Marketing guru offers ideas for rethinking your strategy
He set the marketing world on its ear with talk about permission marketing and purple cows. Now, Seth Godin shares new thinking about how marketers need to adjust to their ever-changing world and make their messages resonate with their target audience.
You don’t need to be a marketing guru to know that the conventional mass marketing approach to advertising is dying.
The rules have changed and consumers now hold all the power. They can screen calls, sign up for the Do Not Call registry, edit out commercials with DVRs, unsubscribe from e-mails and toss mailers unopened.
This kind of consumer empowerment is good for anyone in direct marketing.
“Direct marketers, of course, realize that measurement is the key to success,” writes Seth Godin, the author of All Marketers Are Liars and dozens of other books. “Figure out what works and do it more! Mass marketers have always resisted this temptation.”
But in a recent speech, he accused most direct marketers of being guilty of “TV thinking,” which says, “I can interrupt whomever I want, whenever I want. I can call you at dinner, I can send e-mail, I can buy magazine ads.
“You’re spammers if you’re sending me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk in a format I don’t want to get about a product I’m not interested in and won’t have time to look at,” he told the crowd.
Ouch!
So what are the rules in this new marketing paradigm? Deliver asked Godin to explain how marketers should change their strategy. Here’s what he had to say.
START AT THE BEGINNING, NOT THE END
First, Godin argues, marketers need to quit focusing on tweaking product attributes. That’s the wrong end of the selling process. They need to be involved at the very start of product development or their campaigns will continue to fail.
“Innovation is cheaper than advertising,” he points out.
But given corporate politics, is a strategic role in product design possible to achieve? In his book Free Prize Inside, Godin offers methods marketers can use to line up support for their ideas, from making explicit what the dangers of the market status quo is to championing someone else’s pet project.
“You would be surprised at how people will listen when someone in marketing speaks up and explains clearly why something different needs to be done,” he says.
This new influence helps the company create a product that is so remarkable — what Godin famously termed “a purple cow” — that everyone notices and talks it up.
One word of warning though: Because customers are buried by too much information about too many choices, only extreme improvements will be noticed. “Half-measures are not rewarded,” Godin says.
AIM FOR THE EDGES
The marketplace is filled with products that are good, but don’t excite customers and don’t contribute much growth. And don’t count on R&D as a source of fresh thinking.
“It’s a bust because big organizations play it safe and safe is risky in the long run,” he says. “They try to come up with the perfect product everyone agrees is guaranteed to succeed and the result is a compromise that is doomed to failure.”
Real innovation comes not from bureaucracies but from individuals who have nothing to lose by breaking the rules, Godin asserts. A technique he calls “edgecraft” focuses on making your product appeal much more strongly to one segment of the market.
“Most companies make the mistake of aiming at the broad center, which is crowded and jammed with noise,” he notes. (And potential customers in the center tend to listen to experienced peers rather than paid advertising anyway, Godin claims).
He also warns against trying to please your happy customers.
“They’re your worst enemy, because they’re unlikely to push you to stay ahead of the competition and one day when a competitor has something better, will just quietly leave,” he adds.
Rather, Godin says, “talk with those who are dissatisfied with everything on the market and those who are unsatisfied and don’t even know their needs are not being fully met.”
Finally, forget about focus groups. “People in a small room at a shopping mall will tell you what you want to hear, and I’ve seen time and again where focus groups are used to justify whatever the boss wants,” Godin says.
Better, as he says in his book Purple Cow, to project yourself into the minds of customers by disciplined immersion in the customers’ culture (fan magazines, trade shows, design reviews), then let the marketplace react to a cheap prototype.
