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More marketing bollocks by clueless “experts”…

The internet has created some fascinating new habits, particularly in the social media channels.

One that has grown rapidly is the posting of vacuous, meaningless, blatantly false infographics that claim credibility because, well, they’re infographics. They have images to go with the words, so they must be true!

This lame one’s done the rounds lately – though not much graphics. I suspect it’s distributed by people who have never run their own business, or spent their own money marketing their goods and services, or they only started working in marketing after 2000.

6 new rules

As you know, anything claiming there are new rules to the way people behave when they part with their hard-earned cash, is bound to be chock-full of bollocks.

Let’s deconstruct this shall we, to help the uninitiated.

THEN – Find customers
NOW – Be found

For decades marketers have run ads in all sorts of media, created content for all sorts of media (articles, videos, printed inserts, white papers, seminars, websites, etc) and done as much as they possibly can to be found by customers. Yellow Pages comes to mind – the original analogue search engine.

You would tell prospects and customers what you sell and where you sold it, then hope they would buy from you when they were in the market. You went about finding customers, by making sure you could be found – so to speak. And here’s the rub, in 2014 you still have to find customers – now you just have more channels in which to do so.

customers

What fool thinks all you have to do is create content and stop your advertising or selling? The punters don’t awaken each day, search for content and then kick your door in to throw money at you. Why do you think Woolies and Coles continue to use unaddressed catalogues full of sales copy for example? Maybe it has something to do with “because catalogues work“!

The purpose of business is to acquire and retain customers profitably – always has been, always will be. You just have to find the best channels to get them.

THEN – Demographic
NOW – Behavioural segmentation

Yes, behavioural segmentation has evolved rapidly since the mid-1980’s. It’s not new though. In the 19th century catalogue marketers inserted offers based on previous purchase behaviour. Now we just have more behaviour to track, because we can track every activity online.

behaviour

And don’t ignore demographics. They are still very handy. Want to sell pool cleaning products for example? You don’t need behavioural segmentation, unless you regard selling chlorine to people with pools, as against people without pools, “segmentation“? Just use any online mapping tool to peer into people’s back yards, then get the pool-owner’s address from street view – it’s not behavioural rocket science.

It’s the simple use of demographics, based on the behaviour of owning a pool. Then you mail them offers and information (sorry, content) so they know where to find you when they are consuming gallons of pool cleaning content on the web.

THEN – Mass advertising
NOW – 1:1 Communications

Hello, is anyone home? 1:1 communications was so popular it became a buzzword in 1980. Dozens of companies named themselves some version of “One to One Marketing“. If you read “How Brands Grow” the brilliant book from the Institute of Marketing Science, you’ll get a clear picture of consumer behaviour and understand why mass advertising is not going to die, just evolve stronger than ever.

CTA

And if you want a sure sign that 1:1 marketing online is struggling, just look at the hotel category. The moment every online brand starts spending a small fortune running television ads on the same day, often in the same ad break, you know they are in strife. Trivago, Hotels Combined, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc are desperately using mass media to survive. Some won’t make it, you can be sure of that.

The maths explain it. The more competitive a category (like travel), the more it costs to buy generic keywords and break-through the digi-clutter. And the more costly it becomes to acquire a customer, via PPC, SEO, social media, content marketing, et al. So online marketing becomes too expensive. The marketing department says “we better try mass advertising on TV to generate leads“. Smells like 1999 to me.

THEN – Point in time blasts
NOW – Continuing relationships

I’ve owned a retail supermarket, travel agency and a number of B2B businesses. They were all built on continuing relationships. That’s why a whole industry was created, again over 30 years ago, called Customer Relationship Management (or Marketing depending upon your jargon). It was so popular it became an acronym – CRM! You know you’ve made it in marketing when you have evolved to acronym status.

relationships

I don’t know any business in the history of the world that succeeded THEN by using point in time blasts – most people don’t even know WTF it means? Has the author of this infographic ever run a business?

THEN – Few isolated channels
NOW – Exploding integrated channels

Yes there are definitely more channels now – some work, some don’t. As for them being integrated, that’s a drawing a long bow and not the main reason to use online channels.

I vaguely remember some time last century when ads ran in newspapers, magazines and on television with a call to action. People could ring a phone number, clip a coupon, or visit a website to respond – we didn’t label this as integrated media channels, we just assumed it was common sense. (click here for the history of PPC)

integrated mktg

Whenever I ask my audiences of marketers at seminars, “who has a current accurate database of their customers?” only about 10% – 20% answer in the affirmative. When I ask “who is following fashion and rushing to every new digi-channel that opens” the majority of the audience is in the affirmative. Why chase fashion, when you don’t have healthy business basics?

