momorantings

Direct marketing practitioners know that success is primarily a numbers game. That's not to discount the work that goes into tweaking a control package, testing messages, building list models and analyzing data. However, the foundation of any direct marketing campaign, be it for ticket sales, subscriptions, memberships or donations, is the number of qualified leads in your database. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how many of us didn't know who are best customers  were. Since that time, I have come to realize that many of us don't know who many of our regular customers are. Performing arts organizations have a distinct advantage over a majority of museums as gathering leads usually stems from capturing information during the ticket buying process, although challenges do exist. Organizations that have a robust group sales business know that it's all about personal relationships as one group contact can bring in hundreds of pat...

Marketers will try to justify almost any worldview. After all, they reason, if enough people share or can be convinced of that worldview, there'll be a profit in it. But it's a dangerous fallacy. One that fuels a segmentation mania that alienates customers and distracts business focus. The problem is that every business will develop different ways of imagining market segments, most likely attuned to their own strengths, the egoes of senior executives or the biases of the people charged with developing them. Today, this is increasingly exacerbated by the abuse of data capture and production flexibility.  Data capture that enables the infinite slicing and dicing of customers all too often devolves into character sketches that are more caricature than clarity. Production flexibility that facilitates customisation all too often leads to attempts to transform  product offerings that simply transform featuritis into modelitis. In this blogpost , the writer shows where that leads ...

A number of desks will soon feature marketing pitches based on the concept of the "reluctantly wealthy".  I know this because the phrase appeared in the comments in Rob's blog the other day and  caused quite a stir. The idea stemmed from the realisation that the wealth of a successful individual is sometimes only a by-product of some other attribute, be that industriousness, creativity or a passionate belief. People see the wealth, but miss what lies deeper. If you can recognise the unintended consequences in relation to the situation you're marketing, you're  likely to appeal to a much more resonant motivation that lies beneath rather than repeat the superficial notion that inhabits your competitors' lowest common denominator efforts.

Deficit budgets have started to accumulate. Core audiences have began to slip away as smaller and smaller houses become the norm. And there is a palpable sense that a once formidable company has lost its way as a growing group of stakeholders from donors to press start asking what happened? Almost certainly, the marketing department is pointing its finger at the artistic staff laying the blame for the downturn solely at their doorstep, while the artistic staff believes that if they only had better marketing, the issue would disappear. Reality is that if a company is experiencing a significant decline, usually there are issues in both areas that need to be resolved. At some point, the financial position of the company becomes untenable, and a turnaround team is brought in, usually in the form of a new artistic director, but sometimes a new executive director and marketing director as well. If executed well, strategic shifts in progra...

Having checked that it was not from the candidate's opponents, I had to wonder if this personalised marketing was an example of subtlety or incompetence. Marketing may often engender indifference, but it always has an impact.