Targeted Marketing: When and Where

Posted on March 22, 2009 | Comments Off on Targeted Marketing: When and Where

Talking about targeted marketing, you cannot ignore the importance of right time and right place to market your product.

Simply putting, it might not be that fruitful to market your personal tax management software in the month of May, or outdoors water sports resort when the temperature is sub-zero. Similarly, it might be more effective if you advertise a digital camera next to search results when someone is shopping for digital camera, rather than in a news feed where chances are the user will consider it as an obstruction.

Seasonal dimension plays a significant role in spotting the right time to market your product. When trying to figure out the right time for marketing, the important thing to understand is that it is very hard to make the customers go out of their way and consider your product, but you can make your product play a role in their thought process if they are already thinking along the same lines. This is equally true when you are trying to figure out the right place. The marketing message should blend in with something  that holds importance for the customers. This will make them notice it and think about it. 

Internet advertising is gaining traction because of its growing effectiveness in nailing down the right place and the right time. Search engines do a phenomenal job placing ads right next to the results for the product search when a person is showing genuine interest in a product. Then there is behavioral relevance in online advertising. Think of it as someone something smart enough travelling with you while you are shopping in a mall and taking notes on what you are planning to buy. Now when you are sitting idle, that something intelligently shows you advertisements of products you were shopping for sometime back. That is pretty much what technology enables online in order to do effective marketing using behavioral characteristics of an individual.

In a world where the likes of TiVo and satellite radio are gaining prominence, the importance of nailing down the right place and the right time to gain attention of your target audience is more than ever before. Tactics like subtle branding and community engagements can be more effective as compared to traditional ways of marketing. This brings us to the last pillar: “how”.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Technology

Targeted Marketing: What

Posted on March 10, 2009 | 1 comment

Now that we have identified the right set of audience for our product, we move on to figure out the right message that will have the most impact. When we speak about the right message, it is not just the message that we broadcast while advertising for the product. It is the message that is part of every communication the company has with its customers, directly or indirectly. These communications can vary from a press release where the company defines its plans to go greener or a community participation where the company address the broader cause addressed by its products.

When trying to figure out the right message, we need to understand the things that influence the buying decision of the target audience set. One information that can help in doing so is the psychographic profile the customer. Psychographic profile is based on IAO variables (Interests, Attitudes and Opinions). It provides basic information about the target segment for our product. Using this kind of information, company can make sure it effectively communicates with its customers.

Another thing we should consider while we talk to the customers is the cultural code that links the product to the customer. Customers differ from each other. One such differentiation is cultural which is influenced by the society a person grows in. American culture is very much different from European and Asian. So when we plan the message to communicate to the customer, it should be adapted accordingly. Clotaire Rapaille explains the culture code for everything from shopping to love for America in his book The Culture Code. He briefly compares these cultural codes with the ones for France and Japan to show how different these cultures, and hence the codes, are from each other. Using these culture codes and going local with the marketing efforts can have a bigger impact on the target customers.

There’s no golden recipe to have an effective communication with the customer. The general pattern that derives one successful campaign after another is to focus on the customer, talk their language and feel their problems, or in other words focus on the customer more than the product.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing

Targeted Marketing: Who

Posted on February 25, 2009 | 2 comments

This post is first in the series of exploring targeted marketing.

It is very important to identify the right set of audience you got to tap in for your product. Simply putting, if you are opening a steakhouse, advertising to vegetarian audience will not serve the purpose. You need to identify who is most likely to use your product.  Targeting the product to the demographic which is most likely to be your customer will lead to greater impact.

Few other factors come in picture while determining the right audience. One such factor is the current stage of the product. Are you launching a product, or the product is already there in the market for sometime? If you are launching the product, you need to identify the mavens in your industry and target all your energy in winning their support. Mavens are the community experts. They are the early adopters. Pitching the product to mavens and gaining their support is as vital as anything else. If you as a marketer are able to sell the product successfully to mavens, you have in a way recruited the best sales force out there to market your product. These passionate users serve as consultants in the market whom the masses look for before making a buying decision. If the product is already accepted by the mavens and you are looking to cross the chasm, provide tools to the mavens to push you across. To accelerate the growth, shift focus to the larger set of audience in the right demographic who normally go for the tried and tested products.

Nailing down who your target audience is fundamental for the success of a product in any market. Who element not only shapes the marketing, it shapes the product itself including the pricing of the product, the look and feel of the product and the product placement.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing

Targeted Marketing Pillars

Posted on February 24, 2009 | 3 comments

Who, What, When, Where and How: the four Ws and H every company needs to cover while developing the marketing plan for a product.

