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This Is a Great Time To Be a Marketer

January 23, 2008 •

Today I was struck with how many peo­ple are writ­ing and debat­ing about the secrets to suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing. Seth Godin has a new book out; the CMO Coun­cil has released a major report on B2B mar­ket­ing; and I stum­bled across a blog that chal­lenges the valid­ity of the clas­sic mar­ket­ing fun­nel. Pure brain candy.

Thanks to a short break between client engage­ments, I was able to indulge in some of the lat­est think­ing, span­ning the gamut from con­sumer-cen­tric mar­ket­ing pun­dits to B2B gurus. Here’s a quick tour of today’s nuggets.

Getting Marketing Back In Synch

Meatball_Sundae

Today I attended a webi­nar fea­tur­ing Seth Godin who was launch­ing his lat­est mar­ket­ing provo­ca­tion, Meat­ball Sun­dae.

God­in’s new book out­lines the 14 key themes that are reshap­ing the mar­ket­ing land­scape. Whether you spe­cial­ize in B2B or B2C mar­ket­ing, there’s some­thing here for every­one to con­sider. As a case in point, Godin opines that scarcity and abun­dance cre­ate won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ties — but between them lies the curse of medi­oc­rity and obscu­rity.

What I liked most is his rec­om­men­da­tion that mar­keters take respon­si­bil­ity for craft­ing the cus­tomer’s entire expe­ri­ence, from prod­uct incep­tion through to deliv­ery and the pro­duc­t’s inte­gra­tion into the cus­tomer’s life. This means rethink­ing the value chain, from the fac­tory to the point of con­sump­tion. It’s another take on his theme of mean­ing­ful dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.

To explain what he means, his webi­nar (and prob­a­bly the book) cite a stream of busi­ness inno­va­tions from Josiah Wedge­wood (whom Godin calls the great­est mar­keter of all time).

Wedge­wood inno­vated in many ways, such as:

  • brand­ing things made of clay (pot­tery in all forms) — even 200 years later, we can still rec­og­nize the tra­di­tional Wedge­wood pot­tery, thanks to brand char­ac­ter­is­tics that are intrin­sic to those prod­ucts
  • intro­duc­ing the first prod­uct show­rooms in Lon­don (think Nike Town, circa 1700’s)
  • per­suad­ing the British pow­ers-that-be to build canals to his fac­tory so Wedge­wood could reli­ably trans­port their frag­ile prod­ucts via their dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels to their end-cus­tomers
  • lever­ag­ing the power of “light­house cus­tomers” and word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing — by send­ing a full set of prod­uct sam­ples to the crowned heads of Europe (at great per­sonal expense to Josiah Wedge­wood)

After all these sto­ries, I’ll look dif­fer­ently at the Wedge­wood china we inher­ited from our in-laws…

Aspiring to Customer Affinity

I was equally impressed today with a recent report spon­sored by the CMO Coun­cil on Cus­tomer Affin­ity: The New Mea­sure of Mar­ket­ing. Although the writ­ing lacks the light­hearted fun of Meat­ball Sun­dae, there’s great food for thought in this report on how to drive supe­rior rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers.

Here’s a nugget (their def­i­n­i­tion of cus­tomer affin­ity):

…Cus­tomer affin­ity is more mean­ing­ful than cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, loy­alty or advo­cacy. Cus­tomer affin­ity goes beyond cur­rent, top of mind per­cep­tions; it looks into the depth, breadth, and impor­tance of the cus­tomer-ven­dor rela­tion­ship in order to deter­mine its capac­ity for sus­tain­abil­ity, strate­gic value and trusted, long-term engage­ment. Indeed, we have found dis­tinct dif­fer­ences in this study between cus­tomer advo­cacy, which is basi­cally a will­ing­ness to refer a ven­dor, and cus­tomer affin­ity. We believe that cus­tomer affin­ity is the more pow­er­ful and sub­stan­tive issue for ven­dors, chan­nel part­ners and cus­tomers alike. In today’s fast-chang­ing and dis­rup­tive mar­kets, supe­rior cus­tomer inter­ac­tion may be the most essen­tial com­pet­i­tive advan­tage.

For peo­ple engaged in B2B mar­ket­ing, this report is def­i­nitely worth read­ing.

Is the Marketing Funnel Still Valid?

Last sum­mer David Armano raised the ques­tion of whether a spi­ral might be a bet­ter alter­na­tive to the clas­sic mar­ket­ing fun­nel as a metaphor for the core mar­ket­ing func­tion. His blog sparked a lot of debate.

Check out his blog to see his think­ing and how he illus­trates his ideas, as he reflects on some 2007 thought pieces from For­rester regard­ing mar­ket­ing best prac­tices.

Armano’s key point is that if cus­tomer engage­ment mat­ters — if there’s some form of inter­ac­tion among cus­tomers, or between the cus­tomer and the ven­dor — then a spi­ral might be a more use­ful men­tal con­struct.

Here’s Armano’s illus­tra­tion. The inter­est­ing ques­tion is, how valid is this con­cept for B2B enter­prise prod­ucts, par­tic­u­larly those that fall into infra­struc­ture cat­e­gories? It’s easy to imag­ine its rel­e­vance for con­sumer prod­uct cat­e­gories, in which the end user cares enough about the prod­uct to engage in a con­ver­sa­tion with oth­ers.

marketing_spiral_4

To me the ques­tion isn’t either/or — it’s both/and.

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Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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