Marketing for the Third Millennium
Real Results, Real Value, Real Quick
There has been a lot of fuss about Kelly Blazek’s response to an unsolicited email and whilst her response may be a little harsh, there are a couple of valid issues here that are going unaddressed, One thought is that Politeness – in all directions – is a rare commodity. If you do something for me,…
In general, I am a big advocate of the aphorism that the customer (or client) is always right. But what is missing in that bald statement is that not ALL customers are right for YOU. I’ve had a couple of examples in the last several years since I became an independent. One recently, which prompted…
Hardly had I posted the blog entry on working with email lists, which talked of the virtue of working with ‘warm lists’ through partners, than I get an egregious example of how NOT to do so! I run (in a different life) a fairly successful Meetup.com group for photographers. We are closing in on one…
Tivo, which I used to love a lot more than I do nowadays, recently sent me an email and asked this: Why ask me to answer one quick question, then give me 4, three of which are mandatory? Don’t take the mickey out of your customers, transparency and honesty are important. And though this might…
In my last post, I talked about email lists and my motivation – a good friend and her complaint about the amount of spam trying to persuade her to buy email lists. “I know you are against buying lists, but why?” she said. I don’t have the amount of time we had at lunch, and…
I got a New Year (notice the singular!) email from a friend “Write about why not to buy email lists, I’m swamped with spam offering them.” This results from a lunch conversation about the value of, inter alia, PR and email lists in today’s world. I have strong views on both, but Andy Sernovitz beat…
We chatted, and by the time I’d finished, I came out with a new Garmin Edge bike computer (I’ll write more about the horrible experience with Garmin’s site later). … This week in the mail I get this: 
What a fantastic piece of reinforcement of my purchase and a personal way to emphasize their personal service and support.
An aside, that seems like a horribly negative name, perhaps that’s why the keep telling us (on NPR within the last hour) that they used to be Horn, Murdoch, Cole. … Not what they stand for, why I should get to know them, but who they haven’t been for over TWO years. … This stuff is not that hard, You do work hard to define the business you are in, the way you relate to your customers, what your products and services are; and then you tell them the story, over and over again. … It’s not that legacy should be forgotten, but there are few, very few, organizations for whom it should, or can, be the marketing route to the future.
However, I do think that the poor product marketers responsible for Quaker Instant Oatmeal have had to carry this a little too far – something you never thought you would hear me say! … It struck me how different the two – at first glance – similar product packages were and I wondered if this was legal advice at work, or whether someone in the product department was being overzealous.
As it happens I was driving – via the Mojave desert and a few days of photography on the way down, and Yosemite for more pictures on the way back (you can see the results at www.brearleyphoto.com) and so chose my arrival to coincide with a drive through the Mojave National Preserve. … I get that she was completing something for the previous guest, but no greeting, no smile, no ‘I’m sorry, this is going to take me a moment’, I stood there, ignored whilst the people after me who were ushered to other clerks departed for their rooms.