

First of all, you have to deliver. On-demand advertising would mean that when the customer expresses their needs and wants, you need to have a single matching offer to meet those (rather than having a range of offers that may bend customer’s needs and wants).

Second, you have to be the best. While many different businesses can ran ads on the same topic and find solace in some more or less meaningless metrics (reach, impressions, engagement, click-throughs, conversions, and so on), on-demand advertising would have one winner only. The one who gets the deal.

Positioning

FabrizioLeave a comment

What does a book from the 80s have to teach to marketers today?

Let’s see.

Advertising is, for the most part, unwanted and unliked. In some cases, advertising is thoroughly detested.

[…]

In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. Millions of dollars have been wasted trying to change minds with advertising. Once a mind is made up, it’s almost impossible to change it. Certainly not with a weak force like advertising.

[…]

as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users.

These are some of the aspects Ries and Trout start from in their book, Positioning: how to be seen and heard in the overcrowded marketplace. And they bear quite incredible similarities to the environment marketers operate in nowadays. Almost 40 years after the book was written.

The solution to this mix of sensory overload and advertising inefficacy is positioning, the process that leads (better, should lead) companies to identify a space in the prospect’s mind and leverage it for growth and success. Contrary to common shared belief, indeed, growth and success are not in the product and its features, they are in how the audience and particularly your prospects remember and talk about you.

Not surprisingly, Ries and Trout share quite many examples of companies who did positioning right and companies who did it wrong (back in the Seventies and Eighties), and perhaps the more interesting examples are the ones the authors dedicate a full chapter each in the second half of the book. Some commonalities.

  • Find a space (“cherchez le creneau”, as they say in French) that is not taken, no matter if it is a small one, and be the first to move there.
  • To find that space, the company needs to know a whole lot of things that have very little to do with the product or service they offer: market, competitors, audience, prospects, and so on.
  • Be mindful of the importance of the name of your product or service, better if it is a name that reminds what the product or service stands for.
  • Avoid name extensions to the best of your abilities (“When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it“).
  • Be consistent with your positioning strategy in the long-term, particularly in times of change, when it is more beneficial to change tactics rather than strategy.

Positioning is one of those books that anybody who starts a career in marketing should read and keep close throughout their careers. It really is too easy to forget about the importance of everything that is not the product/service you are offering (competitors, environment, audience, etc.) and fall in love with words and messages that mean literally nothing to the people you seek to serve.

This is the classic mistake made by the leader. The illusion that the power of the product is derived from the power of the organization. It’s just the reverse. The power of the organization is derived from the power of the product, the position that the product owns in the prospect’s mind.

 

 

Metrics that distract

Fabrizio1 Comment

Reading this reminded me of the time I found a job ad for Social Media Manager listing 1,000 (or was it 10,000) friends on Facebook as a requisite to apply.

We are easily mislead by what is not important, and so we believe that doing Marketing on social media is about metrics that are as much visibile as they are insignificant. And of course, managers and executives are then disappointed when they come to this very realization.

Continue focusing on bringing consistent value to your audience where they are, and stay clear of distraction-metrics. Long-term success will be your reward.