If you have a customer name, address, phone number and email address you can run a business. But without customers you don’t have a business. By all means, test different media channels, offers and creative to grow your business – that’s fundamental. Just don’t rush to every new channel because it exists. Test and learn, test and learn is the mantra. Always was, always will be…again.

THEN – Intuitive decision making
NOW – data driven information

Aaahh the old chestnut. Nobody used data until 2010 – what utter bollocks. I opened Australia’s first data consultancy in an advertising agency in 1988! Database Marketing magazine was launched in Australia in 1994! Data-driven marketing is decades old, it’s just more prevalent now.

Why do these sad tragics think that just because something is new to them, it is new to the world?

customer behaviour

The real issue is that traditionally, the big brand marketers didn’t use data to drive their marketing on a one-to-one basis. In most cases they didn’t need too, as the population (and therefore market size) was growing organically. So mass marketing was the easiest solution.

But if you ran a small business (about 70% of all businesses), or one based on the way of  direct marketing, you ran your business using one-to-one tactics and by building relationships based on customer behaviour. If you didn’t you went broke.

The only thing that has changed is the internet has exposed marketers who previously didn’t use data, to the benefits of using data – lots of data in fact. And these marketers are often those who had big media budgets to flog things like packaged goods. So now they invest some of those media dollars in data capture and analysis, so they can continue to flog things like packaged goods – whoop de woo.

Welcome to the real world kids – wake up and smell the coffee. If you took time to study marketing history and examine the truth, you’d save yourself loads of time and money – and probably stop wasting electrons by forwarding dishonest infographics.

I’m off to make a cuppa and maybe have me some content…

34 Comments

  5. No-one points out better than Malcolm that the Emperor has no clothes. As someone who regularly delivers a presentation called ‘The New Rules of Communication’, all I can say is – ouch!

  6. Thank you for saying so much more pointedly what needs to be said! OMG if I hear one more time “but we’re different” by a marketing newbie, I’m going to hurt them.

    Classical good marketing anyone? Data driven, multi-channel. There’s nothing new here. Direct mail and email are the same. KPIs are KPIs.

    Now, time to spread the word! Thanks for the ‘content’!

  7. Excellent, love the content and cartoons!! Well said… enjoy your cuppa… Mine’s a coffee with milk in first or a MIF!

  8. Well said! Sadly not only limited to the young though. There are plenty of marketing folks with many years of ‘experience’ that believe in the process of making content but forgetting to actively take it to market. They don’t understand how to use and learn from data, how to actively advertise and sell to their customers (dirty words: advertise, sell, customers!). It very much seems that marketing is becoming egocentric – be seen to be doing the latest thing but don’t worry if it’s right for your market. I share your despair!

    • Thanks Helen, you’re right of course. Though the older players have no excuse as the evidence and knowledge has been there to tap for decades. Sadly today, fashion seems to dominate, particularly where people aren’t spending their own money, so are not as accountable.

  9. 1988? I was running and using a marketing database for a major health insurance company in 1979…. but it wasn’t on a computer. It was on thousands of index cards filed in shoe boxes and stored in an attic in suburban South London. Best database I ever worked with.

  10. From 1981-1983 I was in an unusual situation — teaching marketing and visual communications by day, running the night shift of Melbourne’s top advertising typeshop in the evenings and consulting to a number of direct sales companies and several advertising “hot shops” all at the same time. (It’s a complicated story that ended in a spectacular mid-life crash-and-burn.) So I was in a pivotal seat to watch what was happening, unusually well-connected and up-to-the-minute on industry intelligence.

    During that period major changes took place in advertising, much of it triggered by technological changes. “Relational Marketing” made serious inroads — example: Myer ceased running multiple double-page spreads in the Melbourne Herald each afternoon and diverted the spend into direct marketing, mostly catalogues and direct mail, all database driven. Election advertising also saw ad spending diverted to direct mail in a big way.

    The thing that struck me about this new direction was that most of it was really just BIG businesses using technology and data to try to synthesize what small businesses already had in real, live, person-to-person relationships with their customers.

    With their customary wasteful, broad-brush approach, most of those BIG businesses — and their agencies — squandered opportunities willy-nilly. (Small businesses, oblivious to the changes, just went on doing what they’d always done.)

    My own experience and observations pretty-much mirrored your own, so I concur totally with this article. Once again, the circus had a handful of high flyers way above the rest of the crowd, but most of the attention was hijacked by the clowns and illusionists.

    Nice read, as always. 😀

  11. Now if Oily Boy and the Bimbo running the average recruitment agency were to read your blog they may understand that employing a mature marketer as opposed to a wanker who thinks that everything he knows about is ‘new’ or that database marketing started in 2010, would save their clients repeating mistakes made twenty or thirty years ago. I did the first Telex shot in the UK in ’84 addressed ‘to the receptionist’. It achieved the unheard of response of 98%.

