Marketers Aren't Like Normal People

Morgan Stewart had a great post yesterday on the MediaPost Email Insider blog (Don't Confuse Your Personal Experience with Good Strategy). The biggest takeaway for me was the reminder that, for any communication I create, I need to think about what my target customers want and how they will react, not how I would.


If you ever need a reminder that marketers don't necessarily think like the rest of the world, check out the fantastic site Which Test Won, a rapidly growing repository of A/B and multivariate tests. Each test is presented in a fun quiz format. I find that I do quite well guessing which test won, but every once in a while I get one wrong (judging from the vote results, I'm not the only one!). I highly encourage you to check out the site. Not only is it a great way to spend your lunch hour--it can also serve as a warning of why testing is so important.

Irrational Consumers

Sometimes I want to weep for the human race. For example, take a peek at Christopher S. Penn's recent blog post "The sale is better because the sign is bigger." Chris is absolutely right that marketing can manipulate the mathematically challenged. And in his specific example, that is likely the correct analysis.

But what if we take a wider view? The field of behavioral economics has really taken off in recent years. It's best considered as a fusion of economics and psychology, and one of the more interesting veins of study involves irrational decision-making (see Predictably Irrational* by Dan Ariely for a great introduction). Classical economics has traditionally believed that people make decisions rationally (in other words, they choose the option that is objectively most advantageous for them); Ariely and others have shown that this is not the case. People encounter so many stimuli in everyday life that they have to take shortcuts when they made decisions. Otherwise, they'd be paralyzed by indecision. And those shortcuts mean that often the easy choice is not always the right choice.

There are many messages to take away from this. Here are a couple:
1. The human mind is truly amazing, with the myriad stimuli attended to and calculations made in a single day, often subconsciously. But it is also tremendously fallible and prone to manipulation.
2. When you are coming up with offers to incentivize customer action, it's important to test! Customers don't necessarily respond rationally. For instance, I am reminded of a company that did an email offer test of $50 off vs. 15% off. $50 was 15% of  the average order value ($350), so the offers were basically equivalent. The dollars-off offer pulled 170% more revenue than the percent-off offer, even though rationally a % off is better because the more you buy, the bigger the savings.

Think about it--what can you do to make your product/service the easy choice?


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Love the LOFT

Pretty much anybody who works with me knows that I love the LOFT--about 85% of my work clothes come from the store. So naturally I became a fan (now liker, I guess?) of their Facebook page. If you're looking for a fantastic example of a company using Facebook to build brand loyalty and keep in close communication with their customers, make sure you check them out. Even Mashable agrees!

The Mashable post details LOFT's responsiveness after customers complained that a certain pair of pants would only look good on a model. So LOFT posted pics of 5 employees of varying heights/weights wearing the pants. They still didn't convince everybody to buy the pants, but they did earn major brownie points for listening!

And as a marketer, I love the fact that, unlike many other stores, they don't focus too much on coupons and discounting to attract people to their Facebook page. Exclusive fashion tips, heads-ups on new arrivals, and quick answers to customer questions and complaints are so much more powerful than coupons when it comes to building long-term loyalty. Now if they could just try that with their other marketing channels. I get so many coupons by email and postal mail that I couldn't possibly use them all...

What's a Few Years Between Friends?

Yeah, so I took a little hiatus from the blog thing, but I'm back! New posts coming soon...

The Unexpected

One of my absolute favorite books that I've read in the past year is Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. It is fascinating and thought-provoking, with many great examples to illustrate the authors' points.

They offer six principles to make an idea memorable:

• simplicity
• unexpectedness
• concreteness
• credibility
• emotions
• stories

I came across a fun example of principle #2 (unexpectness) on a recent trip to visit my sister in Orlando. At several intersections near her house, signs were posted warning that motorists would be fined $183.50 if caught running a red light. I commented on how odd that amount is and my sister (she's so smart!) responded it's to make people talk about it. Duh! I'd read Made to Stick--why didn't I think of that? Anyways, on a later trip in the car, my husband (who wasn't there for the initial conversation) made the same comment I had. Almost a month later, I still remember the exact amount of the fine. What a simple way to make an impression!

