Marketing can be a friendly activity (Courtesy of {eclaire})
Sometimes, I wonder why the world of marketing has to be so competitive.
Many marketing strategies reek of a “command and conquer” mentality. We’re constantly told to “benchmark” against our competitors, “target” or “ambush” our customers, offer “value” pricing, and “position” ourselves such that we have an “advantage” over other similar businesses.
Serial entrepreneur and billionaire Lynda Resnick’s book “Rubies in the Orchard” provides a fascinating glimpse into the marketing strategies behind brands like POM Wonderful, FIJI Water, Teleflora and the Franklin Mint. Part autobiography and part business book, the highly readable tome chronicled how Lynda rose from rags to riches and deployed her marketing smarts to seed and grow four highly successful businesses.
Written in a witty and conversational fashion, Rubies in the Orchard presents an in-depth glimpse into four very different industries. In the section on Teleflora, Lynda described how marketing is “all about listening. You want to be the equivalent of a good friend”. She then described how an attribute can be a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) based on the following:
Ebenezer Scrooge may have more company this Christmas (image source)
Penny pinchers. Value-for-money shoppers. Bargain bin hunters.
Call them what you may, thrifty consumers have been around since time immemorial. The recent economic onslaught and accompanying rise in inflation will likely increase this group of discount shoppers. In a cash and job strapped situation, everybody – rich and poor alike – will pay more attention to their wallets.
Christmas is in the air, and retailers are all out to garner those precious year-end gifting dollars. With bonuses likely to be bountiful this year, any business worth its salt would be finding ways and means to target the consumer wallet.
Young children probably form one of the most important markets in the season of giving and receiving. Nothing beats the story of how Santa Claus will shimmy down your chimney – or rubbish chute in Singapore’s highrise context – and bear tidings of fun-tabulous toys. On a more pragmatic level though, how can companies cream this festive occasion for their own profits (and bonuses of course)?
Give up? The answers, according to uber guru Tom Peters and Martha Barletta in their slim volume Trends are oodles of cash, purchasing power and huge influence.
Written in Peters’ no-holds-barred, rant-heavy and straight talking narrative, Trends provides lots of facts, figures and anecdotes to show that women and Baby Boomers are probably the two largest blindspots in the eyes of marketers everywhere. With a steely-eyed determination to tear down age-old prejudices against the “weaker sex” and “old geezers”, Peters and Barletta described how myopic views of catering largely to “White men in the 18 to 44 age group” have resulted in organisations neglecting huge markets worth “trillions of dollars”.
Courtesy of eTour Singapore
Festive holidays have always brought much cheer to those in the retail and service businesses, especially seasonal ones like Christmas, Chinese New Year, Deepavali and Hari Raya Puasa. Considered peak periods for those in the consumer and lifestyle industries, festive holidays are peppered with numerous promotions and special deals by shops in order to trigger purchases both impromptu and planned.
Many retail outlets are dressed to the nines during these occasions, decked in splendid eye-catching and attention-grabbing hues.
Surprising Them May Be Better Than Satisfying Them (Courtesy of Anthony Cain)
In many B-schools, the mantra for marketing goes something like this:
Do surveys and profile studies to determine what your target customers prefer.
Courtesy of gapingvoid.com
As I trawl through my RSS feeds this week, the following posts caught my eye.
The first is this fascinating titbit in Branding Strategy Insider which noted how Chinese adopting Western names are using more unique monikers to make themselves stand out from the usual Toms, Dicks and Sallys. They include a young lady who calls herself Vanilla Wang, an artist working on wood-block prints who is renamed Colour Zhao, and a Beijing video editor called Thunder Wang. The rationale behind this is to give greater significance to their names and to also make themselves more easily remembered from the seas of Johns and Janes – a legacy of the traditional Chinese emphasis of according meanings to names.
Customers should feel as relaxed as spending a day at the beach
While browsing various blogs, websites and news feeds today, I was suddenly hit by a thought. What if we make it more enjoyable for our customers to transact and purchase from us? In other words, improve the quality of their time spent with us.
As many would have heard, time is often more precious than money. You can’t buy a day, an hour or even the second that has slipped by. As the saying goes “Carpe Diem!” or “Seize the Day!” goes, one doesn’t want to waste precious discretionary time doing something utterly boring, meaningless or frustrating. The best way to avoid the ravages of time – at least to your consumer – is to offer an experience that is so compelling and “magical” that they no longer remember that they are spending their precious days of leave spending hard earned cash on you.
Dinosaurs are a surefire hit, but should all museums have them? (taken at Melbourne Museum)
Should museums and galleries always attract the largest and widest crowd possible, attracting/attacking every customer segment? Can they be scholastically superior, operationally efficient, highly entertaining, marketing savvy, and customer oriented at the same time? Are major blockbuster exhibitions the only way to draw a big crowd?
Some of these issues were tackled in this excellent post by Nina Simon (of Museums 2.0 blog) in an interview she conducted with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard, authors of the book “Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions”. Admittedly, I haven’t read the book yet but I am definitely going to check it out.
