Marketing Wisdom

I am finally motivated to start writing.
Yesterday I re-connected with a friend & colleague from my days in Photonics. Lee Blake and I instantly bonded the first time we met in 1989 at an Optical Society of America reception at a major trade show in San Francisco. We were the only people attending this event who spoke the language of marketing. Segmentation, Geoff Moore’s Chasm theories, Bill Davidow’s complete product ideas, and how small business gazelles could outrun giant IBM were the hot topics of the day. And we were lone voices in a wilderness of optical engineers & physicists who had yet to invent telecom components, LASIK or RFID.

20 years later I called Lee when an optics company asked me to help them put together a new business and I wanted to jump back into the fray. I expected to talk for a few minutes to get an update on a particular application. 2 hours later I realized we were still driven by the power of strong marketing principles and had both gained the wisdom that comes from applying those principles in day-to-day business situations.

We are seeing the same scenario: new media, new sales & marketing channels, new technology, new platforms are rapidly transforming our businesses. Twitter, facebook, YouTube and the iPhone are pervasive in our communities. But OUR communities of plugged-in, 24/7 technophiles with unlimited appetite for innovation are not the entire world. And I suspect we are a smaller percentage of the world than we imagine in our ego-centric mindset.

Lee made an excellent point: People tend to segregate into groups that are like us. Similar experiences, similar politics, similar music choices. To make marketing decisions, we cannot go on OUR experiences or those of our group. Remember it’s about the customer, the people who pay our salaries. Clearly market research is even more essential, in this day and age, to determine the needs, wants & desires of our customers, but also to define the medium through which they are receiving promotional messages.

Case in Point
Last year I did a marketing project for a golf company in Florida. The customer base was mostly over 50 years of age with more than 75% retired and over 65. Our sales point-of-purchase system required that we get an email address for each customer. Over 50% did not have email addresses and of those that did at least 20% admitted they didn’t use it! Clearly, new media was NOT going to reach this market segment.

MARKET RESEARCH IS A SEARCH FOR TRUTH
If you discover your product’s customers are not yet technically savvy, how much better to know how to communicate with them than to jump on the new media bandwagon and lose them to “old school” competition. Yes, you won’t realize the cost savings, yes, it’s less efficient. But not to your customers.  New media is the future of marketing communications but during this transition time, we must be sure how new media fits into the marketing mix for the exact market segments we target.

Lee Blake can be reached through www.leeblake.com and on Twitter @LeeBlakeBiz
I tweet from @BathwaterMrktg

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

More and more businesses are leaping into new media such as Twitter, facebook, & blogs without maintaining the strong marketing principles that are still necessary for success.  On Twitter, a million followers might be great for a celebrity, but for a business in a specific market segment can so many Tweets be worth pursuing?  More powerful is a targeted group of followers that are actually potential paying customers. 

Bathwater Marketing wants to help you throw out old media programs but not forego the principles of strong marketing strategy.  Watch this space for articles, tips, links and other tools.