Influential Marketing Blog

Your Competition Isn't About What You Sell

This may come as a surprise, but your competition is not based on who sells the same thing you do. In fact, often it's not even about your product or your service.  The simplest way that most businesses define who they are competing against is other companies in the same category as you. If you own an Indian restaurant, it is other Indian restaurants. If you sell flowers, it is other flower shops. The problem with this model is that it is usually too narrow to give you a picture of who your real competition is.

On any given night, any Indian restaurant might compete with a fast food joint, or even a grocery store. The flower shop might compete with a chocolate store on Valentine's day, or even with charitable causes when it comes to donations people make in memory of their departed loved ones. There are many sources of competition and often they are far beyond the real sources that you are usually thinking about. Here are three ways to start thinking more broadly about who your competition really is ... a necessity if you are going to be able to get smarter about marketing against them:

1. Competition By Location - If you are a business based on convenience in any way, location can be your golden trump card. People decide on dentists, dry cleaners, gas stations and much more based on little more than whether or not you happen to be on their way home. Thinking about your business in terms of where you happen to be located can help you to focus on the real competition, and think more strategically about how to beat them.
2. Competition By Emotion - Typically the product or service you sell will fit under some type of need for your customers. They may need to pick up dinner (hunger), or buy a gift for a friend's birthday (reinforcement), or need a way to register a domain name online (online branding). Thinking in terms of the underlying needs beneath these specific tasks can also help you better understand your competition because you can understand what your customers may really be thinking about and need help with.
3. Competition By Experience - When someone purchases a service like house painting, they are not just paying you to paint their house. They are also expecting you to use the right kind of paint, and not to get paint on their floors and to clean up when you're done. These are all part of the experience, and can be what help your business to stand out from your competition, even though you technically sell the same service.

As marketers and businesspeople, we often focus on fighting against our competition. Sometimes, the better course might just be to see if you're even fighting against the right foe.

TurboBasters, Folding Guitars and Business Lessons From Shark Tank

During the brief fleeting time when The Apprentice used to be great, it was about business. Reality television, at its core, is typically about showcasing some type of conflict. Most often that conflict comes from relationships and unrealistic portrayals of "real people" acting badly, hornily or greedily. So when I first watched Shark Tank - another reality show supposedly about business where entrepreneurs compete to get funding from already wealthy businesspeople (the "sharks" willing to invest their own money), I was ready for the worst.

So far, the show has been pleasantly surprising and educational for any business person or entrepreneur interested in taking their idea to the next stage, including ideas like a "turbobaster" and a guitar that folds. Here are just a few of the essential business lessons that I noted after watching just one episode:

1. Know what your business is worth. The most important thing any contestant on the show can do is to have a clear idea of what their business and market is worth. Valuing your company wrong (either over or under estimating) is mistake most of the early contestants seem to be making - and mirrors a mistake many entrepreneurs make in real life.
2. Make an offer to establish your position. There are different points of view on how best to negotiate, but the format of the show that I find myself liking is that contestants must state as soon as they walk in the door what offer they are making, how much they want and what equity they will give. If only real business worked this smoothly.
3. Focus on what's in it for the other guy. When you walk into a situation to ask for money, it's obvious that the person you are asking can help you. But what is in it for them? The better the answer to this question, the more likely a contestant on the show is to get the funding he or she is seeking.
4. Decide what you are willing to accept. There is a difference between what you ask for and what you are willing to take. Knowing what you really want and what you can live with is crucial to any negotiation and is proving to be an important lesson that the contestants on the show are forgetting with surprising regularity.
5. Prove the value instead of describing it. Similar to a point I made about infomercials in an earlier blog post, the power of a product is often best unlocked through a live demonstration. Most of the contestants were asked to illustrate what their product could do, and the value of it was directly related to whether or not they could do it.
6. Create a bidding war. The last important point I took away from the show is that if you have something really valuable, it helps to create a bidding war. Too many times, businesses go for the first offer they can get, which can be a major limiting mistake.

Based on the sad history of reality television, there are still plenty of ways the producers can lose their focus and turn this show into just another extended conflict infested piece of noise. But going on the small glimmer of hope that it remains about business and real entrepreneurs selling their big idea, it's going to be an essential watch for anyone who has ever dreamt big and thought about becoming an entrepreneur to pursue their dream.

Palm Pre Misses Opportunity With Bollywood Hero Sponsorship

Earlier this month, the IFC channel launched a new three part mini-series called Bollywood Hero that featured the story of an American actor (Chris Kattan) who decides to leave Hollywood for Bollywood to become a leading man. The show aired in early August and has been replaying on the channel since then. I found it entertaining and highly recommend it, but I doubt you're reading this blog to get my review of a TV mini-series ... so let's talk about the marketing.