If you haven't read Made to Stick, I highly recommend it. I had purchased the audiobook version through iTunes, and I loved it so much that I'm seriously considering buying the hardcover version for reference. If you're looking for more wisdom from the authors, you can check out their blog. They don't update it as often as I wish they would, but there's some great info there!

Great Tips for Bullet Point Copywriting

Another short one--I just read a great post on MarketingSherpa about effective bullet point copywriting.

I highly encourage you to give it a read. Even if you aren't involved in writing marketing copy, the tips could help with writing more effective business communications.

The two big takeaways:

• Readers tend to look at the first, second, and last bullets (in that order), so you should rank your points to fall into that pattern.
• You should put your most important words at the beginning of the bullet, and each starting word should look physically different from the others.

Hmm. Hopefully you read those bullets!

Fascinating Brand Image

I just have to get this down before I forget it, because this is such a powerful image. I was listening to a podcast this morning (The Age of Conversation episode from The Engaging Brand) and host Anna Farmery recounted an absolutely fantastic--though brief--story from a speech by Michael Eisner. She couldn't remember the specific artist, but Eisner showed a painting to the audience (I imagine it was probably a pointillist painting). Eisner said that a brand is like this painting--when you stand back, you see a whole image (the brand). But that image is made up of myriad little points. Those points correspond to the various interactions a customer has with your brand--contact with customer service, perhaps marketing pieces they receive, the logo or packaging you use.

It's a simple thought, but so illustrative that I find it fascinating.

From the "Are you kidding me?" File

So, I peeked in my work in box this afternoon and found the following well-meaning but *poorly* executed email. (All identifying information about the company has been blacked out to protect the clueless.)

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? Why on earth would I see them as an authority when they can't even send out a decent personalized email? ("Dear NULL" and "[not provided]" don't make me feel warm and fuzzy.) Please, please, please--if you are going to send out a personalized email, make sure you have your list and email set up to use generic information if you don't have specifics available.

P.S. You'll notice on the image that I forwarded this message within 10 minutes of receiving it. That's from when I forwarded it to our Web Marketing Manager so she could have a laugh, too. I'm sure that's not the kind of word-of-mouth this company is looking for.

A Great Microsite

I recently discovered NFL Network's campaign for Joe's Diner. Very nicely done! I LOVE the commercials that they've aired on TV (and not just because they feature a character named Matt, who reminds me of my husband--another Pats fan from the Worcester area, also named Matt!). The site allows you to view the entire campaign, up through the most recent one that they've aired, plus has a fake video bio of the diner's owner (played by Joe Montana). There's even a link to Matt's Patriots blog, to encourage comments from the community.

Overall, I think it's very cool and nicely done, but I do have a few suggestions for the NFL Network to improve the site.

• The commercials are hilarious. They're so funny that I want to share them with my friends. Why not include a link at the end of the video to make that easy for me? You do it at the end of the video bio for Joe, so I know you know how! You have great content--encourage viral behavior!
• What's up with the fact that the posts on Matt's blog all have the same date? After taking so much care with everything else, that just seems sloppy.
• I actually didn't notice the blog the first time I cruised through the site. I only noticed it after I decided I wanted to post here about the microsite and went back to take another look. Again, you've taken so much care with everything, but you should make it easier for visitors to find aspects of the site that encourage them to hang around and stay engaged!

Microsoft is SO helpful

This is slightly gratuitous, but I had to post about something that seems like overzealous marketing, or perhaps just marketing gone awry. The other day, a Windows update notification came up.

