momorantings

The problem with marketing is not interruption. Nor is it false claims or agency/client compromise. All those things and more are deficiencies in the practice of marketing but they're not the root problem. No the real problem with marketing is that it all too often follows the creation of the product/service and thereby is reduced to promotion. It is bad promotion that is the bane of most anti-marketers. Not marketing itself. All those conference ideas about branded utility, shared interests and authenticity are good ones, but they'd be much better if they weren't add-ons.

The final response in this series of posts belongs to Julie Peeler, a close friend and expert arts marketer. Prior to her current position at Americans for the Arts, Julie headed the National Arts Marketing Project , which was where I met her in 2004. She is a wealth of knowledge, and someone that I look to for advice when I am navigating particularly difficult marketing decisions. I hope you enjoy her insight below. Julie Peeler Vice President, Private Sector Initiatives Americans for the Arts I would be happy if I could figure out what’s going to happen in the next 6 months. After all, very few people could have predicted in 2008 that we would be in the shape we’re in right now, facing the issues we are facing. But if we’re to learn anything from the current conditions, we know that we cannot be as insular as we have been as an industry and a profession. The arts are as bruised by this recession as any other business, and we are positively and negatively affected by the same social, ...

I haven't yet asked Iain if he was being serious or sarcastic. Chances are he was being both and I agree with him. We all know we are social, we all know we don't want to be interrupted, we all know that marketing needs to be shareable. We all know all this and agencies, books and careers have inevitably sprung up to fill the potentially lucrative vacuum. But what is all too often forgotten is that it's optional not obligatory. We all want the opportunity to share, but most of the time most of the people aren't actually going to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 1:9:90 rule to be uncovered here. The massive are still passive. We're becoming obsessed with the sharing when we should be obsessed with all our customers, especially the introverted majority. And in so doing, we run the risk of ending up with this sort of thing.

“Every time you take out a prop, your price goes down.” Joseph Dunninger, the famed mentalist, was talking about magical props, but marketing props are just the same. Perfect the essence of what you sell and you won't need props.

Two years ago, I saw these shoes in the exhibition section of a Nike pop-up store in London. The material from which they were made is now appearing in commercially available sneakers. That exhibition made me realise that Nike is as much a technology company as a marketing company. Its a profile they've emphasised through initiatives like NikeID where technology is used to assist and enliven training regimes. Next week, it will be taking a stage further here with Nike Grid when people will claim their own postcode/zipcode by running between specially adapted public telephone boxes. GPS iterations utilising apps like Foursquare are surely not far behind. Running, their original raison d'etre, remains at the heart of all this, but layered upon it is the technology - another level of interestingness that draws you further into the DNA of the business. Making marketing interesting (while reminding them of the unique expertise that creates the products) engages the user intellect...

Part three of the series features responses from two experienced theatrical marketers--one that works at one of the finest training institutions in the nation, and the other works at a top Broadway marketing and advertising firm. Anne Trites Director of Marketing & Communications, Yale Repertory Theatre Assistant Professor of Theater Management, Yale School of Drama Technology! I think the biggest marketing challenge facing arts organizations is related to the impact of technology on communication with audiences – current and prospective. We used to rely on print and radio advertising, snail mail, email and the telephone to communicate. A great deal of time was spent developing just the right message to be delivered at just the right time to each segment. We would develop tactics to stimulate positive word of mouth to encourage sales. Marketers were largely in control of the message. Technology has already tipped the balance and audiences are quickly gaining that control. Individua...

Seth Godin posted about Levy Flights the other day. This was not a reference to an obscure dancehall performer, but a discussion of the similarly obscure statistical distribution pattern that I first came across in Kristakis and Fowler's Connected . A Levy flight basically illustrates that behaviour focuses in a small area for a period of time and then when that area becomes uninteresting, there is a flight/leap to another area quite some distance away where another period of grazing follows. Seth's post sounded a little fatalistic to me, but Connected highlighted two interesting features of actual network behaviour. Firstly, when people make the larger leaps, the size of that average leapp is much greater than was expected under a random walk; but, secondly, those transitions actually occur more slowly than a Levy flight would predict. That seems to me to suggest that customer ennui is not inevitable and that there might be more hope for retaining customers if you both make t...

The series continues as more experts weigh in on what they believe will be the biggest marketing challenge arts organizations will face in the next 10 years. Jim Royce Director of Marketing and Communications Center Theatre Group "Word of Mouth is Just Too Important to Ignore" This is an economic time when every business and arts organization needs to look intently at its core audiences, ask yourself: what can I do to bring customers closer or more frequently to our product? How can I leverage their experience to generate more word of mouth or get it going faster and wider? Oscar Wilde’s famous remark, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” is even more relevant in the age of social networking and ten-second sound bites. And the rules of spreading chatter have not changed: ya gotta have something interesting to spread around, it must be easily talked about, credible, respectful and satisfying. People love to talk and when they have informati...

Sainsbury's have a Twitter account. They presumably think it will help them engage in conversations with their customers on a human level. But do their customers really want to talk to "colleagues"? When seeking to engage the external (aka real) world, don't use the alienating internal language of the corporation. Just say "talk to us".

Today this blog is four years old. This is the thousandth plus post which will be read by a select group of people. Blogging is supposedly not as popular as it once was. The huge majority of them lie inert. Some, mercifully so. But not this one. So, what have I got out of four years of blogging? 1) Chinese comment spam, ridiculous PR approaches and offers of irrelevant guest blogs from total strangers. 2) A sense of guilt at still not having made this blog more visually pleasing and more easily navigable. 3) A nagging doubt that I have nothing else left to say. 4) An awareness that you need to keep repeating yourself because ideas actually spread quite slowly and orthodoxy takes a long time to overturn. 5) A constantly renewing knowledge of bands that only five other people have yet heard of thanks to a reader who has a passion for such things 6) A stalker - albeit a very nice one. 7) A true appreciation of our increased connectivity - courtesy of the night when one of my posts went g...