Marketer Ben Mack said once in talk I saw “Make the customer your hero”. I like this saying. He attributed this insight to his ability to help a Yo-Yo company sell over a billion dollars in it’s new threaded device. Aren’t we all heroes in our own mind?

I’d go so far as to say we already have multiple universes. The multi-verse that scientists are still arguing about already exists. It exists and it measures just over 6 billion of them. The ME universe or (if you prefer the ME3601 universe). More expansive than the Milky Way and even more mysterious. Each one of us has our own universe that begins the day we are born.

Sure we can classify experiences, actions, and even facial coding as so eloquently displayed in Paul Ekmans book Emotions Revealed– but in the end behind those windows to the soul is a separate functioning ecosystem. An ecosystem that has one goal and one purpose– serve the insistent need of the host.

We See We Do, You Do I Feel

Although we care about ourselves the most what opens up a can of worms of the psyche is what is called mirror-neurons. These so-called empathy neurons—allow human being and other species to feel the experience through observation. If I observe a spider going up your arm I’m going to get a creepy feeling. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are starting to prove that we are actually soft wired to experience another persons plight as if we are experiencing it ourselves. (Animate, 2010).

These findings are changing some thoughts on motivations. If you’ve spent any amount of time studying the art of marketing you’ve most likely come across Maslow’s Heirechy of needs. As a recap these needs are the human desire to fill physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs.

Recent discoveries point to our first need of actually wanting to belong. At an early age (a few days) we have empathic distress. Picture one baby in a nursery and one baby cries—the other babies will cry in response. They just don’t know why—that’s empathic distress.

The implications for marketing run deep here. Not only do you have to play to the empathetic qualities of your target market but you also have to find a way to stroke the hidden narcissistic bent. While you might find those to be competing views it’s not quite an oil and water mix. It’s more like carbonated water.

(Image by Charmainezoe)

• 60,000 new book titles are published each year in the United States alone. (300,000 worldwide)
• More than 18,000 magazine titles in US – 225 billion pages of editorial content put out every year
• 400,000 scholarly journals
• 15 billion catalogs (1999)
• 87.2 billion pieces of direct mail (1998)
• Grocery store – 15,000 new products a year, average grocery store has 40,000 SKUs and the average family buys only 150 SKUs per year.

I also like these quotes that succinctly put the problem right in place:

Human attention might be one of the most restrictive limitations to the promise of the internet.

Mitchell Wade, Rand Corporation

Attention has become the scarce resource of the information economy.

Wired Magazine

Your Market Can Be the Same

I believe there is a strange change taking place with attention. Tools and technology are finally coming to age and able to help us save time and effort. Just last week Google released Instant which they claim will save you 2-3 seconds per search. With this savings we also have technology like priority inbox or the Facebook wall that make these decisions for you. This technology is deciding for you and your target market what is important and more importantly what gets your attention.

Here is where the change will take place. Technology and data will increasingly play a role for what is deemed important. While there will be options to expand or pick and choose ultimately technology will reign. As the systems become more smart we will begin to trust the system more. As we trust them more they become second nature.

The Answer is Positioning

I really believe the answer for reaching your target market and breaking through current and future changes will be positioning. How you position yourself, your product, or your service. While this is marketing 101 it also has been something that I have seen be a major focus in discussions are new media marketing.

Here are some general rules I’ve put together from various sources throughout the years:

• Lead with the most important point you have. I’m a big believer in the inverted pyramid concept.
• Most likely, your market is blocking you out and not hearing you. They are on overload.
• Ask yourself if you or your company are the perceived leader? If you aren’t what position do you hold? Can you change the perceptions?

Focus on the market that you exceed and excel within. If you don’t exceed within it I would ask why you are competing.
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

• Why is exceeding important and why is it critical to look like the leader? Well people look for shortcuts. The perception of your company in the market place or the value you provide is a form of shortcut.
• Customers will remember exactly one thing about your product or service. You must reduce your message to the one single benefit that stands out in your target market’s mind
• Even if you think you have no competition you still have one that many people don’t consider. That is the option of not using your product or service. So someone always has an option.

Your job is to figure out which one of those reasons the person on the other side of the table is considering buying your product or service.  Your role then becomes a dance to persuade them that your product or service will accomplish their goals.

