Google

Customer Marketing vs. Customer Satisfaction

Have been doing a little bit of thinking around yesterday’s article.

iPhoneIt occurred to me, that in principle, customer marketing is a mislead approach. Customers don’t need being marketed to. Customer need to be excited about the product or service they are receiving. They need to be happy. They need to be delighted. The product or service should make their lives better.

Think about it. I am a customer, as used in yesterday’s example, of BT. If I was extremely happy with everything these guys did for me, wouldn’t I actually be looking forward to what they will do next? Wouldn’t I say: wow, these guys are doing it again, here is this new thing, and doesn’t it look great?

The whole approach would flip. Instead of them pushing, I would be pulling. Because I love what they do. Think this is nonsense? Ok, let’s use a couple of examples. Take Apple. Apple has great products. Although not all of them hit the sweet-spot (e.g. MacBook Air), many of them do. People love these products. Every time when Apple announces something, their customer (well, maybe not all of them, but enough of them) are eagerly awaiting what they will do next. Not only will they be likely to buy it, but they are also likely to evangelize it to their friends and colleagues. This also true for journalists. They will evangelize it, too. So you get additional free PR on top of it.

So, you think Apple is unique? How about the original Sony PlayStation. People went ballistic over how great that was. When the PlayStation 2 came out, the hype surrounding it was huge. Or take Innocent, the juice company. People love their juices. When Innocent does a little summer festival in London, 100,000s of people will go, just to have some juice (well, and some other stuff). Crazy. Or take Google. Look at all these little free products that they support just so that people like them better and use them all the time. So where do you go to do your search? Microsoft?

So, what all this says to me is: marketing to existing customers has to work through your products. If your products are great, your customer will market them for you and they will be very happy to take a look at everything else you do. BTW, this is one of the very good reasons why it pays to have free products. If people love them, they will consider your paying products, too. If your products don’t make your customers happy, you can throw as much money at people as you like, they still won’t buy from you.

Pragmatic Webinars

WebinarOne of the most interesting sources of content covering product management and product marketing topics is a webinar series by Pragmatic Marketing. The series covers a myriad of topics related to product management on marketing more generally. One of my favourites is a recent Webinar held by David Meerman Scott on the ‘New Rules of Marketing and PR’. Scott has also published a book of the same title which I haven’t had the chance to read, yet.

Scott’s view on Internet marketing in general can be summarised with his belief that ‘You are what you publish’. So, for example, if you have a website that takes a long time to load just to show you TV commercials of the company, then you are slow and boring. If, however, you have a website that has cool content on racing bicycles, then you are cool and know your stuff about racing bicycles. Overall, the argument makes a lot of sense to me. Scott then gave the hilarious example of how IBM market their mainframe computers using YouTube: great stuff.

This general approach pervades much of Scott’s thinking. He extends it to areas such as press releases. For example, let’s say you publish one press release a month that contains a lot of marketing jargon. This means that a buyer has a low probability of finding this release accidentally via, say, Google and even if he found it, he would have a hard time understanding it. You are what you publish: can’t be found, can’t be understood. The opposite example was to publish releases much more frequently and to use actual buyer language in the release. This would then lead to a much better chance of somebody finding the article and then actually being able to understand it, too.

As an aside, Scott has also done some statistical analysis of the words used by PR/marketing specialists so frequently that they are essentially devoid of meaning. Top of the list of the words frequently used in press releases were: “next generation, flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use” you get the gist. My personal favourite in that list is “enterprise class”.

Overall, I suggest you check out both the Pragmatic Marketing webinar series and Scott’s work, both are very intriguing.


AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Zemanta Pixie