defenestrate99

Panic Marketing

Seth Godin has an interesting post on the elements required for an idea to be viral. As usual, he does a good job of distilling marketing ideas to basic building blocks. But that wasn't what stuck with me the most. It was this:

Panic, for instance, is a superbad idea at all times, but it spreads faster than most. That's because spreading an idea is rarely a thoughtful, voluntary act. Instead, it is near the core of who we are, and we often do it without thinking much about the implications.

I wonder how much the idea of panic is used by marketers to sell something. Sure, the theory that FUD (Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt) inspires some of our purchasing decisions is not a new one. But true, unbridled, scream-like-a-little-girl panic? I don't know if anyone has jumped on that yet to hock a product or service. I suppose you could make an argument that virus protection software or Y2K supplies play into that core emotion. And maybe some pharmaceutical companies have been guilty of overemphasizing certain consequences of NOT taking one's medicine in their advertising. If I wanted to get political here (and I guess I do, because I'm mentioning it), I could make an argument that the current administration is using Panic Marketing to sell the War on Terror.

Here's hoping this is a trend that does not continue. Marketing is only sustainable with educated customers, not freaked out customers. As soon as the panic goes away, the utility of the service or product (or administration- damn! sorry. won't happen again) diminishes in the eyes of the customer significantly, and their trust in you, the vendor, evaporates utterly and permanently.

If you really are one big company, act like it.

Had to return a gift to the Pottery Barn today. Actually, the intent was to exchange it for something we really wanted. But we couldn't. Why? Because the gift was purchased through the Pottery Barn catalog, and Pottery Barn stores won't give credit to Pottery Barn customers who return Pottery Barn catalog gifts. Instead, the Pottery Barn store people called the Pottery Barn catalog people for us and told us that the Pottery Barn catalog people would be sending us, get this, store credit in seven to ten days.

I would like to make one of those global generalizations that cautious people normally avoid, and state without fear to the good people of Pottery Barn that this makes absolutely no sense at all to anyone who has ever been a customer anywhere in the history of civilization. If a store is savvy enough to open multiple channels for purchase, it should anticipate and even welcome exchanges across those different channels. A customer sees a brand, not a department or channel, and expects currency within that brand to be universally accepted. I was amazed to learn that the Apple was equally ignorant in this regard. My in-laws were kind enough to get me an Apple Gift Card from the Apple Retail Store near them in Emeryville, not realizing that I, who live more than 100 miles from the nearest Apple Store, could not apply this card to purchases made at the Apple Store that operates conveniently on the Internet.

Does it really surprise Apple, Pottery Barn, or any other company to realize that customers associate their brands as globally as they themselves try to sell those brands?  I don't want excuses about being separate branches or departments. If you have the same logo, you should be able to deal with me as a customer.

Learn to code.

It is a dangerous thing when I am left unoccupied for several hours. I take on strange projects with no obvious merit for a marketing guy.

Case in point, a little while ago I learned some basic programming on Ruby. For those of you unfamiliar with the language, it is supposed to be the next, best, coolest thing ever. Efficient, powerful, and (most important to my particular skill set) tremendously simple to learn. Jonathan gave a presentation on it at work, and the topic was evidently all anyone could talk about at OSCON, for whatever that's worth.
 

Not that these things have anything necessarily to do with a guy trying to sell stuff. Outside of some very primordial html jockeying I did back in 1995 or so, I have no programming background to speak of, and a comprehension of the mysteries of Computer Science that many of my kinder engineering colleagues refer to as "underdeveloped." Nor should you leave with the impression that I just popped open a Ruby book and bada-boom, now I'm coding my own Instant Messenger program (I figure if Google is getting in the game now, maybe it's not too late). My Ruby programs are functioning,  but otherwise ugly, simple (in the "really, really dumb" meaning of the word), and absolutely without any practical application whatsoever.

Still, I found the exercise very useful, and would recommend it to all of my non-technical colleagues for the following reasons:

1. You will have an important, renewed (or brand new) appreciation for your engineers -  This is an open apology for any coder I've ever worked with on a project. For any engineer who I asked to slip in one last feature because, heck, it didn't seem that hard from the sound of it. For any developer I ever gave crap to for missing a bug. I just didn't get it. Code is hard. It took me an hour to write a 14-line program and 35 minutes to debug it thereafter. Now that I've limped a mile in my engineers' shoes, you may consider me suitably humbled.
2. Learning Ruby (or any language for that matter) is a good brain exercise - If you are a marketer, read Kathy Sierra's treatise on blowing your own mind, and give coding a whirl just to make your head work a little differently. Otherwise you risk cranial atrophy, which might be why so many products and services suck nowadays. One-trick ponies, by very definition, don't have the breadth of experience to understand a varied customer base. This was a cool way to think differently and grab a healthy dose of perspective.
3. Personal satisfaction - I'm a crossword junky (or playbabble, depending on my mood and resources) and I will admit to a bit of a thrill when I find a word that's been driving me nuts trying to remember it. Coding was, to my great surprise, perfectly analogous. The challenge of building something that works is just fun.

Oh, and don't give me any of that "I'm not any good with math" crap. One of the biggest selling points of Ruby is the simplicity of it (indeed, Chris Pine's excellent tutorial that I used promotes the language as foundation for learning other, more complicated programming languages). You have no excuse.

I challenge every marketer out there, especially if you work online, to try this. Go here, download what you need, and get started.

Geek Marketers

I really dig this post by Anil Dash, specifically the part about Geek Marketing as a web trend for 2006:

...geeks really need to learn how to explain their skills, the benefits of their skills, and the business advantages provided by those benefits. Knowing half a dozen programming languages won't help you if you can't communicate with the people who want to hire you. And your language/platform/development environment of choice won't succeed unless you do a great job of evangelizing it and promoting it to others, including non-technical people.

Absolutely agreed. However, I think this is a trend that's been around for a while. The really solid engineers who are writing their own tickets can already communicate well. What I think is more of a trend for 2006 is that good marketers and general non-technical business-types will start listening more to the engineers who take an active interest in business goals and customer needs. An engineer could have (and at my job, often does have) the greatest ideas to increase conversion, improve UI or construct killer features that will result in incredible upside, but we need to be able to hear it. Communication requires two entities, and as the barriers to start-up and maintain great new businesses decreases, it will be the marketers who can't make the effort to  understand the technnology avaliable and its applications who will be marginalized in the Web 2.0 economy.

O'Reilly books aren't just for engineers.

This is Why Radio is Dead.

So are you, like, really busy now?

That was, I swear to you, a direct quote from the morning-show DJ lady on KIST FM, Santa Barbara's "New Rock Alternative." To give the proper context, this question was addressed to the haggard sounding Red Cross employee who had JUST FINISHED explaining to the DJ lady and all of her listeners how her colleagues and volunteers were working 24/7 to help with the NOLA relief efforts.

Mr. Radio, I understand you are trying to do a good thing here, but really:

First, you fill our day with commercials instead of music.

Then you take away all of the good music from individual stations and play the same rotation of 12 songs.

Then you take away individual stations, and you give us one corporate monolith radio station that, frankly, sucks.

And somewhere along the way, you hired thoroughbred morons to blather at us about things of massive importance when they clearly can't marshal the intellectual capital to pay attention, literally, to the person whom they are interviewing.

Soma FM (indie pop rocks, please) or LaunchCast at work. And the iPod in my car. Excepting the occasional NPR fix, radio is officially out of my life.