Let’s take a brief walk into persuasion–in the book Buying Trances by Joe Vitale he breaks down his core idea down to just 27 words.

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

How do you merge these two ideas together?  Once you have figured out the core reason why someone is considering your product or service your next step will be to figure out the trigger points at which their decision will be made.

(photo from StevenDepolo)

Ah the Snuggie

At first I should start off with a disclaimer.  I don’t own a Snuggie, I don’t think I will ever will own a Snuggie, and I’m not quite sure if it’s a good idea that you own a Snuggie as well.  Beyond that disclaimer and the demise of mankind as a whole I think what Snuggies has done is absolutely genius.

If you haven’t seen their latest commercial I’ve included it below in all its greatness.



I highlight this is a great example of a company with a product that is embraced its place in the market.  Just when you thought Snuggies couldn’t be more cheesy they hit you with the Macarena.

The Target Market

One of the main reasons I feel this is a brilliant move is that they clearly know who their target market is.  They’ve identified their target market and their place in modern culture.  The vast amount of mentions, shares, media time, and conversations off this latest commercial effort is evidence to this. I’ve personally seen it shared, mentioned on news casts, early morning radio shows, and media buys on various cable channels.

Put yourself in the shoes of the marketing director for Snuggies.  There you are in your blanket with sleeves trying to figure out how to reach the market and gain the attention of the consumer.  Your product been out for while and sales have stagnated.  The vaunted holiday season is on its way.  What to do what to do?

And while there tons of people giving praise to old spice and Isaiah Mustafa–I think some praise should be given to Snuggies.

I also look at this as an example you can use to help you improve your engagement with your clients, prospects, or prospective customers.

You might have caught these commercials, they direct you to a website called http://www.hyundaimomentum.com/. The general outline to these commercials goes something like this…

we know when you choose to buy a new car you do research, you ask your friends, you go to third party websites, you look at reviews… so on and so on. Essentially validating what you already do as a consumer.

The call to action for this commercial is to visit their website where Hyundai has put together all these ‘conversations’ for you to view in one place.

I believe this is a small glimpse things to come from big brands as advertisers and brands grapple with the changes in the consumer mindset.

When you visit the website above you are greeted with is a pretty slick interface containing various stories, reviews, and general news about Hyundai.

Looking behind the scenes what seems obvious that Hyrundai realizes you are doing research as a consumer (not much of an insight). So the ploy here is to aggregate this information in one place so they can control the experience.

By control it really is to direct the user to a call to action. The links you see at the top and bottom. The driving force behind this strategy is to give value to the visitor; by giving they hope your next step will be one or many of the 5 call to actions located on the page.

Receive Updates (permission based marketing)

You give the company permission to send updates directly to you. If this back end was intelligent enough to send updates based on purchase time, model, and GEO target that would be amazing. Also if done correctly this is one of those opportunities in marketing where the company would have a good opportunity to build a relationship with you as you’ve invited them to update you frequently.

Tell a friend (relationship based marketing)

This is nothing new here but giving the ability to allow someone to send this website to a friend or spouse makes it easy for this site to be put into the trust column.

Locate & Request a Quote (call to action based marketing)

These are buying call to actions, most likely someone using these links are further along in the sales cycle. If I were building this strategy this would be the focus of why we would put this site together.

Build Your Own (custom experience based marketing).

This redirects to a process of building vehicle based on your own make, model, and options. Brands such as Nike have been moving in this direction for a while (see NikeiD). While the Hyundai process is a not as unique and custom as designing every small aspect of customized footwear the mindset and process is in the same realm.

My Take on the Site

As a marketer I like the site on one level, as a consumer (who is a marketer) it’s a hit and miss.

Sure if I’m in the market for a new car I would be doing research. But what I found on this site is the user experience is not what I would want if I was doing serious research on my car buying options.

But maybe that is part of the strategy… where I think this site wins is in the attention factor.  The biggest diminishing factor marketers are faced with today is the attention of the consumer or a prospect. Garnering this attention is the focus of advertising today and of tomorrow. This might just be where this site is creating it’s biggest payoff.