Am I the only one who finds the wording here to be ludicrous? Microsoft is so thoughtful to provide this "tool" to help me know whether my copy of Windows is genuine, and to offer their assistance with finding another copy if mine isn't genuine.

I fully support Microsoft's right to protect themselves from software piracy, but why cloak it in this false helpfulness? Is it any wonder that marketers sometimes earn such disdain for their spin tactics? It seems like sometimes you'll earn more trust if you just call it what it is. Why not just say it's a check to ensure the copy is genuine, but include some kind of benefit for the customer? I'm assuming there is some benefit for the customer, otherwise why include "advantage" in the name??

Facebook Redux

Aha! Finally the pieces are starting to come together regarding how Facebook can be used for marketing purposes. The possibilities with advertising via Facebook's Social Ads are fairly obvious (though intriguing due to the ability to highly target those ads based on demographics, interests, etc.).

The Wall Street Journal ran an article this week with examples of how small businesses have used their profiles and group pages to build awareness and share products and services. Now Facebook has made another type of page available--company pages. I find this idea fascinating, and the wheels are already turning in my head to see how this could be used on a bigger scale. I think that the biggest challenge will be in how to speak to and connect with people ("fans" on Facebook) in an engaging and personalized way, rather than as a company to a group of customers and prospects (i.e., how to leverage the conversational aspects that are so strong and almost inherent in social media space, rather than falling back on the one-sided relationship found in traditional marketing).

Psychology and Marketing

My degree is in Psychology, and many people I speak with (outside of Marketing) have the tendency to think that I'm not using my degree because I don't spend all day listening to somebody tell me their problems. However, I'm constantly finding things about my job that are aided by my background in Psychology--understanding the triggers that make people act; how memory works, so I can make my campaigns more memorable; how the human eye reads and the brain responds to stimuli, so I know that the design of a piece is really going to achieve our objectives.

I just read a great article about leveraging human behavior in Marketing from Target Marketing Magazine called "Live From DMA 07: Four Ways to Leverage Human Behavior" and has some really great tips for incorporating psychology research findings into your marketing.

While I'm on the subject, one of my all-time favorite books is a *fascinating* one by Paco Underhill called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. It's not too helpful to me in my current job because I don't deal with retail, but it's still a truly interesting study into the intersection of human behavior and business.

Leadership

I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately. Not just because it's an important aspect of good management, but also because the company I work for isn't doing well right now. Our parent company has put us up for sale, and we've been told by management that layoffs are on the way (the rumor is that they'll happen this week). At a time like this, there's always finger-pointing, and I've done enough talking about this offline that there's no need to do it online as well.

Although there are many facets to effective leadership, one that is especially good for worker morale is the ability to make employees feel known and valued. This ties in nicely to the ideas in a book that came out recently, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees) by Patrick Lencioni. The first of the three signs is what he calls "anonymity." I still remember my first day as a Marketing Assistant at my current company. The then-president of the company stopped by my cubicle to greet me and actually commented on where I'd worked previously. It meant an enormous amount to me that somebody that high up took an effort to check into my background and welcome me to the company. I don't think that happens nearly often enough.

Facebook

Many people in the business blogging/podcasting world have been talking a lot about Facebook recently, so I decided to join and give it a try. So far I've been able to connect with a bunch of old friends, which has been FANTASTIC. But, I'm even more excited to see how Facebook grows and changes as all these business people play around and experiment!

Getting Started

So, here I am with my first post! I've started this blog as a way to document my personal journey through the business world. I've worked in Marketing for 6+ years (all at the same company) and over time I've come to realize that I need to grow and expand my knowledge of Marketing and business in general if I'm ever going to get anywhere.

I started listening to lots and lots of podcasts and reading more and more blogs over the past few months, but never really take the time to reflect on what I've heard and read. Hence this blog--my hope is that I can use it to formulate my thoughts and process the information more deeply.

Is possible that I'll be talking only to myself? Yes, it might even be a certainty. But only time will tell!