You might have the best software solution for customer relationship management in the world, or for that matter the best baby soap, but till your customer knows it, and believes in it, it’s of no use.

No matter how big or small your marketing budget is, if you are not targeting the right audience with the right message, at the right time and the right place, using the right medium, it is of no use. In the next few posts I will share some thoughts to explore each one of these rights.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing

How to KISS

Posted on February 8, 2009 | Comments Off on How to KISS

So now that we know KISS is easier said than done, it’s time to take a stab at the more important question: how to strike the appropriate level of simplicity? I believe there are two ways to get it right to a large extent. First is by creating a facade. A lot of simplicity can be obtained by creating a mask to hide the details. A customer does not need to deal with the inner functioning of your system. There is a big difference between knowing the inner functioning exists and dealing with it. Driver of a BMW knows that a great deal of engineering excellence goes in developing that engine for the car, but need not have to deal with it. Knowing that makes them pay for it, and not dealing with that makes it easier for them to use it. Similarly, if you are dealing with marketers in search of sophistication, you need to make sure you explain the system and the wealth of engineering sophistication working behind it, and as a special treat to them, they have got a simple personalized interface to deal with it.

This brings us to the second point – personalization. Having personalization as a required feature in your product or service can make even a highly complex product get the traits of simplicity. You want to serve every customer out there and extend the reach of your product. But every customer does not want everything you have to offer. The customer should know that you have all the check-boxes checked when they are choosing between offerings, but they do have a specific set of requirements that need to be fulfilled at this time. Cater your product to meet those needs. Think of Amazon as an example. Amazon has more than 50 stores selling things varying from books and electronics to bags and shoes. But they personalize the website with focus and recommendations based on your needs and past shopping experience. In a very similar fashion, you got to personalize your offering to meet the needs of the customers and make it easier for them to discover the supplemental offerings if they ever have a need for it.

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Posted in Business, Technology

KISS

Posted on February 2, 2009 | 1 comment

KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid –  is easier said than done. It is ironical that to keep something simple is not that simple to do. Though KISS is a software development principle which states that design simplicity should be a key goal and unnecessary complexity should be avoided, it can pretty much be applied to any business in almost any field. 

What comes in way of KISS? I think it is the urge to do it all. We want to do everything and serve everyone. We don’t want to miss a single customer. We keep adding features till our product or service is complex enough to need a simple list of instructions to explain how to traverse through the maze, and often times in the process throw simplicity out of the door.

I believe checkbox features play an equally significant role in killing simplicity. These are the features you got to have to make sure you match your offering with your competitors’. This is something like a necessary evil to retain and attract customers, but the way we do it sometimes kills the simplicity of the offering. 

Another thing that prevents from keeping something simple is the notion of value that thing provides. A general understanding is that the amount of sophistication is directly proportional to the amount you can charge for it. We embrace sophistication. Marketers love the idea of sophistication. Well if something is this simple, why do you expect me to pay so much for it? So we take the easy route, make it look more complex than it’s got to be and attain the goal.

The list of reasons and excuses can go on and on. In a nutshell, KISS is easier said than done!

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Posted in Business, Technology

Apple and Obama

Posted on January 20, 2009 | Comments Off on Apple and Obama

Obama: Apple of the political world? Well the resemblance in the path to the apex is pretty similar!

Let’s talk about Apple for a minute. A decade ago, Apple was a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since then, it has beaten expectations several times over the last decade. Just when we end up thinking that this is the best iPod ever, Jobs comes on the stage with a better one wow-ing the world. Beating super high expectations time and again is the genius of Apple. Apple has put life in fields that were thought to be saturated and dead along with setting new standards. Just like a decade ago you would have never thought of spending this handsomely on a personal music player (year after year) but changed your mind for the iPods, up until two years back, a mobile phone was treated as something that will be given away for free with a service agreement. Along came iPhone, price equations changed and new standards were set. Suddenly everyone in the mobile phone industry dropped their preset three year plans to design the perfect copycat. Today Apple is a cash rich cow with $21 billion in cash. For any brand enthusiast, it is one of the biggest compliment to be called the Apple of your own industry.

Now back to Obama. Obama’s journey to the White House maps pretty well to that of Apple.  A few months before Iowa Democratic primary, he was 30 points behind the presumed Democratic nominee. He was different and he did beat expectations of one and all, time and again. He pumped life into the seemingly dead Democratic primary that people expected Hillary Clinton to wrap up in a few months. The curiosity and political interest he stirred in young people was comparable to the one generated by Apple products in the tech community.  He pulled a whole new demographic of young voters to volunteer for his cause and vote (many for the first time ever) for him. His mavens were extremely vocal and enthusiastic tribe raising his popularity in the community along with winning him almost all the caucuses in the primaries. And above all, he definitely set the standards for the future presidential races in this country.

