Marketing

A funny thing happened on the way to the ball park – the Nationals won! This does not happen often.  As a former Washington Senators stadium Public Address Announcer, I have seen many more losses than winners. You’ve heard the slogan: “First in War! First in Peace! Last in the American League! Well, times have changed! For the past few years the Washington Baseball Club is now known as the Washington Nationals – and we are no longer in the American League, we’re now in the National League. We're talking Major League Baseball in Washington DC! 

Another Presidential election is less than a year away. The Democrats are backing President Obama, since the incumbent is usually a safe bet. Unfortunately, this means an unusually large number of Republicans spent most of 2011 wrestling endlessly amongst themselves for the chance to take him on in 2012. I’m not sure if this is the longest pre-convention tussle ever, but it sure feels like it, and I for one am happy it’s beginning to wind down. Still, the wrestling continues.

When marketing practitioners discuss the tools of the trade amongst ourselves, we usually manage to keep the customer in mind. We do care about the fact that someone has to earn the money we spend, and we need to produce measurable results. To get there, we may recommend a certain level of print or online investment to get certain shares of voice, or certain mixes of tactics to get viral effects. But we also know clients have budget, culture and operation limits that can make these targets impossible. Those limits can force us to re-focus tactics around events (like tradeshows) or calendar cycles (like peak quarters) that tend to drive sales outcomes.

Everybody wants to be different. And everyone wants to do business with a company that stands out from the crowd. That’s why the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, is at the core of every organization’s messaging. It's a simple statement, one or two sentences long, that explains to customers what it is you provide that sets your company apart from your competitors.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an event where the speaker was so boring that almost everyone in the audience was looking down at their gadgets and clicking away rather than continuing to pay attention.

In contrast, this morning I attended an event at which U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra held everyone's rapt attention. He was articulate, passionate, and engaged. He spoke without notes or slides and damn well knew his stuff.

Whenever there is an economic downturn, many small companies think marketing is the first budget item that should be cut when times are tough and sales are down.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many people make that mistake because marketing is usually the last thing a business adds to its toolkit as it grows. As a result, smaller businesses see marketing as some kind of luxury – as a drain on a company’s resources. After all, the company got along for the longest time without it, so why not just do without it again when budgets get tight?

Even as a child, I was interested in advertising. There was a TV campaign (apparently a quite successful one, judging from how long it ran) for a cereal called Trix, featuring a large white rabbit who was addicted to this fruit-flavored cereal. The rabbit seemed like a pretty nice guy, really. He just loved the cereal and wanted some. But the children wouldn’t let him have any.

While you were sleeping, the email marketing world turned last week – and it’s not welcome news for purveyors of mass customer contact.

Around the end of March, unknown intruders gained access to servers at Epsilon, the world’s largest email service provider. Among the data harvested in this attack were millions of end-customer names and email addresses from blue-chip marketers like Amazon, Best Buy, Capital One, Citigroup, Hilton, Marriott, TiVo, US Bank, and Walt Disney.

It took several days for Epsilon to identify the intrusion, days more before an accurate list of affected clients was publicly available, and still more before each of those marketers contacted their customers. During this period, speculation in trade and general press ran rampant, but the affected parties (clearly listening to their legal counsels) were largely silent.

Whether you’re a marketer or an interactive creative, here are the big questions you’re now facing:

Yes, I’m quoting Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, from the comic book/TV series/movie series that follows the adventures of Spider-man™ as he protects New York City from supervillains. (Deal with it, readers, pop culture references are cool). Oddly enough, I’m surprised these bad guys haven’t figured out by now that a lot of America remains a superhero-free zone. Maybe instead of always trying to take a bite out of the Big Apple, these supervillains should find a nice city to terrorize out in the country, like Poughkeepsie, or Conshohocken, Pennsylvania?