momorantings

As I have written about previously , often times marketers get themselves into trouble because they focus too much of their attention on under-performing productions causing them to ignore opportunities to better capitalize on productions which are over-performing. So, now you have a hit on your hands, and you know you have to strike while the iron is hot. Sometimes hit productions can be few and far between, so what you do next could make or break your season. When a hit does occur, many entrepreneurially minded non-profit producers start to consider an extension to their previously announced runs. Before announcing an extension, here are a couple of things you should consider:   Feasibility. Is it even possible to extend your run? Oftentimes non-profit subscription houses have another show coming in right on the heels of the previous one, and there is no room to extend. Are your actors available for an extension? Many times actors have other projects already lined up, and they are un

A retail chain revamps its design and there is much back-slapping and pronouncement. Sarah Doyle, marketing director of Eat says, "We are very excited to be unveiling EAT.’s new look which we feel reflects the core principles on which our brand was originally founded. It is modern and stylish, yet also has a natural, simple and handcrafted feel, which reflects the essence of our food. The new design marks the start of a new stage of growth and expansion for the business." All very nice, but there's no mention there of improved service or better customer experience. Indeed, there's virtually no mention of the customer at all and even though this is taken from a design magazine, I think that's unforgiveable. Blinkered broadcasting isn't limited to advertising and if you're not mentioning your customer front and centre, then you run the risk of appearing to belong to the old school of marketing by message. You also run the risk of forgetting what your job i

So, British Airways serve in-flight croissants. It's hardly a deal-clincher is it? And not just because we all know what fast-food croissants inevitably taste like. But when they go on to describe a light breakfast in such ridiculously overblown and patronising language, you have to wonder if they got the memo about treating customers as sentient human beings. Guilt-free friend indeed. Too fly to serve more like.

I've long been a sceptic of the value of Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets as measures of anything but the narcissism of the people clicking on the butons. It's largely been a gut-feeling that's occasionally backed up by anecdotal evidence. Take, for example, the experience of the well-known blogger who was delighted to receive a huge number of retweets of his tweet announcing a new blogpost and slightly less delighted to realize later that those retweets outnumbered the aggregate number of page-views the post received in the following week. So, I was very pleased to see that we now have a statistial analysis that showed that 16% of 2.7 million studied tweets followed the same pattern. Meanwhile, over at Facebook, the fact that Mitt Romney has lost 100,000 of his 12 million Likes in the past two weeks doesn't mean that the GOP vote has collapsed in the same time. It's not about him, it's not about voting intentions, it's about Facebook users not wanting

Last weekend was my annual pilgrimage to the National ArtsMarketing Project Conference hosted by Americans for the Arts. It has become my favorite conference of the year, not only because I get to catch up with friends from all over the country, but because it reminds me that sometimes the most profound marketing decisions are the most basic ones. I attended a session entitled “ The Curated Arts Experience ” featuring Ceci Dadisman , Deeksha Gaur and Nella Vera . During this session, Nella started talking about something really fundamental – having fun. She gave several great examples of organizations that went out of their way to create fun and memorable experiences for their audiences. Immediately prior, we were treated to a lunch session featuring cdza , a trio of guys who create musical experiments.   With their experiments, they make classical music fun and accessible, and in doing so have millions of viewers worldwide. I have to wonder how many people have been introduced to cl

Andrew Grill (CEO of Kred) is a good guy and he's got a lot of coverage recently for his posts that detail his failure to connect to the brand new 4G service launched by EE. While he makes some good points, I fundamentally disagree with his assertion that marketing did their job. No, marketing absolutely did not do their job. They didn't do job number 1. They didn't ensure that what they were promoting aligned with the reality of the product/service and not some fatuous ideal. Under-promise and over-deliver are the watchwords. More than that, given the vagaries of technology, they should have insisted on a soft launch, ensured that customers were delighted rather than disappointed and followed up with marketing that promoted that satisfaction. As for his assertion, that EE would have saved themselves £260k if they'd realised he was a social influencer, well the less said about that the better.

A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference and someone from the audience asked me what I believed to be the biggest marketing challenge of the next five years. I answered with the death of the newspaper, which surprised many, who thought I would point to declining subscription bases or overall drops in arts participation.   We had just experienced the death of four major newspapers – the Seattle Post Intelligencer , the Rocky Mountain News , the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor – at a time when most non-profit arts organizations had important symbiotic relationships with their hometown newspapers.    So let me pause to ask – if your newspaper were to go out of business today, how would that impact your organization?    And here’s why I am asking. According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA): ·          Total print advertising has dropped from $47.4 billion in 2005 to $20.6 billion in 2011 – the lowest print advertising has been since 1983 (not f

Kickstarter launches in the UK at the end of the month and there will be lots of media coverage about this "funding platform for creative projects" and its new way of raising money. But, it occurs to me, it's not really about crowdsourced funding at all. After all, many of the successful projects could arguably have found traditional funding if the founders had been willing to give up some control to traditional third parties, and many of the projects find themselves funded far beyond the original goals. No, the money's secondary. Something else is going on. This isn't just crowdsourcing, it's momentum sourcing. Momentum that's derived from proof of concept; momentum that's derived from building a tribe of promoter-users who are incentivised via the range of prizes on offer; and momentum that's derived from being able to leverage critical mass with future investors, distributors and customers. Most people see it solely as a fund-raising exercise a

