In the process of moving this blog from the old rusty diesel engine to the new shiny WordPress engine, old post drafts popped up like dead fish in a pond after an accident involving lots of chemicals. One was titled Everything I’ve learned about marketing in ten years. It didn’t have an ending or a beginning yet, it was just a sketchy list but surprisingly it made a bit of sense. So I dusted it off and edited it to be readable, but didn’t add or remove anything. Here goes:

Stand for something. A little bit better than the competition leaves everyone cold. If you have nothing to say, there’s no need to shout about it.*

One message at a time.*

When conducting market research, ask only whether the message you are sending out has been received as intended, and nothing else. The one thing you definitely shouldn’t ask your customers is “what would you like to have”. *

Always put 10% of your budget in risky channels and promotions ie. where they might bomb but, if successful, that generates a healthy ROI.*

Work for a boss that wants big change.**

Test where the limits that shouldn’t be crossed are, with advertising or whatever you have to play with. ***

None of the above tips apply if you just want to sell a bit of goods, and not do something remarkable.

Footnotes AD 2012:

* Fully agree to this day, I thank the year 2007 version of myselt for the reminder.
** 2012 addition: or be an entrepreneur that wants big change.
*** Back in 2007 most of my marketing career had been in media or FMCG, where there’s hardly any disruption in the business itself. So it made a lot of sense to push the limits with communications, because this was all there was. With startups, you’re so much closer to disrupting businesses and business models and there’s much less of a need to do scandalous communications.

Please help me complete the commandments of marketing. What have I missed?

Today I took a bunch of clothes I hadn’t worn for a while to the Tallinn re-use centre. It’s a fine social enterprise that accepts clothes and other items in reasonable condition, sells them or gives them to the people in need of clothes and uses profits from sales to educate school kids to reuse and recycle. After handing over an armful of T-shirts, jeans and sweaters the girl at the counter thanked me and handed over a thank you card. I took a quick look at the card before handing it back (to be used again, you know) and what got me thinking was that the card featured a small discount off my next purchase. I reckon that while the people buying stuff from the centre may be very price sensitive the people taking their stuff there are most probably not. What I think they could have done instead:

Taken my email address to engage me with newsletters in the future.

Taken my email address to send me information where the clothes I donated ended up, making my contribution more tangible.

Allowed me to pick a free book from the selection of donated books

Nothing. (In addition to the smiling thank you I got anyway). Promos may work wonders but they’re a hindrance if price sensitivity is near-zero.

Any other examples where discounts don’t work? 20% off your next wedding and 2-for-1 funerals come to mind.

Shit doesn’t happen. Shit takes time and effort.

I was recently in a meeting where co-founder of a next-big-thing-startup, when probed about marketing plans, said something to the line of we’ll do something viral so we don’t need to worry about marketing too much. Right. I’m in no means a viral marketing expert but this much I know: viral marketing does take time and effort.
There seems to be a widely spread misconception that viral marketing doesn’t cost anything and that if you do even tiny bit of it, customers will turn up on your door or website like zombies. In my view this is only true on four occasions. First, companies like Skype or Facebook whose product is so viral in nature that they seem to grow “just like that”. Second, brands like Apple or Obama that have such loyal followers that every step they take is echoed on blogs, social network profiles and T-shirts of fanboys across the world. Thirdly there are those whose idea is just so spot-on that no-one can refuse to pass it on to a friend. Blendtech’s Will it blend? campaign is a good example of that. And lastly, some just get lucky because a celebrity blogger somewhere happens to like it.
That leaves 99% of folks to make viral marketing happen with their sweat and/or marketing dollars. I’ve seen the behind the scenes of quite a few viral campaigns, and none of them have been super cheap or super easy to do. Take my recent task of generating blog coverage for Pledgehammer. I now know I have to do about a dozen units of work (this can be an email, blog comment or a guest blog post) to receive one unit of coverage. I’ve made north of 250 contacts to get about 20 people interested and writing about Pledgehammer. That’s good many evenings and weekends spent on creating “something viral”. (Luckily the weather has been rubbish). See here, here, here (got to love this one) or there for results, more links are available on Pledgehammer blog.
Long story short – viral marketing is a powerful thing, definitely worth some experiments, it just takes time and effort to work.

By now you’ve surely seen the new T-Mobile ad. Such a great idea! A friend who was in the video told me they had five full days of rehearsal, at first in some huge building in North London where the life-size plan of Liverpool Street Station was drawn onto the floor and at night in the station itself thereafter. They shot the thing six times with 16 (or was it 14) cameras, with half-hour breaks between the shoots. Dancers were carefully choreographed to leave corridors between them so no-one would miss their train and there were station official present to green light the beginning of each take. Which all makes it a great idea that is also executed brilliantly.

The only thing I couldn’t understand is that the guy I spoke with reckoned that 40.000 pounds was paid out to the dancers. With 400 dancers involved, can it really be just 100 pounds per hard working dancer?