The first thing any marketer would notice is that the show seemed to have two main sponsors - Palm (focused on promoting their new Pre) and esurance.com:

What was most interesting about these sponsors, however, was not that they both chose to support the program (which I think is great), but in how they chose to "activate" their sponsorships. Palm placed banner ads and logos on the website for the film that pointed to a branded page all about the Palm Pre. No mention of Bollywood, the campaign or anything related to the film. Esurance.com, on the other hand, chose to put together a full campaign called "Bollywood Casting Call" that invited lovers of Bollywood dance to submit their videos for a chance to win the "prize" of being animated to dance in an animated promo for the brand with their cartoon spokesperson Erin Esurance:

Anyone who has seen a Bollywood film (or even a farce about one) knows that a good part of the film is about the dancing. Picking up on that, esurance.com invited people to participant in the fun and offered an outlet to become a part of their campaign. Though the tie to the film could have been stronger, the campaign generated 54 video entries and over 25,000 video views - over what seems to be a relatively short duration of a few weeks. More importantly, esurance.com now has several branded videos online to use as marketing assets, and will soon have one more when they create the animated prize video featuring the winning video.

Palm on the other hand may realize some brand awareness and positive brand association for choosing to sponsor an independent production such as this, but leaves much of their opportunity on the table by not choosing to integrate the campaign more into their overall efforts. What could they have done? Exclusive content on the Pre to drive trial and maybe even purchase, giving product to the winners of the dance contest, or even creating a demo of the product where you could watch a trailer of the film on the Pre would all have been ways to further engage the audience with their product and get more out of their sponsorship.

One final yet simple idea: imagine if Palm just did more to support of one of the best marketing tactics for the film itself ... a flash mob dance in Times Square (video below) that has already generated almost 200,000 views. Sometimes it's not enough to put up the money to simply sponsor or underwrite something - to really get the value from it you need to take a more integrated approach.

SXSW And The Power Of Nametags

I remember a cold morning in January, piling onto the Metro and heading with hundreds of thousands of other excited and frozen people to stand outside and watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. As you would expect, emerging in DC there were tons of vendors selling every kind of souvenir imaginable. Bobble head dolls, tshirts, mugs, and American flags spread as far as you could see - on the rare occasion that you could see, between the wall to wall people all seeking their spot. This was the largest mass event I had ever been to.

Walking off the Metro, though, the first thing someone gave me was a nametag. Actually, it was more than a nametag. It was an invitation not to be faceless at a faceless gathering. It was a challenge to be approachable to a stranger. I wore it most of the day. Before that day, I had heard about a guy who wore a nametag every day, 24-7. Around the same time of the inauguration, I got an email from someone named Scott Ginsberg who had read my book and thought we had similar philosophies.

As it turns out, Scott is the Nametag Guy - and has spoken all over the world about approachability, written a bunch of highly entertaining and useful books and also writes a great marketing blog. So, how does all this relate to SXSW? Scott and I started talking about this huge annual music, film and interactive festival that happens in Austin every March. They were accepting submissions for proposed panels and the deadline was closing soon.

So Scott and I started talking about approachability and authenticity and how it has become a huge buzzword for companies (and people). Both of us felt like there was more to it than that. Authenticity, in short, is overrated. So we decided to put together a proposal for a session like neither one of us has done before, all about what authenticity really means, and what you have to do to get past the buzzword facade.

Our session, "Authenticity Is Overrated" is now live as part of the Panel Picker - an online tool that SXSW uses to help determine which sessions to include in the program for 2010. Check out the description here, and if you feel it's worthy, please vote for it before September 4th!

10 Basic Rules Of Twitter (And How To Avoid Being A Twanker)

Twanker - An egocentric individual, celebrity or organization who uses Twitter only for one-way broadcasting about their own greatness.

Twidiot - An individual or organization that uses Twitter only to talk about insignificant things no one cares about, like what they had for breakfast or their latest press release.

One of the funniest things about Twitter is how it has spawned a language unto itself for those who use it. People in social media love to see the world in terms of those who "get it" and those who don't. This breeds a behaviour on many social networks (and particularly on Twitter) that sometimes seems no more mature than a high school clique - something that many might aspire to, but that thrives upon its artificially created exclusivity.

Yet as Twitter continues to evolve beyond the microblogging platform of choice for those with too much time on their hands to an easily understood service that encourages typically reluctant organizations and nongeeky individuals to finally start using social media, the barriers are breaking down.       

Still, as in many online networks, people on Twitter are establishing a code of conduct all their own and though it's not written in any one place, the people on Twitter who ignore the rules of this code risk being called one of the above "twinsults" or perhaps a worse word yet to be created or popularized. Unfortunately, I haven't yet seen a good compilation of the "rules" that people seem to assume that everyone already knows when it comes to how you should and shouldn't behave in the Twitter environment.

