Drew McLellan, Author at McLellan Marketing Group

Love me or let me go (part deux)

January 12, 2007

A couple days ago, I suggested that if you couldn’t love your clients — you owed it to them to fire them. Our clients deserve not only good service and competent skills. They deserve our love.

The same, I believe, is true of our employees. If you don’t love them — fire them. Of course, loving them doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have to part ways either. Sometimes the best thing you can do for an employee who’s the wrong fit or can’t wrap their skills or attitude around your organization is to let them go. Give them the kick in the pants they need to find a place where they can be successful and contribute.

How does loving your employees benefit you, the company and your customers?

Selfishly, you get to work with people you love
It builds incredible trust and loyalty (both ways)
Your employees care about you, the business and your clients as though they owed the joint
Better profits, lower turnover, more fun
They get better because you care enough to help them get better
It’s authentic

Over at Innovation Compass, Susie de Ville Schiffli paints a nice picture of what a loving company looks like. If it doesn’t sound like your place of business — what can you do about that?

Flickr photo courtesy of omnia.

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Should I launch this product?

January 11, 2007

I need some advice. Let me give you the facts.

I have a new product that is going to create incredible immediate demand. No questions asked.
It is unique and it will take my competitors awhile to catch up.
I will not be able to actually deliver the product until the middle of summer ’07.
I have a name for it, but another company owns the rights to that name.

Here’s my question. Should I announce my product and launch the marketing of it this week?

My guess is that most of you will tell me no. Deal with the legal issues. Don’t create demand you cannot fulfill. And yet, Apple announced the iPhone this week and is now stuck in a quagmire with Cisco Systems suing them over the name and the actual product not being ready for months.

Maybe you’re smarter than I am and can help me figure out how in the world they talked themselves into thinking this week’s announcement was a smart strategy.

What do you think?

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Love me or let me go

January 10, 2007

It’s really a simple idea. You need to love your customers. No, I don’t mean love their money. I don’t mean love that they send their friends to your business.

I mean love them. As people. Collectively as in "I love our clients" and individually as in "I love Lana."

If you don’t love them, you owe it to them to fire them. Because you will never be extraordinary. And every customer deserves that.

Sure, they buy your brain and knowledge. And they buy your end product. Those are the givens. But the "I’ll care as much about your business as you do" is not on the price list. It’s not for sale. You either give it to them freely or you can’t because you don’t feel it. And if you give it, you give it from love.

At the Conversation Agent blog, Valeria Maltoni talks about inspiring love rather than trust or loyalty, in terms of your product. I couldn’t agree more. And the way to get them to love you…is to love them first.

Steve Farber’s brilliant book Radical Leap is all about infusing love into your work.

I’m not sure why the word love is so taboo in business but it needs to stop. It’s a big part of why Kohl’s looks like a dump, why Wal-Mart employees were taking out TV ads against their employer, why Enrons happen, and why the people at the drive-thru could care less if you actually get what you order.

As consumers, we’ve not demanded love. We’ve accepted sullen. We’ve pardoned rude. We’ve tolerated mediocrity. As business people, we’ve offered acceptable. We’ve delivered good enough. And we’ve billed our clients for better than average.

I think it’s time for us to try a little love. Don’t you? (Part two coming….)

Photo courtesy of flickr and photographer Aaron Walsh.

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:60 ticks marketing tip: Hold Me!

January 9, 2007

Grab it fast…it’s gone in about a minute. A :60 ticks marketing tip is 150 words or less…so read it in a minute and implement it in the next!

Don’t waste an opportunity to brand every customer experience. If you have to put a caller on hold, what happens? Consider these options over being lazy and just playing muzak or a local radio station.

Record client testimonials
Ask provocative questions (the current one at MMG is "if you were a superhero what would you insist went on your utility belt?") that reflect your brand
Answer a few frequently asked questions

Whatever you do, give them an option to hit a button and get to a live body. No one’s brand includes frustrating the stuffing out of a caller because they are caught in a voice mail maze.

That’s it. Go put it into action!

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I don’t get this new math

January 8, 2007

Let’s see if I have this right.

You make most of your income from current customers
+ Your current customers are happy with you, so they are predisposed to buy again
+ Your current customers know you and take your calls
+ Your current customers have other needs

= You invest 90+% of your marketing budget on chasing after strangers/prospects.

Help me see how that adds up again?

Photo courtesy of flickr.com from the works of lacadaz.

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AdAge jumps on the YOU bandwagon!

January 8, 2007

Following in TIME’s footsteps, AdAge announced that the winner for their annual agency of the year award is YOU. Well not quite YOU. They defined it as "The Consumer" but basically you win again!

Read more about their choice and rationale and hear from the Editor’s POV why the stories like Lonelygirl15 and the Mentos/Coke experiment swayed their decision.

In case the articles are not evergreen, here are PDF versions.

Download adagestory.pdf
Download adageeditor.pdf

But here’s what I am wondering. So what? From your perspective, is it just nice validation for those early adopters who are blogging and YouTube? Does it change the way you intend to market your business?