With economy in slump, terrorism around the world on a rise and image of the country not at its best, people elected Barack Obama with immensely high hopes. Expectations are higher than ever before. It will take us at least a few years to see if he is able to do an Apple with those expectations as well.

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The Obama Brand

Posted on January 19, 2009 | 3 comments

Back in summer of 2007, while volunteering at a project with Seattle Works, a fellow volunteer made a passing comment that Obama campaign is hot. She went to see Obama speak in the city and saw the enthusiastic young crowd of volunteers cheering for him. The same was the reaction of almost every person I talked to about the event. There was a sense of curiosity everywhere around this young candidate – with a different set of credentials, amazing oratory skills and ability to connect with the masses – running for the highest office in the country. That led to the creation of the maven base for the Obama brand.

With an economy in trouble and the nation in two wars, Obama campaign was orchestrated around Change. The Change message had a two pronged objective – first change in the country and the way current administration was dealing with the war, and second change in the people running affairs in Washington which also differentiated him from his rivals Hillary Clinton and John McCain who have been players in Washington politics for decades. Change became the tagline for the Obama brand.

 The things that were supposed to play against Obama became his biggest assets in his path to the White House. His age, comparatively less experience of running an executive office and few years in Washington helped him stand out of the lot. While his opponents pointed them out as his weaknesses, they helped Americans identify him as someone who can really change the traditional functioning of the government. These “features” became the differentiating factor for the Obama brand.

Well, like in case of any brand, you cannot sell your product till the product itself is an outstanding one. Obama brand was very well marketed and it was coupled with his outstanding oratory skills, his ability to connect with people and energize them and his vision to lead the country…all together making Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States of America.

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Posted in Marketing

Kindle must have…

Posted on January 12, 2009 | Comments Off on Kindle must have…

1) Blog feeds: Blogs have become mainstream source of information for everything from news to articles. Many people read tens of blog posts a day and something like a book a month making blogs a must have on an electronic reading device. Amazon can develop a web-based blog reader which will remain in-sync with the feeds on Kindle. Having blog feeds in Kindle will also provide an opportunity for Amazon to monetize through contextual ads next to the blogs.

2) Chat client: There’s no question about the importance of community around a product. Having a Kindle-to-Kindle chatting client will allow book clubs to use Kindle as their primary device of communication. People will be able to discuss sections of a book, send around bookmarks and do so much more if they can communicate from right “inside” the book.

3) “Serial” book: Kindle digitizes the books. So an interesting feature for Kindle will be to have a “serial” book, i.e. get an installment of the book every week. Wouldn’t it be great to get a chapter of the new novel from your favorite writer every week way before the novel is out for publishing? The excitement of this for die-hard followers of an author will be just like that of a 24 fanatic watching Jack Bauer traversing through an hour a week in 24.

Technically, all these features are possible. Kindle’s got a wireless connection that enable users read daily newspapers on it. It’s got a full qwerty keyboard for people to search books and browse through Wikipedia. It’s true that none of these features will do an Oprah for Kindle, but they will definitely make Kindle more wannable and pull some customers towards it!

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Google’s marketing genius

Posted on January 10, 2009 | Comments Off on Google’s marketing genius

Since writing the post on marketing starts at inception a few days back, I had a discussion with a few folks on whether Google is run by marketers or not. Well I believe Google has been one of the best marketing companies online and it asserts that marketing needs to be ingrained in every part of the company right from the product and design to community and customer connection.

The entire marketing effort of Google was focused on the early adopters. Google’s target customer base became the savvy Internet users who were continuously in search of information on the web. This created a strong community of mavens which served to increase the marketing strength of Google to spread it all over the web and helped it cross the chasm. 

Simplicity was another feature that differentiated Google from its competition. Google marketed itself to the customers who were not looking for organized content, but were looking for a way to get a list of all content on the Internet in an organized fashion. The success of Google Search engine is dependent on how quickly a customer leaves Google and reaches to the information they are looking for. Google created brand equity and gained customer confidence by not tampering the search results with sponsored results. Instead they clearly marked the sponsored links which became their main source of revenue.

And then there was “Don’t be evil”. I believe it was arguably one of the best principle statements on the Internet (or maybe technology industry) which also served its purpose in marketing the company. Google attracted that big community of users who were looking for alternatives to existing behemoths.

It’s important to understand that great marketing is not an alternate to great product. You got to have great products to succeed in the long run. In fact, a great product is made better and is able to reach the majority if there is great marketing behind it. Google is a perfect example of that!

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