To say that these are challenging times for non-profit arts organizations is probably an understatement. We're still struggling with the after effects of the global economic crisis. Previously viable business models are imploding. The elimination or severe reduction in government funding has resulted in a very quick need to replace public support with private funds. And who knows what is around the corner. But, artists and arts administrators are a resilient bunch. One of our strengths is our never say die attitude. We confront each challenge head on in a "show must go on" fashion. We are inherently hard working. To make it in this field requires years of rebounding from rejection. When the going gets tough, we redouble our efforts. After years of struggle, the fight in us undoubtedly begins to wane, as we contemplate the permanency of the current climate. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. In moments of crisis, we ring the alarm and all hands arrive on deck to f

A number of articles recently proclaimed the economic benefit of restaurant reviews. Not unusually, many of them cited identical assertions that could be traced back to the original press release. Being something of a sceptic regarding both the reporting of academic papers and the power of anonymous recommendation, I emailed one of the authors at Berkeley to try to understand if what was reported was what he had claimed. He pointed me to this article by way of a good summary. My logic is that better restaurants will be fuller because they are better restaurants and that any ratings they garner will follow that and not vice versa. I also believe that people are more likely to pay attention to the views of trusted friends or proven professional reviewers than crowd-sourced averages and, having consulted an old professor of mine, I remain unconvinced that the study has proven any real causality. We both agreed that to do so would require a longitudinal study of the relation between a re

About a year ago, I began designing a graduate certificate program for American University focused on technology issues in arts management, and this past summer, I taught my first course focused on the intersection of technology and marketing. To open the course, I asked students to read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point , which if you haven't read it, describes how social epidemics evolve, providing a great platform to discuss word-of-mouth marketing and how technology can be used to ignite a movement. Early in the book, Gladwell discusses "The Law of the Few," which boiled down is a riff on the 80/20 principle - 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the work. As marketers, we latch onto this principle, as it correctly argues that if we can identify and cultivate relationships with a select group of influential people called "connectors," then our returns can be maximized. One connector can be worth his weight in gold, and easily as valuable as t

New CMO.  New agency. New campaign. Same old meaningless justifications - this time reported in AdAge . "Consumer-centric brands must always evolve in order to keep pace with ever-changing customer needs and preferences." She added that "Avis is evolving as a premium brand to better meet those needs." The new tagline, she said, is "reflective of [Avis'] ongoing mission to be a customer-led, service-driven company, and presents the brand in terms of the customer experience and the advantages inherent in renting from Avis." Me neither. So let's move on to something I think I do understand - the removal after 50 years of the one thing people associate with Avis. Something I doubt will ever fall out of the list of customer needs and preferences regardless of how much they evolve. Something that reeks of that brand equity thing that marketers are always banging on about, and something that can't be explained away with this rationale: "W

Outside the realms of tax efficiency, nobody starts a business in the belief that it will fail. However, a recent visit to a start-up incubator revealed mindsets that ignored the possibility while putting the cart before the horse and making some basic marketing mistakes. 1) What you've done in the past is of very little relevance to your future customers unless they were your customers in the past. The most bizarre example of this was the proclamation that their CEO is a biathlete and their COO a fencer. Egoes should be checked at the door. 2) Your marketing focus should be on what the customer perceives to be the problem, rather than on what you deem to be the solution. A dating site that was promoting itself as a place where you could be honest rather than having to lie was missing the fact that its selling point was verified profiles that other users could trust. 3) Being funded doesn't mean you've proven your business case. You've just convinced some people who a

Today I tread lightly into the “new models” discussion which has recently been at the forefront of chatter among arts managers. For a good recap, please read the following: “ Why Arts Managers Short of Cash Are Looking at Detroit ,” by Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal “ Theaters Look for New Ways to Draw in Subscribers ,” by Nelson Pressley, The Washington Post “ The New Model, Part 2 ,” by Michael Kaiser, The Huffington Post “ Swimming Downstream in the Current of History ,” by Adam Huttler, Fractured Atlas Blog As Michael Kaiser states “the world is changing – but it has always been changing.” I agree with Mr. Kaiser to a point, but I’d like to point out that the amount of change organizations have faced in previous decades probably pales in comparison to the change they have confronted in the past ten years. In a one decade, pretty much everything we have been taught is now in question. How many of us were taught that the key to financial stability was saving money in order t

We hear all about China and its inevitable rise, but how much do most of us know about the place? My answer to that question was virtually nothing, so it was a very nice surprise to receive this book some months ago. It's taught me a lot (subject to cross-referencing of course) and is a good mix of assertions and business and cultural examples. I find it hard to believe that Chinese cultural hierarchy is incompatible with creativity and innovation, but perhaps that is just an example of my uninformed pre-conceptions. And if you don't challenge your assumptions about the markets you're targetting,  you end up making big mistakes. You can never know enough and you need to be sure you know anything. Addendum: This is not business-related but as an insight into other people's lives (this time in the southern USA) it's remarkable.

