This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Mar 2007, by eyal matsliah.
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28 Mar 07
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THE MARKETING CRISIS THAT MONEY WON'T SOLVE
YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. NOBODY IS.
It's not your fault. It's just physically impossible for you
to pay attention to everything that marketers expect you
to-like the 17,000 new grocery store products that were
introduced last year, or the $1,000 worth of advertising
that was directed exclusively at you last year.
Is it any wonder that consumers feel like the fast-moving
world around them is getting blurry? There's TV at the
airport, advertisements in urinals, newsletters on virtually
every topic, and a cellular phone wherever you go. -
Wouldn't it be great if we could eliminate this incredibly
wasteful part of the process? Unfortunately, Permission
Marketers cannot ignore the interruption part of the
process. They can't walk away from the cost of getting
strangers to raise their hands. But they CAN leverage the
expense of that interruption across multiple interactions. -
Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific. And always be
anticipated. Anticipation, of course, is even better than
expectation. Without surprising the consumer, gradually
raise the level of permission you extract. -
The reward you offer a consumer must be obvious and
simple. To dramatize the importance of this stage, to
make it crasser than it needs to be, I call it bait. -
In order to make the marketing messages you send
relevant and personal you need to get some data.
Permission marketers are totally obvious about their
objectives with the consumer. They make it crystal clear
what they will be doing with the data they collect, and
exactly why it's beneficial to the consumer to give this
data. -
An interrupted consumer is in no hurry to send you
money or promise to invest a lot of time. An interrupted
consumer won't fill out a long demographic form or get
in his car to drive down to your automall. The less you
ask of the consumer and the bigger the 'bribe', the more
likely the consumer will give you permission. The
permission won't be broad or deep. But it will guarantee
that your next interaction will be significantly more
impactful. -
The response rate to a free
sample or an affinity program or a birthday club might be
five or ten times the response rate of an ad asking for a
sale. -
The only goal of the video is to get permission to have a
personal meeting. It doesn't sell the camp. It sells the
meeting.
Now, fully qualified, and having seen the testimonials,
the photographs, the facilities and the happy campers, the
family is ready to be sold on the camp. And that's done in
person. -
The ad
sells the brochure, not the camp. -
But the first step is still to interrupt the consumer. That's
one reason there will always be socially acceptable
interruption marketing media. We need to get that initial
attention. -
Customer service has always
mattered. But now that power has shifted to the
consumer, it matters a great deal more. -
Did he burn a customer? Of course. That was his
intention. But what he hasn't learned yet (and soon will,
or he'll be gone) is that the act of dismissing that
customer didn't cost him just one sale. It cost him the loss
of permission to sell products to this woman for the rest
of her life. -
Technology enables marketers to have a perfect memory,
and provides them with the ability to customize
correspondence on the fly and deliver it for free via e-
mail. Combine that with a database of customers who
expect to receive marketing messages from you because
they gave you their permission, and most industry book
chains should begin to see a looming threat. -
Amazon appears to be building a permission asset, not a
brand asset. Amazon has overt permission to track which
books you buy and which books you browse. They have
explicit permission to send you promotional e-mail
messages. They are building special interest communities
in which Amazon and its customers will be able to talk
with each other about specific genres of books. Why?
Where's the payoff?
The payoff comes the day Amazon decides to publish
books. This is where the profit lies and where Amazon is
best able to leverage their permission asset. -
They're building an asset that has
nothing to do with brand and everything to do with their
relationship with you. -
As the company gains
more permission, it's not hard to imagine them branching
into house cleaning, house painting, gardening and a
huge range of home care and home delivery services. -
Then, using the Web, you log on each week and tell
Streamline what you need. You fill out a pre-automated
shopping list. They pick up dry cleaning and
prescriptions and photos as well. Then, while you're at
work, they do all your errands, pick up what you need,
and drop it off at your house. -
Frank Britt and Tim DeMello run a company called
Streamline that is at the vanguard of the junction between
Permission Marketing and one to one marketing.
Streamline capitalizes on the technologies and social shifts
that are changing our lives, and they are building a
fantastic business that serves as a model for the future.
They offer to save customers hours and hours of time
each week by doing virtually all of their routine errands. -
sidebar
The one to one marketer works to change his focus from
finding as many new customers as he can to extracting the
maximum value from each customer.
The Permission marketer works to change his focus from
finding as many prospects as he can to converting the
largest number of prospects into customers. And then he
leverages the permission on an ongoing basis. -
THE NATURAL SYNERGY OF PERMISSION AND ONE TO ONE
MARKETING
As you've seen, Permission Marketing is the cousin of
one to one marketing. Where Peppers and Rogers begin
the process with the first sale, Permission begins the
process with the very first contact.