So to help you avoid being a "twidiot" or a "twanker" - here are a few rules that seem to have become generally accepted for how to get set up, brand yourself or your organization and converse on Twitter. It's not meant to be a complete list, but hopefully others will add to it in comments:

1. Choose as short a username as possible. This really makes a difference when people are trying to retweet your links and include your username, but only have 140 characters to do it.
2. Think hard about your thumbnail. For many methods of browsing Twitter, your thumbnail is the only bio information that comes through along with your username, so try make a statement with it that says something about you.
3. Select a bio link wisely. Twitter offers you the chance to put a single link in to let people click and learn more about you. Don't just automatically assume your homepage is best for this, think about whether there is a better bio page to link to.
4. Use your background to share more info. The image you use for the background of your Twitter page is one of the few things you can brand and change. To take advantage, use the left sidebar to share more about you (and try to make it no more than 200 pixels wide). You can also use a service like Twitter Backgrounds.
5. Follow other people (judiciously). This is a basic premise, but nothing demonstrates more that you are a twanker than following no one back. And if you can, try to make it more than just 10 people. Conversely, though, there is no social obligation to follow everyone who follows you.
6. Reply to @ messages. An "@ message" is when someone types @[yourusername]. That means they are either just mentioning you, or trying to connect with you directly. Either way, the more of these you respond to, the more you can engage with Twitter.
7. RT often and strategically. A retweet (RT) is the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email. Usually it's done with the syntax RT @[username] followed by the exact text you are retweeting. They are a great way to let your content travel, as well as share tweets created by others.
8. Leave room for retweets. Calculate how many characters your username is (for example, my username "rohitbhargava" has 13 characters). Now add 4 characters for "RT @" - and in my case I get 17 characters. This means that if I want to let people retweet my messages without losing part of the message, my tweet should be no longer than 140 minus 17, or 123. Generally when I tweet something I want to get retweeted, I will therefore make sure it is less than 123 characters.
9. Refer to people by their Twitter names on Twitter. Imagine Twitter is like a play and every user is like an actor. You wouldn't call a fellow actor by their name on stage, you would use their character's name. Twitter is the same way - so if you happen to link to me or this post, make sure you call me @rohitbhargava so others can see my name and follow me.
10. Allow and respond to DMs. DMs (or direct messages) are private messages that anyone who follows you can send to you directly without posting them publicly on Twitter. It is one of the few private communications methods on Twitter and is a great way to have longer and more significant conversations with your connections on Twitter if you take advantage of it.

A Marketer's Guide To Being Anti-Social Online

Everyone wants you to be social. If you're a marketer, you have heard about a million times in recent weeks, months and years about the power and necessity of social media. Get a blog, get on Twitter, create a fan page ... every piece of advice seems to point towards being more social, more open and more transparent. Let's take a deep breath together. This post is not the kind of advice you'd expect to get from a "social media guy" like me. In fact, it's downright antisocial. To put it more accurately, it is about the right times to be anti-social.

This is a strange post when many brands are struggling right now to even find the right ways to be social online. Engaging with social media is an imperative for most brands (though the way you do it can and should vary greatly depending on your business and goals). There is plenty of good advice online for how to do this well, though. I like to think I have shared a decent amount of this type of advice here on this blog. But as marketers we also want to avoid the landmines. The situations or instances in social media that may be likely to blow up in our faces. Those are often the situations where being anti-social is the best strategy.

Here are a few situations and pieces of advice I have gathered on how to be anti-social online and help your brand succeed at the same time:

1. NEVER allow YouTube comments. I have had the opinion for some time now that allowing people to comment on your YouTube videos without moderating is an idiotic thing for a brand to do. Why? Because the vast majority of YouTube comments lack substance, include uninformed or somehow offensive remarks, and offer little context or real discussion. Instead, if you want to foster dialogue on your videos, create a video blog and embed the video into the blog. Then allow people to comment on the video in the blog. This will generally result in far higher quality comments, and less infantile useless banter.
2. DON'T friend/follow everyone. As a brand, the temptation is to friend and follow everyone who contacts you or requests to be your friend. Resist that temptation, and instead make it the job of someone on your team to actively monitor these requests and approve them based on criteria that you set. This criteria can be lax (not a robot account) to more specific to your industry or area of concentration. The effort will pay off, though, when it comes to using a particular social network as a marketing platform and tool for collaboration because you will only be talking to people who really matter.
3. MODERATE your profiles actively. What is written online is not written in stone, and as a brand you have the right to set the ground rules for your own profiles and sites online. What this requires is clearly posting your policy about what is ok and what is not ok for people to post and share in your environments. This doesn't mean to try and delete anything negative or critical ... but off topic or offensive comments or posts can and should be moderated. And in cases where people are posting incorrect or flawed information, you have a right and obligation to correct them (but allow their comment to be posted if it meets your criteria).
4. SEPARATE private content. There are legitimate reasons why you might want to share brand content among a small subset of users or internal users online. Just because content is online doesn't mean that everything needs to be open and public. If you feel you have a legitimate reason for sharing password protected private content, you should do it. And if it is extremely sensitive, make sure you take the right steps to protect it and prevent it from getting in the wrong hands.
5. PROMOTE yourself and your brand. Part of the benefit of using social media is that it does allow you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons. The fact is, if you are using social media in an authentic and not overly promotional way on a daily basis, you can earn the right to share marketing information at various points and not lose your audience. The real trick is to strike the right balance.