Look what the advertising and design is telling you:

• We understand you, we know you are doing your research, in fact we will agree with you that this is a smart thing to do, and by validating this we offer to you one place that will make it easier for you to accomplish this.
• By directing this validation to a specific landing page and not the corporate site it garners attention, keeping the options simple and concise this website is designed to convert to 1 of 5 call to actions

Based on my experience with web marketing I’d be willing to bet that most stats on this website point to that a user looks at an average of 4-5 stories then does one of the five call to actions.

What I would like to see is the what level of bounce rate this site currently has and how it changes as they further dial it in.

What does this mean for you?

When looking for inspiration or moving trends typically it is good to look at what is working or what others are trying. With advertising, when you see something that tends to be around for a while you can reason that it is effective on some level. The economics of it make sense after all, if it wasn’t working most companies would change, adapt, or simply stop this strategy of advertising.

What do you think about this direction Hyundai is taking and my take on the whole matter?

Communication overload is about to hit full steam (image by Nicholas Smale)

When it comes to communication the biggest problem someone faces right now is overload. From cell phones, text messages, emails, and social networks. The vast amount of communication that the average person parses is staggering. Never before has one had such an access to instantaneous one on one or even one to many communication options.

I’m guessing you feel this yourself and it’s not just you– people in your target market feel this as well. It is the consumer you are looking to sell. It is that purchasing manager you are looking to inform about your product.

Is your message to your target market worthy of breaking this communication firewall? Right now these choices are still relatively left to the user but going forward these choices will continue to be managed by the systems themselves.

Now the Bad News

For you it has been easy. The communications you have sent out to your target market have pretty good chance they will at least be received. Your email will go to the inbox where it will show up in the order it has been received by time in the day. You social updates will show in the stream of conversations of family and friends.

Well that is now but in the near future our inboxes won’t be so courteous to our communications. As technology and the tools we use learn more about us, what we care about, what we read, respond to, forward, and ignore–well let’s just say this changes the game a little in your outreach to your target market.

Imagine a new radio that auto changed commercials (image by James Cridland)

Look at it this way. Let’s say you are buying a radio advertisement. You do the traditional buy of a certain amount of runs for a certain date period. Your guaranteed your commercial will run between such and such time and will get such and such slots. That is great except one thing your ad rep didn’t tell you…

Now radios are equipped with this new device (not the HD radio I still have figured out if I need)–this device knows what the listener likes, cares about, etc. When  your commercial comes on this new feature blocks that commercial and in fact plays another commercial all together.

You still pay for the air time, the radio station delivered but your commercial never was heard (or even had a chance to be heard). Now I should mention this is nothing new–the cassette tape, VHS, and time-shifted television were all said to be the death of their respective markets and advertising. That wasn’t what has happened–in fact those industries thrived and advertising grew at a rather brisk rate.

There is a Difference in Technology Today

The difference with the technology today is that we now have the data, or put another way– we have the predictive history of what you like, interact with, and consume. This new dataset of interactions allows technology to filter out automatically what is important and what isn’t. Your television doesn’t do this–sure Tivo recommends television shows you might like but when you watch a recorded show does it automatically skip past the commercials? Shouldn’t it?

For social networks and email to be useful as communication tool I argue that they have to employ this regulation feature. Social media as it sits right now is broken. Email is slowly falling into this category as well.

Social is broken because 80% of what you see is not relevant to what you care about. All your conversations are lumped into one stream causing you to self censor what you update. When that update to your  friends who are little more on the wild side never gets mentioned because you don’t want the parents of the little league team to see it–well let’s just say it’s stifling the real you and the purpose of connecting with people you care about.

So How Does This Get Solved?

First technology and the social networks will have to solve these items. There has to be some form of classifying people on social networks. You need an easy way to update a certain segment of your friends, followers, or groups. This is a feature I think we will see in most social networks in the near future (12 months).

For email–well the priority inbox for Gmail is a step in what I feel most mailbox solutions will move towards. Essentially technology and your usage patterns dictate what you see first, what you respond to first, and what gets your precious attention.

What This Means For  You

If you have any message or any form of communication you want to reach someone you have to start planning for these changes. Take the example of the priority inbox from Gmail. Gmail is automatically tagging things that are important to the receiver. These get placed or ordered into what is essentially a special folder that is titled “important”.