Permission Marketing works to turn strangers into friends
and then friends into customers. One to one marketing
uses the very same techniques, incorporating knowledge,
frequency, and relevance, to turn customers into
supercustomers. One to one doesn't compete with
Permission Marketing. It's part of the very same
continuum. The one to one marketer takes the permission
that's been granted after someone becomes a customer
and uses that permission to create even better customers.
The better the permission, the more profit created. -
The process of getting new customers needs to be
reengineered. Like caterpillars turning into butterflies,
prospects go through a five step cycle:
Strangers
Friends
Customers
Loyal Customers
Former Customers -
2. Increase the durability of customer
relationships. Invest money in customer retention,
because it's a small fraction of the cost of customer
acquisition. -
CHAPTER FOUR
GETTING STARTED-FOCUS ON SHARE OF CUSTOMER, NOT MARKET
SHARE
FIRE 70% OF YOUR CUSTOMERS AND WATCH YOUR PROFITS GO
UP!
Five years ago, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a
book that changed the marketing landscape forever. Titled
The One to One Future, they proposed a radical
rethinking of the way marketers treat their customers.
Peppers and Rogers presented a manifesto for how
companies can increase their profits by selling more
things to fewer customers. In other words, they believe
it's wiser to focus more on increasing sales to a smaller
percentage of your existing customers than it is to find
new ones. -
Mass marketers optimized their organizations for this
approach. They created brand managers and advertising
agencies and measurement companies and focus groups
and a myriad of other techniques to institutionalize their
attachment to Interruption Marketing. -
Permission Marketing has been around forever (or at least
as long as dating!), but it takes advantage of new
technology better than other forms of marketing. The
internet is the greatest direct mail medium of all time, and
the low cost of frequent interaction makes it ideal for
Permission Marketing. -
Worst of all, Permission Marketing requires patience.
Permission Marketing campaigns grow over time-the
opposite of what most marketers look for these days. And
Permission Marketing requires a leap of faith. Even a bad
Interruption campaign gets some results right away, while
a permission campaign requires infrastructure, and a
belief in the durability of the permission concept before it
blossoms with success.. -
[sidebar]
Five Steps to Dating Your Customer
1. Offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer
2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a
curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about your
product or service
3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect
maintains the permission
4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission
from the consumer
5. Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer
behavior towards profits -
Permission to gather more data about the customer's >
personal life >, or hobbies, or interests. Permission to offer
a new category of product for the customer's
consideration. Permission to provide a product sample.
The range of permission you can obtain from a customer
is very wide, and limited only by its relevance to the
customer. -
Along with reinforcing the incentive, the fourth step is to
increase the level of permission the marketer receives
from the potential customer. -
The third step involves reinforcing the incentive. Over
time, any incentive wears out. -
the Permission Marketer is able to
focus on product benefits -- on specific, focused ways
this product will help that prospect. Without question,
this ability to talk freely over time is the most powerful
element of this marketing approach. -
Second, using the attention offered by the consumer, the
marketer offers a curriculum over time, teaching the
consumer about the product or service he has to offer. -
Without a selfish reason to continue dating, your new
potential customer (and your new potential date) will
refuse you a second chance. If you don't provide a
benefit to the consumer for paying attention, your offer
will suffer the same fate as every other ad campaign that's
vying for their attention. It will be ignored. -
THE FIVE STEPS TO DATING YOUR CUSTOMER
Every marketer must offer the prospective customer an
incentive for volunteering. In the vernacular of dating,
that means you have to offer something that makes it
interesting enough to go out on a first date. -
While your competition continues to interrupt strangers
with mediocre results, your Permission Marketing
campaign is turning strangers into friends and friends into
customers. -
Permission marketing is anticipated, personal, relevant.
Anticipated-people look forward to hearing from you
Personal-the messages are directly related to the
individual.
Relevant-the marketing is about something the prospect
is interested in. -
Interruption Marketing is the enemy of anyone trying to
save time. By constantly interrupting what we are doing
at any given moment, the marketer who interrupts us not
only tends to fail at selling his product, but wastes our
most coveted commodity, time. In the long run,
therefore, Interruption Marketing is doomed as a mass
marketing tool. The cost to the consumer is just too high. -
There is one critical resource, though, that is in
chronically short supply. Bill Gates has just as much as
you do. And even Warren Buffet can't buy more. That
scarce resource is TIME. And in light of today's
information glut, that means that there's a vast shortage of
ATTENTION. -
Software provides another example. The most popular
web server is not made by Microsoft or Netscape. And it
doesn't cost $1,000 or $10,000. It's called Apache, and
it's created by a loosely knit consortium of programmers
and it's is totally free. Free to download, free to use. As
resources go, information is not scarce. -
Imagine a tropical island, populated by people with
simple needs and plenty of resources. You won't find a
bustling economy there. That's because you need two
things in order to have an economy: people who want
things, and a scarcity of things they want. Without
scarcity, there's no basis for an economy. -
But in today's free market, there are plenty of factories,
plenty of brands and way too many choices. With just a
little effort and a little savings, we can get almost anything
we want. You can find a TV set in every house in this
country. People throw away their broken microwave
ovens instead of having them repaired. -
Every marketing campaign gets
better when an element of permission is added. In some
cases, a switch to marketing with Permission can
fundamentally change a company's entire business model
and profit structure. -
What if you could turn clutter into an asset? What if the
tremendous barriers faced by Interruption Marketers
actually became an advantage for you and your company?
