momorantings

If I had a quarter for every time I have been asked in my career how I planned on attracting new audiences to an organization, I would be a rich man. On the flip side, I am almost never asked about customer loyalty or retention. The quickest way for an organization to get in trouble from a marketing perspective is to ignore audience retention problems in favor of attracting new audiences. Some common misconceptions: 1. In order to grow, you must attract new audiences. This statement is only true if you are attracting more new audiences than you are losing the audience members you currently have (and even if this is the case, it can be much more expensive...more to come on that point). Many of us are so captivated by the allure of attracting new audiences that we concentrate much of our attention on getting the new ones in the front door while the old ones are running out the back door. A recent study of nine of the most prominent U.S. orchestras conducted by Oliver Wyman showed that ...

Three lessons from my post office . 1) Don't put a sign announcing changes at the entrance. It seems logical to put it there, but people have been visiting the post office since they were young and they are not there to browse. They have a purpose and will purposefully walk straight past your sign because they know what they want to do and will not be seeking guidance. If you want to change their behaviour, a sign won't cut it. You have to understand their existing behaviour and adapt to it. 2) Don't dislocate human contact with your customer. Yes, the queues/lines are a source of dissatisfaction. The solution is to reduce the waiting time not to displace it by getting people to sit down and wait for a number to be called. Moreover, a queue does give the customer some sense of connectedness with their goal where waiting for a number to be called with no indication of "time till service" is alienating. (Side note - if you do have an indicator of "time till ser...

Some blogs recently suggested that fiction titles were better sources of business advice than the traditional non-fiction tomes. Accordingly I was going to recommend the new movie 500 Days of Summer as a guide to the futility of trying to match your product/service with people who are just not interested. But that's not why you go to movies, so I leave what you take from it up to you. I'll simply recommend it highly and, in line with the impact of previous recommendations here, I expect its success further to confirm my influencer status.

One of the oddest aspects of live performance is the end of a comedian's set. The end of a theatrical or a musical performance is usually very obvious. Climactic even. The audience shows its appreciation and there may well be an encore or a curtain call. In comedy, the performer tells a final joke and that's it. You don't really know it's the last joke until they say "thank you and good night". And is there anything more incongruous than a comedy encore? The performers who've thought this through are few and far between, they stand out a mile and they tend to be the best performers anyway. The way you take your leave of your audience is much under-rated. First impressions are important, but so are last ones. Is your audience's last impression one of resisting unwanted up selling offers, one of indifference as you look for the next prospect or one of unsatisfied needs that leave them in the same position they were when you strove to make that first impr...

I walked into the sneaker store. Within seconds, an assistant asked if he could help me. My response was to point out that I had just arrived and might need his assiatnce shortly. The timing of when you address your customers is arguably even more important than what you say. Good customer service takes that into account. Regimented customer service manuals do not.

Three years ago today, I posted a guide to my views on marketing disguised as a discussion of technology marketing. It became my most viewed post (thanks Guy Kawasaki). Three years on, I think it still applies. Three years hence, I fear, marketers will be making the same mistakes. Geek Marketing 101 is so named because I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses. 1) Marketing is not a department. Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). Promotion and sales are just sub-sets of marketing. 2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don't speak geek. Successful tech...

Just recently, I have had several students and former employees who have been offered their first marketing director gigs who have reached out to me for words of wisdom. Below are the fifteen points that I like to share with any first time marketing director. 1. When results at the box office are disappointing, one of two things are usually the culprit: the artistic product didn't live up to expectations or the marketing plan wasn't successful. When enquiring minds want to know what happened, don't point fingers unless you want fingers pointed back at you. Artistic Directors will fail, and so will Marketing Directors. The arts are inherently risky, and if you are taking risks, at some point you will fail. Get up, dust yourself off, and work to make up the loss on future productions. 2. I have worked for very large and extremely small organizations. I used to think that large organizations had the resources to do everything right. I have found that organizations are sometime...

All too often, "marketing" adds unnecessary detail and blurs the message. Why say soon when you give me the actual date? I know what soon means. And now I'm thinking about the composition of your message and not thinking about your message at all.

Your website is an image. Your blog is a reflection. Courtesy of Thomas Mahon of English Cut . Not a bad definition of effective maketing when you come to think about it, is it?

How do you buy things? Do you try new options in the myriad categories you consume or do you just buy what you usually buy? I'd contend that even the most ardent early adopter is pretty lazy and disinteretsed in the majority of their purchases. That's why it's cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. That's why a lot of advertising serves as post-purchase reassurance (and will not be going away anytime soon). And that's why you have to do something remarkable to get people to change their habits. Inertia is your true competition.