  12. Maintain the rage Mal! It looks like we two “has been” DM-ers have some broad support out there! Or is it that you are just a great creator of content…

    Your words have probably moved forward my public announcement that I am officially “over” technology-enabled CRM and all the associated frustration and heart-ache I have experienced since embracing the strategy in 1999.
    Here is an excerpt from my draft –

    With all due modesty I despair that –

    1. There are few Chief Executives and Boards who are prepared to change their business and customer service culture in order to use the data in a customer-centric way. I think that the pressure brought about by quarterly reporting plays a large role in this and accordingly, only privately-owned companies can make the strategy work!

    2. There are not enough marketers in this world who have the requisite balance of analytical ability combined with understanding of “real world” customers and their needs and wants. In general, marketers are not numerate and analysts are lost in their own world of numbers and SQL

    Why, even the Australian Government, with all of its vast resources, admitted this week that it has not been successful in applying “meta-data” to security surveillance…

    I rest my case!

    • Hey Richard, one of the other problems is that people assume that to be a marketer you just have to tick a few digital boxes, by creating content, some PPC and Facebook ads. The latest marketing best sellers are being written by computer science majors who have tasted marketing for the first time and are spreading their new-found wisdom. Sadly, they are being believed. I read one the other day claiming over 200 “new” marketing strategies. There wasn’t one strategy amongst them – just a bunch of social media tactics. Now he’s a marketing speaker traveling the circuit on the back of his exceedingly average book!!!

  14. …and while we are on “experts”, here’s another rant I posted yesterday –

    I am prompted to write this after annoying experiences with four separate websites in the past week…

    I may sound like a typical “old codger” complaining about youth, but my management experience convinces me that I am right.

    In general, websites are programmed by young geeks.

    Said geeks have very little life experience and do not think in “real world” logic.

    Compounding this is the fact that in general, Senior Management do not understand website technology and coding!

    So often the result is the frustrating dogs breakfast I have experienced on the websites of four major organizations over the past week!

    There IS a solution to this sad state of affairs. Management MUST specify the workflow and not abrogate responsibility for the final solution.

    What is logical in code to a twenty-something programmer may not be logical in outcome to a forty, fifty or sixty year old user!

    • Richard, the same rules still apply to web sites as in everything connected to marketing. TEST. The senior and aged management should insist that they trial the beta version of the site and try to to access the information unassisted. If they can prove that it is idiot proof then let the project roll out.

      • Right on Rupert!

        …but how many aged management will take the time to do that? They have “a business to run….”

  15. Hi Malcolm. As usual you have effortlessly carved and roasted the nonsense in that “infographic”. What the author of that ridiculous set of ‘rules’ fails to grasp is that the marketing landscape has evolved so it now embraces BOTH of the approaches listed under THEN and NOW. Digital mediums have created the opportunity for mass broadcast advertising and 1:1 conversations to co-exist, if that is what is needed to reach a the customer.
    Maintain the rage, it’s entertaining and enlightening.
    Cheers. Tim

  18. Awesome post Malcolm I couldn’t agree with you more! Your post is well written and you have chosen a great selection of illustrative cartoons and images; it’s amazing how few writers and speakers realise how important a skill that is.

    I have been making very similar points about Email for quite a while and have come to be known as the guy who says send more email – as if that was easy. I have come to the conclusion after years of studying the way human beings interact with the email they receive, that emails effectiveness comes from its broadcast capabilities and NOT as you so rightly point out its 1-1 capabilities or the fact that it makes sending an automated message targeted to behaviour so easy. What makes email so powerful is good old fashioned Reach and Frequency. It’s not that the other stuff doesn’t work, it does, but at the bottom of the funnel. Almost all language in email marketing ignores the fact that email is a VERY cost effective and efficient way to grow the top of the funnel by bringing broadcast capabilities within the reach of everyone!

    The point is broadcast and other so called old school techniques will be around for a very long time and I think your point about the amount online travel businesses spend on TV illustrates that very well.

    I will say one thing you can count yourself lucky you don’t lead your description of yourself as an email marketing expert 🙂 were you to as I do this article would have unleashed a torrent of flames written by 12 year old marketing gurus and software vendors accusing you of being a spammer and worse!

    Anyway, should you or any of your readers want to read more about how and why broadcast techniques are so effective in email; here are some articles published by me:
    Email as Broadcast Channel http://bit.ly/1cy1R5d
    Beyond open rate: Why it is time for email marketers to think reach, frequency, impact http://bit.ly/14dzYOr
    How to create emails that sell – even unopened http://bit.ly/11aLlFs

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