Marketing

Life / Marketing — No Comments
23
Mar 11

Trends, payphones and missed opportunities

It’s no secret that everybody’s wired these days, and that public payphones are going the way of the dinosaur. The folks at Miami International Airport are apparently aware of this, so they have removed the old payphones from the walls and replaced them with… nothing.

I took the picture above yeaterday, as I was on MIA waiting for my flight to Brazil. I noticed that there were a few plug boxes underneath the empty payphone area so I plugged my Blackberry on one of them. Suddenly, other travelers discovered the other plug boxes and gathered around the area, standing or sitting on the floor, while their different electronic devices charged (I apologize for the bad picture; I didn’t want to use the flash and freak people out…):

Fast forward to a few hours later, at Sao Paulo Guarulhos airport. Apparently they’re also aware of the decline of the payphone and the fact that people now travel with cell phones and laptops that need to be charged.

Unlike their counterparts in MIA, however, they didn’t just remove the payphones. They decided to make it easy for passengers to charge their gear, so they installed these user friendly plug towers and positioned them close to where passengers can comfortably seat.

But they even went a step further: recognizing that an airport is frequented by people from many different places who don’t necessarily use the same type of plug, they’ve equipped the towers with both American style (white) and European style (red) plug boxes.

The moral of the story (there is always one) is this: it’s not enough to recognize a trend. We must also take advantage of it as an opportunity to create a better customer experience.

And now for the bonus round: if you look again at the first picture above, you may notice that some people are obviously using the space left vacant by the payphones to leave their empty food containers and water bottles. Aside from the fact that some people are just plain lazy and uncivilized, food in the concourse is another trend resulting from the fact that we don’t get food on planes any more. There wasn’t, however, a single trash can for as far as my sight could reach. So, a few extra trash cans would be nice to go with our charging stations, please.

Are there any trends taking shape around your business? How can you turn them into an opportunity to delight your customers?

Marketing — 1 Comment
20
Mar 11

Reframing our message

Interesting, how sometimes the only thing we need to do for people to pay attention is to frame our message from a different perspective…

Business / Marketing — 2 Comments
2
Aug 10

The bridge to nowhere

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Brazilian city of Manaus and took this picture of the bridge that is being build between the mainland and the small locality of Iranduba.

Most of my Brazilian friends, pointing out that there was nothing on the other side, were quick to dismiss the project as a white elephant dreamed up by corrupt politicians so that they could enrich themselves.

Given the nature of Brazil’s regional politics, there could certainly be an element of truth to that.  On the other hand, however, maybe the reason why there is nothing on the other side is that people can’t get there in the first place.

Perhaps, once the bridge is built, Iranduba’s real estate will become more valuable, residential and commercial development will start, and with it many new, profitable businesses.

The bridge is a vivid metaphor of the vision successful entrepreneurs have always shown:

  • Where others saw just a vast expanse of swampland, Walt Disney envisioned an amusement park so great that millions of people from around the world would flock to.
  • Frederick Smith, the founder of Fedex, was once told that nobody would pay $10 to have their mail delivered overnight.
  • Martin Cooper, after successfully testing his first cell phone prototype, knew that his new invention would one day give millions the freedom of mobile communications; others, however, could only see a ridiculous contraption the size of a brick.

The world of business is full of successful entrepreneurs who were repeatedly told that there was nothing on the other side, but went ahead and built the bridge anyway.

Posted via email from Mario Sanchez Carrion | Posterous

Marketing — 6 Comments
23
May 10

Are you treating your customers like rock stars?

I found this video of Aerosmith’s recent visit to Lima, Peru. It shows Steven Tyler, the legendary vocalist of the band, upon his arrival to the hotel as he pauses to snap pictures of the hundred or so fans that had congregated outside the hotel to welcome them.

This small gesture may seem trivial but it really is not. Do you really think that Tyler, a veteran rock star who has performed for millions of people around the globe was so impressed by the handful of screaming fans that he felt compelled to produce his camera and start taking pictures?

Of course not. So, why did he do it? To make his fans feel special…

By holding that camera in his hand and pointing the lens to the fans what he is really saying is: you are the rock stars, I respect you and I thank you for your support. This kind of gesture explains why Steven and his bandmates are still hot after more than 40 years in the music business, while many others have disappeared after 15 minutes of fame.

Steven Tyler, at 62 and a multi-millionaire, could most certainly slow down or even retire, but he and his band are still out there, playing their hearts out in every concert and giving their fans more than they ask for, every time.

Passion for what you do and respect for your customers: are you delivering that? Are you treating your customers like rock stars?

Marketing — 2 Comments
2
May 10

Turning Problems into Opportunities

The elevator at the hotel I was staying last week had a sign that read: “Please allow 30 minutes for check-out in order not to disrupt your schedule”. The hotel had a problem: it couldn’t check people out fast enough. But they also had a choice. They could:

a. Make it a customer’s problem
b. Turn the problem into an opportunity

They chose (a) and hanged the little sign in the elevator.

