momorantings

Last week, I attended an unusual evening built around neuroscientist David Eagleman's book of short stories about what happens when you die. As well as the engaging conversation of Phillip Pullman, there were a series of live and recorded readings by luminaries such as Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry and Miranda Richardson. And it was this that fascinated me - some of us preferred the live performances, others found ourselves more engaged in the disembodied voice of the recorded readings. In an attention economy, it is crucial to remember that distraction takes many different forms.

It was interesting to hear a group of newspaper letter-editors reporting an increase in one type of letter. The type where readers make public their appreciation of customer service that they have recently received. Therein lies the seeds of an economic direct-mail campaign focussed on every local newspaper in your markets, but I'd say it was safer and smarter to focus on your customer service quality and let your customers do the direct-mail part for you.

In the last few weeks, I have been doing quite a bit of traveling. I have gotten the opportunity to speak with many of my colleagues from around the nation, and they are all saying the same thing -- ticket sales are down this year. Last year, I kept hearing that well branded products were doing very well, while less known fare was struggling. Now I am hearing that even annual cash cows (think A Christmas Carol and Nutcracker ) aren't doing well. When a classic theater has problems selling Romeo and Juliet , you know something is up. So it got me thinking about what is going on (and of course, this is just an opinion). We are all seeing reports that even though some aspects of the economy might be improving, many are still getting worse, such as unemployment. Unemployment is the highest is has been in 20 years. Last year when the stock market crashed and it became clear we were all in for what looked to be an unprecedented global economic crisis, many companies panicked. They didn...

When the new "paradigm" comes along, people often describe it in ways that differentiate it totally from what came before. Often to enhance their guru status. That's a mistake. Revolution is rare - evolution far less so. Relating the new to the old can be much more insightful and is also more welcomed by the unconverted. In that vein, I prefer to look at marketing 2.0 in terms of existing frameworks rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the two ends of the transfer are still essentially the same - there is stuff and there are customers. They may be changed people and it often is new stuff, but the real changes lie in the interaction between the two. The traditional 4Ps still apply, but they present new problems. Price Economic theory dictates that equilibrium prices equal marginal cost. In the digital world of cost-less replication, that price is increasingly tending towards zero. While that may not make obvious business sense to producers, ther...

I read this in an unlinked article about the threat that online plagiarism presents to comedians' live performances. The secret is to be unique so that they can't steal from you: "That's what comics should think about: it's not the jokes; it's about themselves. It's about your personality. They can't appropriate "you". I'm sure you can see that the marketing punch-line writes itself.

"My customers will be happy I've been honest with them." "I own my shelf-space and I can do anything I want with it." "I don't work, I just play all day long." More wisdom than you'll get from any marketing conference.

One of my biggest gripes about the development of marketing is the increasing trend towards the outsourcing of thinking and execution to third party agencies. It's not that the work done by those agencies is necessarily bad - indeed as a result of writing this blog I've had the pleasue of meeting innumerable practitoners who are smart, funny and conscientious (though rarely glamorous). The problem is that they cannot be as invested in your company as you are and they shouldn't know your customers better than you do. But, all too often, marketing directors run the risk of becoming administrators of these third-party relationships rather than poduct/service champions. Their career development is predicated on the budgets they manage rather than the results they achieve. They become the "client" and develop a client mindset. They forget that the true client is, in fact, the customer. And from there, it's all downhill.

Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust. That's the final sentence from a piece in today's New York Times about online hook-ups, but it uses all the adjectives that marketers should be double-checking. Marketing is not about conversations, it's about the quality and nature of the conversations you have and when you have them.

Once again I find myself at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference , which is being held this year in Providence, RI. This is my fifth conference, and instead of presenting like I have done in the past, I really wanted to listen in on other sessions to hear what is being discussed. I have been asked to blog about my experiences for Americans for the Arts so these posts can also be seen on their blog . This morning I was lucky enough to sit in on the Every Dollar Counts: Using ROI to Prove Marketing Effectiveness session. I decided to go to the session because one of my favorite arts marketing experts was presenting--Philippe Ravanas , marketing professor at Columbia College and former VP of Corporate Communications for EuroDisney . I have seen him speak at several conferences and he is always extraordinary. This morning he discussed a situation he found himself in when he was the Manager of Client Development at Christie's in London. Each year, they would produce a beautif...