Solvation

Real Marketing vs Mad Men

I have had several conversations recently with people about Marketing's role, and I realized I have internalized a "different kind" of marketing so thoroughly that I've forgotten that only a certain breed of Marketing pros really think this way.

Real Marketing is Facilitative

The role of the marketer is to facilitate the emergence of the market and the connection of the market to the product or service.

You can think of marketing as "becoming the exchange platform."

The questions a real marketer needs to know:

• what are the attributes of people who might need this good or service?
• where are those people?
• how do those people communicate?
• what are their triggers: what makes them act?

And then the work of marketing is to live where the market already is, and create messages that they understand that put the product or service in a place where it's easy for them to buy/adopt.

Then finally, the marketing person needs to learn:

• What just happened?
• How can I improve?
• Are there new people who need the goods or service (or can I conjecture that there might be in the future)? Where are those people and how do they communicate?

So you can see "marketing" methodology can be used for any situation where there's communcation between an institution and a population: non-profit, social enterprise, community group, or business. Also, it can be used to "sell," which is to say facilitate the exchange of money for goods/services, or it can be used to exchange knowledge or messages or ideas. You can use this to explain a product, or you can use this to find a pool of recruits.

Marketing is a community building activity.

Best Return Policy

OK, I've got a few good posts I'm working on, but just because this one's easy and gets the New Year's ball rolling...

Zappos has a 365-day return policy!

On the other hand, when I returned my goods to Amazon -- which of course I must prioiritize highly to do because I bought them in early December for Christmas and they only have a 30-day return policy I was told that I have to pay for return shipping since my desire to return wasn't their fault (they were duplicates). Weak.

Wonder if people thought of the idea that 30-day return would mean Dec 23 when they were shopping on Black Friday?

Social Network Business Model

A list I'm on has been having a discussion about a news item that decrees the end of MySpace as younger people continue to try to find a place devoid of older people.

There is often surprise at the transience of these communities.  Inherently, investors want to be in on whichever social space "Wins!", but the reality is that most social network sites are just like any other location that someone might hang out in - it depends on who is there, and how frequently they drop by, and you go to more than one place, but you don't go to an infinite number of them because that would be unwieldy.

However investors want barriers to entry, IP, "coolness."  But just like in physical-space, where for every oxygen bar, there's an Applebee's, in internet-land, for every FaceBook, there's a MySpace (to cite two currently popular choices).

The investment model SHOULD be more like something for a game, which is to say a transient entertainment -- that can sometimes be extensible but is fundamentally discrete -- and something that participation in one of implies it's likely you participate in several.  But it's sold as an infrastructure: a few big winners, everyone else is a loser, and if you can't hold on to your market advantage, then something's wrong.

In order to get trial, you have to help people try

At the 50th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival, iTunes gave out a free playlist, to be used on iTunes.  It went over like a lead balloon, and it was obvious why: this was not a typical young silicon valley music event crowd.  People refused the cards to the point where the distribution "girls" (young women) told people to just take handfuls.  With two or three people asking "Really?!" and grabbing handfuls, onlookers kept on walking by.  In the women's bathroom, people left their iTunes cards on the ledge, confident that someone would want them... just not them.

A simple solution, and one that's often used when launching breakthrough technology -- which this is for 60 year olds, by the way -- is having a kiosk or a demo running. But there was no demo, no kiosk. Just a lot of people wondering what they were supposed to do with this card thing.

For the records, the 65 year old retiree who sat near us is on the computer regularly with his 8 year old grandson, who is showing him YouTube.  So it's not about lack of computer access or aversion. It's about getting trial by helping people try.

The Experience of Prediction Markets

(Cross-post to IFTF's FutureNow blog.)

I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets.  The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.

These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.

Activist Transparency

I think everyone knows the truth of the inability to monitor all advertising purchases. In Daily Kos: State of the Nation, Kos relays Spocko's interactions with the Disney juggernaut.

Here's how to phrase unsolicited pro-bono marketing feedback, excerpted from the link above:

 

VALS classification system

So, following up the worldchanging article, I went to go look at the VALS classification survey that ecoAmerica used.  To my "fit 6 billion people into a few squares" delight, they had an online version. SRIC-BI | VALS.  At the end, after a separator, it asked a few demographic questions.  As I always do, I skipped the income question but answered the gender and education ones.  And then, as I always do, I checked for bizarreness. 

Marketing frames

I had the pleasure of meeting several people from Worldchanging yesterday during an event at IFTF.  So today I checked out the Worldchanging blog and posted a comment to WITTs, YOYOs, and Why Americans Don't Go Green. It's about marketing. 

Given that they have a couple orders of magnitude more traffic than I do, this is a bit ludicrous, but I was so enamored of my own resulting 2x2 matrix that I thought to bring it here.

Sophisticated and Anticipatory Demand? Or two nations, under God?

Let's have a little reality check.

Nielsen published broadband penetration data (thanks to SmartMobs, btw).

So, as usual in these things, you can't really quite manage to reconcile the terms they use since they're never clearly defined. 

The original press release of the report says, "95.5 million users from home of active broadband," 68% of people who have internet have broadband, and "internet penetration in the US" is 74%.  Now, first note that it's very ambiguous whether they mean households, users, or home+office; but let's assume they mean users at home, since the data that they specify indicates this.  Let's also assume that they say the word "active" meaningfully, which is to say that there's also a non-active segment.

So, given this, that means there are 220.5 million internet users, of which 150 million are broadband internet users.  Of those 150 million, 95.5 million are "active" broadband internet users.  Keep in mind there are 298 million people in the US.

Now what does that mean?

That means that 54.4 million users have internet but not broadband and 29.5 have broadband but are not active!  And that's in addition to the 77.5 million who don't have internet connectivity at home at all.

If you know that the top 10 states in the US have over half the population (55% - California alone has 12%), and you think that "almost everyone I know in online a lot -- and pretty much everyone has broadband" you should realize that you're way on one end of the "active user" continuum!

The other thing they mention in their report is that the average "active" user is now at 30.5 hours per month (an hour a day) of home use online.  This means for every 4 hour per day, and 8 hours on the weekend news junkie (or porno surfer or everquest fiend) there are a lot of people who are counted as "active" users who occasionally go online to check email or whatever but who certainly don't live there.

Most tellingly, they point out that internet penetration has stabilized at around 74%.

"Thaink yeeu... four coaling."

Of course the use of three separate English accents in one sentence is the dead giveaway on a voice call, but how do you tell when your email customer service is outsourced?

Changephilia

I had the opportunity to observe and participate a little bit in a process at a Palo Alto think tank.

There was an offhand comment that was made by someone, that sparked this post. He pointed out that his non-Californian friends had commented that only "you people in Northern California" care about these kinds of issues. (Think tank-y ones.)

So, I thought, woo-hoo: my time in Minnesota has some potential market value!  And here are my bloggish thoughts.