I've been called a perfectionist, and until recently, I've always accepted that description as a compliment. However as a leader, one of my primary responsibilities is to help prioritize the work of the departments that report to me, and in doing so, it is very important to understand that most nonprofits are under resourced. In a world where there is never enough, either in terms of money or human time, where and how nonprofits commit their limited resources becomes very important. Perfectionists struggle in these environments because by nature, when we start something, it's hard to walk away with even the slightest flaw remaining. On the other hand, marketers routinely leave projects behind when a greater return on one's resources can be found in other places, bowing to the law of diminishing returns. To be both a marketer and a perfectionist has caused a few schizophrenic debates for me over the years, but I've come to learn to focus on core competencies, and to

Marketers constantly emphasise their humanity, yet insist on using the impersonal term consumer. It's inaccurate, it's distracting and it needs to stop. It's inaccurate beause the person to whom they're selling is not necessarily the person who actually consumes the product/service if, indeed, anyone does. It's distracting because to label him/her as the consumer distances the marketer from the person that matters, the person who makes the purchase be that on their own behalf or on behalf of their family or someone to whom they want to give a gift. It's their hard-earned money that is paying your salary and referring to them as your customers is a discipline that will remind you of that every day.

Many people in business don't understand statistics or finance and that's appalling. Similarly, far too many people neither understand marketing nor know what it is and that's marketers fault. Shel Israel's article   about how marketing is ruining social media is just the latest illustration of that. There's nothing wrong with the argument, it's just that it's not marketing that's at fault, it's bad marketers. Bad marketers are short-term salespeople rather than long-term marketers. Bad marketers see everything in terms of marketing opportunities. Bad marketers would rather do anything than opt to do seemingly nothing.  Bad marketers see people as consumers not customers. Bad marketers lack respect for other people's creativity.  Bad marketers see channels where people see entertainment or utility. Bad marketers overvalue the new and undervalue the present. Bad marketers do what they've always done. Bad marketers use all the jargon but unders

Chatting to a colleague yesterday,  I was surprised to learn how often marketers still fail to discover how their category users decide on their purchases, let alone why. The primary concern of these functionaries remains the sourcing of messages/proclamations designed to change people's behaviour. Well,  good luck with that. Behaviour change is very, very difficult. It's surely much simpler to seek to understand existing behaviour and then position your product/service in that vicinity either by devising new products/services or by reframing the user behaviour in terms of your existing products/services. Marketers often claim to know who their customers are, be that in demographic or, more usefully, related behavioural terms. I prefer a more obvious definition. Your customers are those people who decide that your product/service meets one or more of their needs/wants in a better way than any existing alternative. If you don't know why,  then you don't know who your cus

I've recently returned from Theatre Communications Group's Annual Conference , where the theme was "model the movement," focusing on new models and transformative ideas from the field. I was particularly excited to attend this year, as the speakers included Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company 's Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz and author/marketer extraordinaire Seth Godin . Howard kicked off the conference with his speech "Theatrical Innovation: Who's Job Is It?," in which he compared the systems of our regional theaters to that of an assembly line, a theme that would resurface multiple times over the course of the conference. As regional theaters grew and became more complex, often times non-profit managers were encouraged to borrow best practices from corporate entities, designed to improve efficiency, streamline processes and increase return on investment. And it worked...until it didn't. You see, the process of creating art cannot be controlled

Creating awareness is often rightly derided as an unimaginative advertising goal. But that doesn't mean it's an inherently bad goal. Indeed,  if you share my conviction that it is the user who decides what your product/service means to them, then you could argue that awareness is all you can genuinely hope to achieve. British Airways neither make grandiose claims that they won't match in real life nor do they fall in to the trap of boasting about their sponsorship status that, at best, comec across as faintly ridiculous. They simply suggest that people don't buy their product and stay at home to support the home team during the Olympics. Now, nobody is going to change their travel plans because of this campaign, but it  doesn't matter if people take them literally or not. They'll register British Airways being supportive as a sponsor should be; a little something will be added to their opinion of British Airways, and when they want to fly maybe that will increas

1747 likes for a lecture which took place in a hall with a capacity much smaller than that, but which was not full. Draw your own conclusions. Social media are broadcasting media. They're predicated on self-validation rather than intent.

Without clear direction, success can never be achieved. We’ve all experienced situations where we run toward a goal as fast and furious as we can only to have the goal posts moved on us in route. When this happens over and over again, an organization is guilty of foolishly wasting precious resources at a moment when most are under resourced as it is. Success begins with leadership. As Michael Kaiser discussed in his Huffington Post blog, there must be a leader . All too often, arts managers try to lead by consensus. They don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want people to be upset with them. In complex situations, many times the answer isn’t clear, and trying to get a wide variety of stakeholders moving in the same direction can be tough. But this isn’t a time to postpone critical decisions in an effort to get senior staff, board members and other various stakeholders to agree on a course of action. The executive has been hired to lead, and lead they must. Part of leadership is ga