momorantings

I'd never heard of Woot, but I was aware there was an online retailer doing what they did. I'll be watching them closely now - not because they just got acquired by Amazon, but because of the way they responded to it. Not with legalese or corporate platitudes but with the same human tone they used before they were bought. Businesses grow, businesses evolve and business are acquired, but the one thing they must never forget is that they're still essentially making sales one at a time to individual customers.

Copywriting and the creation of scarcity are central to great marketing.

Customers tend to dislike outsourced customer service departments and endless telephone menus that seem to keep them away from any form of human contact. That makes personal service a competitive advantage and companies never shirk from declaiming their commitment to it - even if the reality may be very different. The screen-shot above comes from an insurance company and was what I saw when a basic renewal proved impossible to achieve online. I interpreted the options as send an email into the abyss and hope for a response some time in the future or tangle with the premium rate phone line. I opted for the latter and got my policy renewed. I also discovered that the innocuous "ask us a question" hid the option of IM interaction with a team of online specialists. Real people answering my questions in real time? Wouldn't that have been worth emphasising?

I've just returned from the Theatre Communications Group Annual Conference. The theme for the conference was "Ideas into Action," and it built upon the previous year's conference where the field took a look at some of the major issues facing all of us. The idea was to take what we discussed last year and to explore "bold new solutions." The first session I attended was entitled " Theatres Becoming Centers in the 21st Century ." I attended partially because my Artistic Director, Molly Smith , was speaking, but also because I wanted to hear some ideas from other centers from around the nation as we move toward the opening of the Mead Center for American Theater . The one thing that stayed with me through the entire conference from that session was the quote Molly used to open her remarks--she referenced a quote by R. Buckminster Fuller in which he said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new ...

At a sparsely-attended promotional launch for an upcoming marketing trade show, the invitees were shown the event's new iPhone app. Rather than the advertised augmented reality, it was essentially a piece of mobile image recognition. It was perfectly adequate and of potential utility to the exhibition/conference attendees, but it was a gimmick. The logic was clear - iPhone apps are hot, so we should have one and generate some PR. It won't because many of the audience knew more about the technology than some of the marketers that were presenting it and were consequently underwhelmed, it won't because it's not a reason in and of itself to attend the event, and it won't because it's of more interest internally than externally. Worse still, it emerged in casual conversation that the event had a more striking selling point - for the first time in its longish history, the conference sessions are going to be free of charge. That represents more user utility than even...

My attention today has been attracted by two seemingly unrelated items that emanated from the mysterious East London lair of the post-digital hole in the wall gang. Russell Davies has highlighted a fascinating film about billboard painters in New York while Phil Gyford has tinkered with the Guardian newspaper’s API to produce a personalized version . They’re both terrific in their own right, but together they got me thinking about completeness and anticipation and how marketers sometimes unthinkingly crave customer attention. The image that grabbed me in the film was actually an incomplete billboard – about one third of the glass of beer to be exact. It seemed to encapsulate the craft of the painters that Russell rightly praised, the slowness of its production and the anticipation of what might develop. I imagined locals passing the scene many times during the painting process and anticipating their next sighting. In fact, that's unrealistic because the film later reveals that th...

When the song's bigger than the trend, you can't go wrong. When the trend's bigger than the song, those are the people who fall by the way-side.

A couple of weeks ago, NPR ran a story entitled "Everyone Else Outsources, So Why Can't the Arts?" Since that time, the story has stuck with me. One positive result of the global economic crisis is that it has forced mature organizations to rigorously examine business practices, many of which haven't changed since the publication of Danny Newman's Subscribe Now! I am consistently amazed at the number of organizations that choose to remain stagnant because change is scarier than doing nothing and watching failure creep up to the doorstep. I applaud organizations that are taking steps to inform the field, as successes and failures will provide beneficial data we can use to plan our next steps. And while I have been accused on many occasions of being too aggressive with implementing change, in this case, I am reminded of a saying that a wise professor in graduate school would always say to me--"just because it is new, doesn't mean it is better." Let ...

When technology writer Dennis Howlett accused SAP of spamming him a year ago, his accusation was rebutted by one of their social media strategy team. Fast forward and we find that same strategist changing his tune . Lesson: You can dismiss critics as cranks or curmudgeons and you may be right, but it's better for your sanity and your business if you take an objective look and see if they have a point. After all, they're on the receiving end. There's also a lesson in the episode itself which only really caught my attention since it contrasted so much with the praise heaped on the SAP Developer Network 2003 in my current reading, The Power Of Pull . Whereas in 2003, SAP were seeking to engage the opinions of their customer base, in 2009/10 they seem to be back to pushing information at them. I don't know if I'm right, but I suspect this may have something to do with the lingering pre-eminence of sales staff who are remunerated on revenues rather than the more intangi...

Some time ago, I found myself engrossed in a documentary about Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. It covered their entire musical life and thus lasted four hours which, largely due to the Travelling Willburys nonsense, was about half an hour too much. But, as ever, the story of a creative journey from obscurity to commercial success yielded a number of "marketing" insights. Media "All of a sudden the biggest radio station there was, was TV." Creativity "It's about reaching for bigger moments where new things happen." Authenticity "What they call country today is bad rock groups with fiddles." Motivation "We're all the romantic leads in our own life." Attention "Don't bore us, get to the chorus." That's four hours I've saved you. You're welcome. Nobody should have to listen to Jeff Lynne.