Compare that approach to what this South Florida hospital is doing about another situation where customers don’t like to wait: emergency room visits. National average emergency room wait time is about an hour, but Aventura Hospital has managed to bring it down to just a few minutes.

This compelling competitive advantage is effectively communicated through billboards that show actual, current waiting times. The information is texted directly to the billboards (and to the hospital’s website) and refreshed every 30 minutes.

This simple and relevant benefit is building the hospital’s brand. It has also increased business: since the billboards went up, emergency room visits have jumped 25%.

Problems tell you where you can add value and differentiate yourself. Next time you find a problem, find also a way to turn it into an opportunity.

Book Reviews / Marketing — 4 Comments
9
Apr 10

Book review: Presentation Zen Design

I read and enjoyed the original Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, but felt that something was missing. While the book did a great job at explaining the planning and delivery stages of effective presentations, it didn’t offer much about the actual design phase.

While some praised the fact that Presentation Zen was not “a book about making slides” I actually did want a book that could teach me how to make attractive, clear and effective slides. Presentation Zen Design is that book.

In it, you will find actionable, how-to advice on topics like: choosing the the right font, working with color, creating attractive visual compositions, using images and video, and other tips and techniques to improve your slides and create powerful presentations.

The book is also vintage Garr, with plenty of references to Japanese culture, and interesting parallels between Zen principles and aesthetics and presentation design. Garr’s personal brand also shines through his choice of images and sample slides, which make Presentation Zen Design part how-to manual, part coffee table book.

For best results I would highly recommend reading both the original Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design, as both books complement and support each other.

Posted via email from Mario Sanchez Carrion | Posterous

Marketing / Social Media — 16 Comments
26
Nov 09

Social Media Marketing: A Three-Legged Stool

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc0047/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

With social media consultants popping up faster than Realtors in 2006, we need to set the record straight: knowing how to use the tools doesn’t make you a social media expert. Like the proverbial three-legged stool, using social media effectively means paying attention to three basic elements:

  • Strategy
  • Tools
  • People

Strategy:

Before you set up profiles in every social network, think about your customers: who are they, what problems do they face, where do they hang out: are they on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace? If your customers are there, you need to be there. Before putting out content, though, think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate. Your message and style must be consistent with your brand, and with the way you communicate offline.

Tools:

Learn the nuances, idiosyncrasies and etiquette of each social media platform. Social networks are not sales tools as much as they are relationship building tools. Using social media to aggressively sell products is not effective. Instead, focus on building your brand, being helpful and showing that you know your stuff .

Also, you don’t need to jump into every new social media platform. There are only so many hours in a day, and it is better to be an active participant in one or two networks than to just dabble in five or six. As Laura Roeder says, social media is not an area where you necessarily want to be cutting edge: sometimes the tried and true, older social networks are better because they gather a larger audience and more of your potential customers.

People:

The real experts never lose sight of the big picture: social media are just a means to a bigger end. It is not a coincidence that Chris Brogan, one of the top names in the field, has chosen these words for the title of his homepage: Beyond Social Media: Learn How Human Business Works.

The end goal should be to help people and build community (which is also a great way to build a business). Focusing on people and solving their problems is a more sustainable business strategy than just showing them the mechanical aspects of how to use the tools.

As Adam Singer explains in his popular blog The Future Buzz, social media is not new.  Just as it would be ridiculous to build a business around showing people how to dial a phone, social media is soon going to become second nature (it already is for Millenials).  The challenge we face now is not how to set up a Twitter or Facebook profile, but how do we use the leverage that social media gives us to build value and help people.

Book Reviews / Marketing — No Comments
24
Oct 09

Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Book Review)

I just finished reading Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
. It is a fascinating read, following in the footsteps of Freakonomics, the book that a few years ago taught us that a subject as dry and technical as economics could be entertaining if used to explain why ordinary things around us turn out the way they do.

Free has generated a lively debate in the blogosphere, with some questioning the validity of its conclusions, others finding some merit to them but hoping that we can find a way out, and others fully embracing them as the inevitable way things will be from now on.

The book is full of interesting examples of how companies and entire industries have been build around giving away stuff. There is a comprehensive chapter on Google (probably the best known company that has been able to build a business around a wide array of free services).

There is also a very good example that I think summarizes the main point of the book: that as previously scarce things become abundant, new scarcities are created, and with them, new ways of making money. Anderson goes back in time to remind us how in the early days of radio, musicians got paid for life on-air performances. That business model was killed by records, which became the new way to make money. Nowadays, of course, the recorded music industry is being challenged by the zero marginal cost of distributing music over the Internet, which has forced musicians to embrace other ways to make money, like live performances and licensing.

My impression after reading this book is that we are not necessarily doomed by the economics of free, but we do need to work on creating business models where we can turn giving away stuff to our advantage (for example, to build an audience faster) and then find related products and services where money can be made.

