What Every Good Marketer Knows:

Once again, here's some genius 101 advice and things to ponder from Mr. Seth Godin and his mucho smart blog.

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.

Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.


Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.

Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.

Marketing begins before the product is created.

Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.

Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.

Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not.

Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

Products that are remarkable get talked about.

Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.

You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.

If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.

People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.

You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.

What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.

Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.

Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.

People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.

Good marketers tell a story.

People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.

Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.

Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.

A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.

Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.

Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.

Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.

Good marketers measure.

Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.

One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.

In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.

Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.

There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.

Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.

You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.

You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.

Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.

That's Right

HMK

Thanks again Seth! Seth's Blog.

Different By Design

A new breed of consultant is using the tools of design to solve business problems creatively.

Surgeon Daniel Palestrant was laid up for several months with a back injury when he realized that it often took years before new techniques developed by pioneering doctors filtered out to the rest of the medical world. Why not bring physicians together online and, even better, charge businesses for access to content from their conversations? But the idea alone wasn't enough to get his social network off the ground. He needed to package that idea in such a way that investors would buy it.

Instead of bringing in a conventional consultant to help him, Palestrant visited a loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. In a series of meetings there, Palestrant rattled off his ideas--an outpouring he likened to "intellectual bulimia"--while Elizabeth Pastor and Garry VanPatter, the team behind the firm Humantific, furiously drew and took notes. "He was really deep in the trees," Pastor says. The pair made sense of Palestrant's fuzzy ideas and turned them into huge, glossy posters with icons representing how the parts of his business fit together. Diagrams in hand, Palestrant went to venture-capital funds and returned with $40 million in start-up money.

That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design--a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people.

Continue reading Chad Robert Springer's piece fore Time: Different By Design.

In short, the smart folks at Humantific are using design problem solving techniques to make complicated business ideas understandable to everyone.

Bravo!

The sooner the business community recognize and embrace the fact that impassioned, educated and professional communication designers are capable of bringing a lot more to the table (and the bottomline!) than just fluff, wrapping paper or "making it look cool", the better off we'll all be.

Right On Humantific!

That's Right

HMK

The Customer Is Always Right…

…is such a flawed statement. It’s the kind of phrase I can only suspect that some deceptive salesman concocted in the early days of American hubris. It reeks of that complete insincerity, which ultimately only says, “I’ll say anything, as long as you buy it.”

Our culture (inappropriately) feels so starved for a sensation of control, that we’ve come to love this phrase, regardless of the fact that deep down we know it is a complete and utter fallacy.

This is an awesome repost that's always nice to re-read. Big thanks to Eric Karjaluoto over at: Smash Lab.

Or, you can skip it and do yourself a favor by keeping this one thing in mind:

The idea and end result for the client has to remain your singular focus.

I choose to work with suppliers and partners who argue with me when I’m wrong. I would certainly prefer to be proven incorrect, as opposed to being erroneously lauded for my oversights or lack of knowledge. Put simply, if we care at all about the welfare of our clients, it is our duty to tell them the truth, even if it means upsetting them, or losing their business. It is both responsible and ethical.

When you finally start to say “no” to client requests which you believe to be misguided, it almost becomes hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Two Types of Clients

There seem to be two distinctly different types of clients. The first looks to you for your insights and professionalism. They clearly articulate their needs and ask you to direct the creative process, acknowledging that you are the professional in your field. These are responsible clients, and we have learned to count your blessings for these ones; likewise, we take their contributions seriously, as they are generally valuable and inform our work. These clients often seem to be quite successful. They find good talent, manage well, and get out of the way when their knowledge is not as strong as another’s, on a particular topic.

The second is the type of client who will make you question why you ever got in to the business. They will not respect your profession or knowledge. These are the kind of clients who say “I just want to sit next to you and tell you what to do. I know what’s good when I see it, but I just don’t know the programs.”

After over 15 years of dedicating every moment I have to this practice, and selectively choosing to bring incredibly talented designers to our studio, I feel no compunction to press buttons mindlessly while a wayward client exorcises their need to do something “kind of neat.”

These clients are hard to say “no” to. When you do, they will remind you that they have paid you substantially, and as such, you are indebted to do as told. The implied message here is “We’re paying you big, so bend over.” When a client sees the people in our firm as software operators, I politely suggest they work with other designers. I’d encourage anyone to do the same. Believe me, you sleep way, way better at night as a result.

Good clients will respect you for your principles, and for fighting for what you believe is in their best interest. Our friend, and client, Mishtu (perhaps the smartest person I know) often laughs about our first meetings. He jokes about how brash we initially seemed when we told him that he couldn’t do certain things, without damaging what he was trying to accomplish. That being said, his company’s interests were always central in our suggestions. As such, he has come to see our positions less as bravado, or “being difficult”, and more as us acting in his best interest.

Exactly.

Read the whole thing over here: Always Right.

That's Right!

HMK