Fighting UK Knife Crimes By Choosing Your Own Video Ending

One of the biggest social crime issues in the UK over the past several years has been the disturbing rise of knife crimes. Now a common enough ocurrence to warrant a section in one the major newspapers of the UK online, the stories of victims of knife crime are sad and disturbing, as story after story talks of gang fights, increasing violence and the brutal deaths of teens across the UK. The government is trying to take action, but recent reports point to a continuing rise in gang violence and knife crimes, and a renewed focus by the government to solve this social plague facing the UK.

One more recent digital effort that has caught the attention of many is a particularly innovative use of YouTube as a potential deterrant for young people to engage in knife crime through the most logical course of action possible ... leaving their knife at home. This campaign, called Choose a Different Ending features a series of YouTube videos where you can choose your own path at the end of each 30 second video to continue the story. Of course, typically you will either end up dead or in jail if you take the knife ... so the videos visually bring to life the importance of choosing a different ending by choosing not to take the knife at all:

The most interesting thing about this highly engaging form of video is that it seems tailored for the 13-24 year old audience, a very wide age demographic that is typically difficult to reach with a single campaign. Yet the videos are relevant, non-preachy, real, and engaging ... exactly the type of content that a teen may actually watch. The element of mystery and choice reinforces the fact that each of us have a choice to turn away from knife crime. So far, the results have been excellent, with the video being watched over 300,000 times in just over a month (more than many company marketing videos get, with much bigger ad budgets).

While knife crime won't be solved with one innovative video idea, the Choose a Different Ending campaign demonstrates how powerful the online medium can be to getting a difficult and uninterested audience to pay attention, engage and potentially even change behaviour as a result.

A Guide To Marketing By Giving Away Someone Else's Money

Have you ever used a coupon at a grocery store or submitted a rebate for a product? If so, you've been part of what is one of the more brilliantly conceived direct promotion methods in the marketing world. Coupons (and rebates, another form of couponing) are a big deal. The obvious reason they matter is because people love to get discounts. But coupons (and rebates in particular) are an inspired idea for promotion for the simple reason that the person who is selling the product is usually not the one who has the pay for the cost of the discount. In other words, coupons and rebates let sellers promote products by giving away someone else's money. This isn't without some danger though ...

As Dilbert demonstrates, in reality we all know that most companies that offer rebates don't make it quite that easy. Who doesn't have a horror story to tell of having to cut off the side of a box, fill out a form in triplicate and wait six months to get a check for $3 that expires a week after you get it? Rebates are a pain, usually because the more hassle they are, the lower the redemption rates on them (BusinessWeek estimates that up to 40% may go unredeemed).

Sounds great for marketers, but the problem is that as more consumers start to realize that they didn't get their money, coupons and rebates will stop working as an effective promotional tool. In an ideal world, though, they can help consumers save money AND marketers sell more effectively. Thankfully, some retailers are creating models to help fulfill the promise of couponing and rebates - even in a low trust world.

 

Safeway, a grocery store chain in the US, recently implemented a program for their frequent shoppers that allows them to enter coupons into their account directly online, and then redeem them in a store without having the actual coupon. Along similar lines, BestBuy and other large electronics retailers have had a system for years that makes claiming rebates easy by pre-printing forms for customers with clear instructions and often even processing mail-in rebates instantly as they are currently doing for the Palm Pre. The reasons these companies are making coupon and rebate redemption easy is simple:

1. Retailers will get their reimbursement from the manufacturer faster and lower their significant processing costs by digitizing.
2. They can increase their customer satisfaction with easy rebates and coupons, thus ensuring these types of promotions continue to work.
3. Most importantly, increasing redemption rates helps the seller, because they are not the ones footing the bill for the refund offered to the customer.

So what can your business learn from the examples of BestBuy and Safeway? When it comes to marketing and promoting your products or services, how can you find ways to sell that don't require you to fund it yourself?  Talk to your vendors, see how they promote their products and what they are willing to offer you to pass along to your customers. Sometimes the best marketing you can do is to save your customers some money without paying for it out of your own pocket.