The truth is that even though clutter is bad and getting
worse, Permission Marketers turn clutter to their
advantage. In fact, the worse the clutter gets, the more
profitable your Permission Marketing efforts become. -
CHAPTER TWO
PERMISSION MARKETING-THE WAY TO MAKE ADVERTISING
WORK AGAIN
POWERFUL ADVERTISING IS ANTICIPATED, PERSONAL AND RELEVANT. -
Is mass marketing due for a cataclysmic shakeout?
Absolutely. A new form of marketing is changing the
landscape, and it will affect interruption marketing as
significantly as the automobile affected the makers of
buggy whips. -
6. But, as you've seen, spending more and more money
in order to get bigger returns leads to ever more clutter.
7. Catch-22: The more they spend, the less it works. The
less it works, the more they spend. -
5. But this increase in marketing exposure costs big
money -
4. In order to capture more attention and more money,
Interruption Marketers must increase spending. -
3. The more products offered, the less money there is to
go around. -
2. Human beings have a finite amount of money.
-
1. Human beings have a finite amount of attention.
-
INTERRUPTION MARKETERS FACE A CATCH 22
To summarize the problem that faces the Interruption
Marketer: -
The last frontier of Interruption Marketing appears to be
exemplified by the movie Titanic. James Cameron
showed the world that outspending any rational marketer
will indeed cut through the clutter. -
Of course, database marketing is a weapon available to
any marketer, so like all trends in Interruption Marketing,
this one will soon lose its edge. When others jump in as
well, the clutter will inevitably catch up. -
Of course, just as suburbanites learned when they fled the
city to avoid the crowds, if a strategy works, other people
will be right on your heels. That bucolic countryside
rapidly fills up with other people looking to get away
from it all. Correspondingly, as each of these promotional
media becomes measurably effective, every smart
marketer rushes to join in. Finding a unique approach that
cuts through the clutter is usually very short lived. -
Alta Vista, one of the most complete and most visited
search engines on the internet, claims to have indexed 100
million pages. That means that their computer has surfed
and scanned 100 million pages of information, and if you
do a search, that's the database you're searching through. -
MASS MEDIA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE NICHE MEDIA!
Technology and the marketplace have also brought the
consumer a glut of ways to be exposed to advertising. -
It's estimated that the average consumer sees
about one million marketing messages a year-about
3,000 a day. -
Except for fast moving industries like
computers, the brands we have today are good enough to
last us for years and years. Because our needs as
consumers are satisfied, we've stopped looking really
hard for new solutions. -
We've also come a long way as consumers. Ninety years
ago, it was unusual to find a lot of brand name products
in a consumer's house. Ninety years ago, we made stuff,
we didn't buy it. Today, however, we buy almost
everything. Canned goods. Bread. Perked coffee. Even
water. As a result, we already have a favorite brand of
almost everything. If you like your favorite brand, why
invest time in trying to figure out how to switch? -
You've got
too much to do and not enough time to get it done. You're
being accosted by strangers constantly. Every day, you're
exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is
optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And
increasingly, it's getting harder and harder to find a little
peace and quiet. -
You can define advertising as the science of creating and
placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets
him or her to take some action. That's quite a lot to ask of
thirty seconds of TV time or 25 square inches of the
newspaper, but without interruption, there's no chance
for action, and without action, advertising flops. -
For ninety years, marketers have relied on one form of
advertising almost exclusively. I call it Interruption
Marketing. Interruption, because the key to each and
every ad is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in
order to get them to think about something else.
INTERRUPTION MARKETING-THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO
GETTING CONSUMER ATTENTION -
The clutter, as you know, has only gotten worse. Try
counting how many marketing messages you encounter
today. Don't forget to include giant brand names on T-
shirts, the logos on your computer, the Microsoft start-up
banner on your monitor, radio ads, TV ads, airport ads,
billboards, bumper stickers and even the ads in your local
paper. -
This is a book about the attention crisis in America and
how marketers can survive and thrive in this harsh new
environment. Smart marketers have discovered that the
old way of advertising and selling products isn't working
as well as it used to, and they're aggressively searching
for a new, enterprising way to increase market share and
profits. Permission Marketing is a fundamentally different
way of thinking about advertising and customers.
There's no more room for all these advertisements!
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