Articles Posted in Marketing Management

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Picking a target market is one of the most fundamental decisions a sales and marketing team makes. Your target market determines what products you build, where you promote them, and how you talk about them. Socratic Marketing in the budding conversation economy demands a rigorous approach to this question as part of your Big M Marketing approach..

Target-Market-Forces.gifPicking a good target market is a balancing act. The smaller your market the higher your odds of success in targeting specific needs. However, that has to be weighed against the financial objectives of the business. You can’t get so small that you define yourself out of a job! Think of this as two forces that are inversely proportionate. Your goal is to find the right balance point.

So why do so many companies get this wrong? They define markets based on granfalloons, a concept coined by Kurt Vonnegut which means “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.” For example, have you seen segmentation schemes based on geography, district size, or % of free and reduced lunch students? If you are engaging in data driven selling and/or socratic marketing these are good starting points, but they are not the most powerful way to define a market.

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BlackboardNECC071.jpgBlackboard’s booth at NECC in Atlanta was one of the best examples I’ve seen recently of Socratic Marketing. They asked teachers to write a brief paragraph on how they intended to use a free trial of the product in their classrooms. Then they took a polaroid of them and pasted several hundred of them all over the booth. In an inversion of current trends they created a real version of a virtual community. It was fun and interesting to browse the cards and it made a strong visual statement.

Blackboard started a real dialog and also provided the foundation for a series of ongoing conversations. Shana Glenzer, Sr. K-12 Marketing Manager at Blackboard, told me that they were getting ideas for uses of the product that they hadn’t thought of, like connecting pregnant teens to classroom resources. They also intend to use the ideas in conversations with senior administrators at districts – “6 of your teachers visited with us and here are some of the ideas they had…”

Blackboard120072.jpgIt was arresting in its simplicity and represented a validation of the products in the words of end users. It also showed that great marketing doesn’t have to cost a lot.

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necc-atlanta.gifThe National Education Computing Conference NECC put on by ISTE in Atlanta this week was the most active education tradeshow I’ve seen since the dot com bubble burst in 2000. Ironically the 2000 show was in Atlanta, the Big Peach bookended a lull in the ed tech market that looks like it is over. 18,000+ attendees thronged the World Congress Center in Atlanta for SRO sessions and a mobbed show floor.

The International Reading Association Conference which was held just six weeks ago was sleepy backwater compared to NECC. Even with valid reasons for IRA having a slow year the difference in these shows is so dramatic that one has to conclude that educators are voting with their time and money on the best tools for teaching today.

To bring this point home look at the two pictures below. The one on the left is from NECC and the one on the right is from IRA. Both were taken at the height of show floor activity. At IRA one could have set up pins and bowled in the aisles. At NECC one had to move at herd speed to navigate the hall.

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Few education companies do marketing well. Many are good at sales and distribution, others are product driven and innovative, but very few are able to drive high growth through world class marketing.

What does great marketing look like?
* Reps have so many leads they triage them.

* Customers recommend you to all their friends.

* Annual growth consistently beats your peers – your market share is growing.

There are two core questions that constitute what I call “Big M Marketing.”
handshake.jpg1. What promise are you making to the market?

2. How are you aligning the entire business to fulfill the promise?

The first question drives the strategic vision and the second drives the tactical execution. Yin and yang – you have to embrace both.

yin-yang.jpg It really is this simple – but simplicity is difficult for most companies. You must put the time in up front to get the promise nailed down and then you have to sustain your focus on it long enough for the market to believe you.

So how can you get away from empty sloganeering, sales support masquerading as marketing (you need both), and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey marcom? Here is a brief overview of one way to start doing Big M Marketing.

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Web 2.0 is providing another nudge to the conversation economy. As advertising becomes less relevant the power of engaging your customers in a real dialog increases. Listening should be a core competency at the corporate level.

Socrates_teaching.jpg

A productive conversation is Socratic, it focuses more on good questions than on staking out positions, and both parties have to be open to learning something. It is a relatively quiet affair, based on mutual respect. It helps the participants distinguish between facts and opinions and arrive a reasoned judgment.

But most marketers are having trouble letting go of dictating a message to the market. We have been taught that the louder we shout and more often we shout the more likely we are to get results. But what happens when everyone is shouting as loud as they can? White noise.

A brilliant article and a subversive video got me thinking along these lines recently. David Armano makes the case for the conversation economy in this article. At the same time the Bring the Love Back video is a hilarious take on the consumer breaking up with advertising.

In a nutshell consumers/buyers want to be heard. If you are still talking at your customers instead of with them you are missing a great opportunity to earn new business.

Follow for a taxonomy of the kinds of questions marketers can ask to get the conversation going….

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TORONTO – From the vendor perspective the big story out of IRA this year is attendance which is less than half of the number that attended last year. Final numbers are not available yet but rumors on the exhibit floor ranged from 5,000 to 7,500 and at times it felt like 0. Prior years have ranged from 17,000 to over 20,000. It is a shame because there are some exciting new products out this year from companies large and small.

No one had a definitive explanation for the drop off. It can’t be budgets, because Toronto isn’t any more expensive than Chicago was last year. In fact it has some significant bargains ($2 seats to the Bluejays anyone?). Perhaps it was just too difficult politically to send someone to a foreign country on a school budget. Maybe people were scared away by having to have a passport.

Whatever the cause it seems pretty clear that in the post 9/11 world American educators are not as able or as willing to embrace the International aspect of the organization. This is tragic because it is happening at precisely the time that the rest of the world is growing ever closer.

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Has your company ever honed a promotional activity only to see it lose its potency right as you perfect it? The frustrating fact is that promotional activities have a shelf life.

This happens because the more effective you get at targeting a market the faster you tap the folks who respond to a given approach. A company I worked at had honed direct mail to a fine art over 3 years – our response rates consistently topped 2%. All of a sudden our response rates were down to 1%. We knew our stuff was good – it had worked in the past. But over those 3 years we had reached most of the folks who responded to mail.

What can you do when this happens? Follow me to the flip for 3 suggestions.

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Most companies switch their marketing messaging too frequently and undermine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns as a result. The power of repetition is one of the foundations of world-class marketing.

So if it is a bad idea – why do so many companies do it? Find three reasons on the flip – see if any of them fit your company.

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