How do you create communications and content that is guaranteed to be placed in the ‘important’ inbox? If you don’t then what box is your email regulated too?

For social, when the user of a social network has the ability to easily group friends, updates, and streams based on social circles or the network itself inherently does this for them–what social circle is your updates on?

Social is broken because there is little if no segmenting of your communications.

Let’s play out this social circle a little bit. Let’s say your target market has this new social network that automatically groups people based on how they interact or how they met them. They have a social circle called “college friends”, “co-workers”, “family”, “high school friends”,  “swim team families”, and “other”.

How Does Your Target Market Group You or Your Business?

My first question is what group do you fall into? Most likely it is “other”. You could reason that the average social user will connect more with the group that they resonate most with most of the time.  While there still might be this one overall stream the updates will be segmented. The real challenge for you is not that you are in this overall stream but that you focus on creating  a way that this person in your target market absolutely has to check the “other” tab.

Today you can be lazy as this does not exist. Shortly I believe you will not have this luxury as email and social will increasingly auto regulate updates and will auto-decide what a particular user sees and cares about. All this will be done behind the scenes in much the way  personalized retargeting or remarketing is being done with search and across the ad networks.

Image by Rosaura Ochoa

When you think and operate like a media company it allows you to interact with your target market on their terms in turn allowing you to sell more effectively and create deeper connections within your target consumer base.

In the podcast we covered this concept in some detail. Listen below or read further for a quick overview:

Listen to Part 1

Listen to Part 2

Why Is it Effective?

• When you or your organization operate from the perspective of the media mind you position yourself for the best success in today’s modern version of mass communication.
• It also solidifies for you or your organization to take operating in today’s media connected world communication is on a path of convergence. In the year 2010 new media and old media market capitalization have finally become neck and neck. This convergence is a thinning line between the old walled gardens of entertainment sectors and technology. The rise of user generated content.

For instance, let’s say that drinking a glass of milk a day was in the best interest for your health. If you receive an email from the Milk Farmers of America (do they exist) that tells you milk is good for you will you believe it? Most of us will not. We know they are biased. We know they have a vested interest.

Now what if you turn on your favorite 24 hour cable news station and you happen to catch a story that shares with you the health benefits of milk. Which one do you believe? Which one persuades you? Without going to deep into how the actual news story was put together our society is conditioned to believe the news organization. You want to capture this power. You want to create your content and outreach from this perspective.

Do this will ultimately allow your content and your message to be reached to the target audience.

What Does a Modern Media Company Do?

• They exist to produce a profit (just as you)
• They monetize content through advertising or subscriptions (or combination of both)
• They broadcast their content
• They have a platform(s)
• They tell stories
  • through pictures, text, audio, and video
• Inform
• Educate
• Entertain
• Operate from position of trust
• They consistently create content
• They keep a schedule because familiarity breeds trust
  • You know what to expect
• They engage their audience
• They are up to date with trends

How to transform into a media organization

• Figure out your companies angle
• Find the authentic way to stand from a position of trust
• Inform, educate, and entertain, packaging
• Figure out your companies voice
• Create a content capture process
• Create a content schedule
• Create your broadcast relationships, platform, channels
• Engage your audience
• Stay relevant and up to date

Please note that the text portion of this post is rather shallow but the audio portion goes into detail and gives some great examples.

Your Product is your best form of Marketing.

Have you played the telephone game? You know the one where one person whispers a sentence and by the end it gets all garbled? Well I’m at the end of this chain except with the advent of copy and paste the message is no longer lost. I found the below quote from Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) on Mitch Joels blog (who found it on another blog… who found it somewhere else). The bottom line is the quote is accurate…

“Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

Awesome quote and it clearly states where we are in marketing and the greater importance of word of mouth. Now Mitch Joe’s thoughts on this are “the individual is empowered” is code for Social Media. I agree on that but only to a point. Yes social media is a game changer in marketing but the main game changer is the speed at which we can communicate. Social media facilitates communication but is not the main driver for communication… minor point though, the bigger point that rings true is exactly what Mr. Bezos stated.