Should it?

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Ease into the week – rather fight than switch?

January 7, 2007

I don’t know about you but Sunday nights are time for me to catch up. On my reading, on my work, on my relationships — all with an eye on Monday morning and knowing that the 180 mph pace is about to resume.

Sundays also seem to be my day for deep thoughts. I thought it might be fun to ease into the week together with a question that is sort of about branding and marketing but also has a personal element to it as well. A chance to get to know each other AND talk shop. Perfect for a Sunday night.

Most of you will be too young to remember the famous Tareyton cigarette campaign which proclaimed "I’d rather fight than switch." Here’s a flash from the past for those of you who love vintage ads.

So here’s the question to take us into the first 5 day work week of ’07. What brand would inspire you to utter the infamous line, "I’d rather fight then switch?"

For me, it’s Coke. If a waitress says "we serve Pepsi" I respond with "I’ll have iced tea." I fell in love with the brand as a teen. For me, Coke is Americana, baseball, and being old fashioned neighborly.

There are few treats I love more than an ice cold Coke in the bottle. It’s no one I indulge in very often, but it’s one of my favorites.

How about you…what brand is non-negotiable for you?

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Have you committed a Cardinal Zin?

January 6, 2007

This marketing truth stings. Just because you care about it, doesn’t mean anyone else does.

Whether you are the creator/inventor, business owner, assembly line foreman, sales manager or marketing genius — what matters to you may very well not matter one iota to your consumers or potential consumers.

In other words, they don’t want to buy what you’re selling.

That doesn’t mean they don’t want to buy. It means you need to get out of the way. It means you need to be smart enough to learn what matters to or influences them.

Roberta Rosenberg over at Copywriting Maven talks about the need to understand your audience before you open your marketing mouth.

Let’s look at a concrete example. 90% of wine drinkers know or care very little about varietals (vine types), bouquet (aroma), depth (layers of taste) or any of the factors that wine makers and connoisseur think are most important. If you owned a winery, because it matters to you, you’d assume it matters to the consumers. You’d be 90% wrong.

For a very long time, wineries seemed to market their product based on either quality (which most of us didn’t understand or know how to evaluate) or price. But, as Valeria Maltoni tell us over at Conversation Agent, product packaging is changing the way wine is evaluated.

Admit it, you’ve bought wine simply because of the name or label. They make us laugh or we think they’re cool or they create an aura we want to be a part of.

We can’t tell a heady bouquet from a cloudy composition. But we can tell whether our friends would be amused by sharing some Cardinal Zin or Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush!

The wineries are starting to get it in a big way. Are you?

Do you sell your product or service based on your level of knowledge or interest? Are you using terminology that makes your consumers feel like an outsider or stupid? (Anyone else ever feel the clutch of panic when the waiter pours the dribble of wine and then waits for you to evaluate it?)

Maybe it’s time to look at your sales materials, website, presentations and other marketing tools. Are they written based on what matters to you or your customer?

UPDATE: Seems like we are all talking about wine this weekend! Check out what Lonely Marketer Patrick Schaber discovered on a recent wine bottle.

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Perk up those ears!

January 6, 2007

I like to absorb and learn in a lot of different ways. I’m a big believer in reading (more on that in a bit), love to learn by doing and talking through ideas outloud and I love to learn by listening.

There are some really insightful marketing podcasts/audio files being put together and I thought I’d just point you to a few of them.

Viral Garden’s Mack Collier has started a new podcast series called Minding the Gap. The premise of this new weekly series is that Mack will identify a specific company and their communities and the gap between the two.

Converstations’s Mike Sansone is sharing his insights via BlogTalk Radio. His most recent episode talks about finding your authentic voice and asks the question “would Rocky Balboa blog the way he talks?”

Managing the Gray’s C.C. Chapman explores new media, “no control” PR and consumer created content in his podcast series. His most recent postcast talks about blasting off in ’07.

These are all great ways to infuse your thinking with new ideas, new voices and best of all, you can listen to them while you are sweating on the treadmill to honor that New Year’s Resolution!

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Brand yourself with a ringtone!

January 5, 2007

How a person brands themselves changes over time. Clothing labels, playing certain positions on sports teams, and Girl Scout badges evolve to the type of car you drive, your personalized plates and today in our all-tech world — cell phone ringtones.

Remember when you thought having personalized ringtones were a crazy fad the kids were into? Now, it’s absolutely mainstream. So here’s my question.

If you could only use one song for your universal ringtone (so everyone in your world and your general vicinity) would hear it and associate it with you — what song would you choose? Let me give you a running start.

My fellow Iowa blogger Doug Mitchell mentioned PhoneZoo at breakfast this morning.

Look at some of the ringtones you can have sent to your phone for free.

Are you an intense guy who’s life is sort of 24/7? How about the theme song to "24" or Mission Impossible?

Are you whimsical and short? How about the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

I know…feeling silly and colorful? Why not sound like Fred Flintstone or Peanut Butter Jelly Time from The Family Guy?

Go ahead….brand yourself with a song!

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