The main importance of this book for small business owners, in my opinion, is that it will open our eyes and minds to new ways of charging for products and services, and will help us understand the complicated dynamics of pricing in an Internet economy.

As we internalize the concepts discussed in this book, we will come to accept that some of the things that made us money in the past may need to become a marketing cost, as we strive to create multiple, new streams of income that feed each other.

Marketing — 4 Comments
26
Sep 09

Leveraging your content online

social media landscape
Chart Credits: Fred Cavazza

These days you can’t build a strong personal brand without a web presence. As professionals and small business owners, whatever our field, we need to become publishers, and use tools like blogs and social media profiles to publish and share information.

The most important element of our web presence is a blog, followed by our profiles in the main social media networks (for me, those are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook).

We can also set up an account with a simple blogging platform like Posterous to share shorter and lighter posts. Finally, we can put it all together by creating a simple personal page where we can introduce ourselves and link to our blog and social media profiles.

All the different elements of your web presence feed from each other, which means that you can leverage your content in many different ways. For example, you could:

  • Craft your elevator pitch and use it in your About Us page, or as your LinkedIn summary.
  • Take a Twitter post and expand the idea into a full blown blog post.
  • Take the pictures you use on your blog posts, and use them in presentations you can then load to Slideshare.
  • Bundle several blog posts into a PDF eBook that you can offer for download on your site or publish it on Scribd or Slideshare.
  • Take a good picture of yourself and crop it in several different sizes to create avatars for your different social media profiles.
  • Slightly modify blog posts to turn them into articles you can upload to article clearinghouses (you can then use your elevator pitch as your bio at the bottom of your article, adding a link to your website).
  • Set your Facebook profile so that you can autopost content from your blog or other social media sites.
  • Summarize the main takeaways of your blog posts in less than 140 characters and publish them as Twitter posts. Then, use those tweets as slide titles or takeaways in your presentations.
  • Film yourself reading your blog posts aloud to turn them into video clips and upload them in YouTube.
  • Gather all your Twitter posts for a week and bundle them to create blog posts.
  • Write book reviews on Amazon and use them as blog posts.
  • Aggregate your content from different social media sites by auto-posting it on platforms like FriendFeed or Tumblr.
  • Etc.

The possibilities are endless and limited only by our imagination. By leveraging our content and establishing a strong personal presence online, our chances of having our sites and social media profiles appear in the first page when somebody Google’s our name will be greatly increased.

(This post was inspired by the Fast Company series 30-Second MBA.  By harvesting 30 second clips from their archive of interviews with top business leaders and organizing them around relevant topics, Fast Company has created an exciting new product, generating buzz and expanding their online footprint).

Marketing — 2 Comments
13
Sep 09

Are you rewarding your most profitable customers?

Photo Credits: Kevin H
I recently went online to buy a couple of tickets for a show and got slapped with a $7.75 per ticket “convenience” charge. If I had bought the tickets at the theater’s ticket window I would have avoided the convenience charge.

That episode let me thinking: who’s convenience are you really paying for?

Let’s see: by ordering online you do all the work (you don’t need an expensive human to interact with you), and the theater receives your payment hassle-free through your credit card company. If you buy from the ticket window, on the other hand, the theater has to pay an employee for several days, balance the cash register at the end of each day, deposit cash payments in the bank, etc.

Yet, those who buy online are the ones paying the convenience charge…

Why is that so? I think it is in part because most people still consider buying from the ticket window the normal thing to do-the way things have always been. It is probably for that same reason that banks are still reluctant to charge customers for conducting business through a teller, but instead have no problem charging outrageous fees to those who get money through an ATM. Without going out on a limb, we could also argue that governments act the same way when they decide to raise taxes instead of finding ways to spend less and more productively.

For those who apply that logic, in the short term everything looks fine: convenience charges increase the theater’s revenue per guest, banks can “invest” the ATM fees in expensive lobbies and nice desks for their officers, and government bureaucrats can get easy money to finance ineffective social programs.

In the long term, however, things won’t necessarily look that good. Theater operators may start to wonder why are there so many empty seats, traditional bankers may finally start to pay attention to those pesky online banks that are stealing their business, and politicians may soon find out that the same people who pay their salaries can also boot them out of office.

Businesses should use pricing to reward the most desirable customer behaviors.

If a customer interacts with you in a way that reduces costs and results in a more efficient operation, that behavior needs to be rewarded. For example:

  • You could charge less for an ebook than you do for a real book (which requires paper, ink and complicated logistics).
  • You could offer free shipping to those who increase their order size.
  • You could offer a discount to those who put your service on automatic payment or pay you in advance.
  • You could give a better price or an internet-only freebie to those who purchase from you online.
  • Etc.

Incentives drive behaviors. Make sure you reward your most profitable customers.

What’s your take?

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