Your Product is Your Marketing

Any good word of mouth professor will tell you this is the key to a groundswell of buzz and up until a few years ago makers of products and firms who delivered service could drown out the negative. They could deliver a sub-par product, a clicker that didn’t quite click, a chain saw that didn’t quite cut, and in the end with mass media and controlled communication they would sell.

Now the instant a movie or even a product hits the shelves a wave of blog posts, Twitter updates, Facebook updates, Skype conversations, Ning threads, and text and instant messages begin to fire up. There is no central control and no one parroted message.

Your Answer

The answer is simple. Create products that exceed expectations and deliver beyond their intended purpose. For a service focus on your touch points with a customer and exceed expectations, communication, and over-deliver on the main benefit that your service provides.

While you could say that should have been your mission all along many companies, brands, and services lost focus because the message could be blasted–thus partially controlled. Are we (and you) prepared for the next level of product and service innovation?

I’ve found to be most successful in this you should look at at this as a form of networking.

The amazing changes in real time search is allowing this form interaction all that more powerful.

There are  two pillars that you must have positioned for this to be successful and worth your effort.

1. Finding your target market. Finding people likely to buy your product, your service, or who have a high likely hood of joining you in your business.
2. Engaging your target market. Properly engaging, done by being authentic and adding value.

There are two tools I have found invaluable in accomplishing both of these tasks.

I did a quick video on these here as well:

Both of these tools are based on real time search.

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Tool 1 – Collecta.com

Collecta.com gives you a wealth of information on what is going on right now, with blogs, comments, and in social networks.

Some key features of Collecta.com are:

• Easy 3 column layout
• Ability to filter searches by stories, comments, updates, videos, and photos
• Easy to see status information without leaving the page
• Constant streaming of real time search results

Tool 2 – SocialMention.com

SocialMention.comis an amazing website on a couple different fronts. It allows you to do the same thing as Collecta but it gives you much more control at drilling down and finding hidden information about what you are searching for.

This tool alone I believe you should be using for your target market research. This is real world stuff, not theory of what is going on right now. Real conversations, broken down by sentiment, mood, and popularity. A true wealth of information.

Key Features of SocialMention.com

• Fast and great layout
• Metrics that mean something to your search (Strength, Average minutes since last mention)
• RSS Feeds and Email alerts
• Pull data down to CSV for keywords for advertising or content ideas

Both of these tools are showing tremendous promise of what is dubbed real time search. I highly suggest that you take the time and learn how to use these as they give you real world conversations that a few years ago simply would not have been possible. One of the keys to having success online is finding and engaging your target market.

Find Your Vocal Minority (image by JMRosenfeld)

One secret to capturing your market is to focus on a vocal minority in your market. Connect and deliver your product or service beyond their expectations. Done correctly this enables you a gateway into the rest of that vertical. These are the people in your vertical market that will spread the message—before you go deep or wide in any market make sure there is the ability to go after this 1-2% of this core market.

Twitter and SXSW

Twitter used the vocal minority strategy in 2007 when it became popular at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. Twitter was betting that this mix of entertainment and tech savvy individuals would resonate with updates from other attendees on strategically placed 60-inch plasma screens in conference hallways. It worked and that year Twitter not only stole the show from there three years later went on to have a 1500 percent growth in number of users, integration into most major websites, and an announcement in April 2010 that the Library of Congress will achieve the collected works of the social platform. (Lohr, 2010)

Dell and Ubuntu

Dell used the power of its ideas in action initiative to listen and then release Ubuntu a Linux-based operating system complete by launching on the homepage with a headline “By Popular Demand Ubuntu Has Arrived”—now at the time I doubt that the consumer was thinking I really need a new operating system—especially one I’ve never heard of. (Saleem, 2007). This played well into the vocal minority of geeks looking to be heard, thus Dell was mentioned in various tech blogs and throughout the Linux and open source community.

Finding Your Vocal Minority

Considerable effort should be put into finding this vocal minority in your market or in your different vertical markets. With the rise of social media, blogs, forums, and real time conversations finding these influencers has become even easier. Today and going forward finding these influencers and courting them to your service or your product will be the key to capturing market. You role needs to be to find this vocal minority and over deliver. Over deliver with your product or service.

This done correctly will give you a backdoor to your target market.