Passion Archives - Page 20 of 25 - McLellan Marketing Group

Howdy neighbor!

January 14, 2007

Being a part of a community means knowing your neighbors. Or at least it should. Lots of us have joined the BlogLog community and it’s time to meet the neighbors!

Here’s how it works. The list below started with Andy Beard and Mike Sansone has now added to it. The first link is someone in their BlogLog community and the link right next to that is the neighbor’s community.

So a link for me would be:

Drew McLellan | Marketing Minute’s community

So grab this list, add a few of your neighbors and pass it on!

Come on…introduce us to some of your neighbors!

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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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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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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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Describe Kohl’s in one phrase

January 3, 2007

Paul over at Hee-Haw Marketing took some pretty damning photos at his local Kohl’s. He raises some great issues about advertising and saying one thing and living another.

Then, Mack Collier picked up the ball and posted this very interesting question: If the CMO of Kohl’s saw Paul’s post…what should he/she do?

I started to add my comment to Mack’s post and then I could hear Mike Sansone whispering in my ear “long comments should be posts on your own site.” So here we have it.

So….Kohl’s has a significant problem. There were lots of good comments on Mack’s site, suggesting what the CMO should do. I didn’t disagree with any of them.

But they all started at stage two — at the store level.

I believe the CMO needs to start at the beginning. The Kohl’s brand. That’s why I asked you how you’d describe the store. Most of us would use words like “cheap, knock offs, second runs, last year’s styles, shoddy production, disinterested employees.”

Every choice the store makes — the stock, the short-handed staff, the under trained staff, the crowded junked up retail ads…tells us that the employees who allowed that Dallas store to look like that were simply behaving as they have been taught to behave. They don’t show the store or the customers any respect because no one has taught them to respect the brand.

Punishing a store manager or answering a blog post isn’t going to fix that. That’s treating the symptom, not the cause. If an organization’s leaders are not willing to explore and uncover what their brand is all about — why they exist (and I do not believe any store exists to offer crap in a shoddy store staffed by disgruntled, short-handed staffers) then really, there is little hope. They will go down the path of K-Mart and others who thought “low prices” was enough.

If Kohl’s management could change the way they look at the chain by seeing it through a brand lens, they would change the way the employees see it. When the employees see if differently, they begin to take pride in their work and their environment. No matter how inexpensive the merchandise is. And when that happens — they change our perception.

Until then…let me recommend Target. By the way….Kohl’s tagline on their website…”expect great things.”

Yikes. They even bolded great.

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A blogging friend in need

December 30, 2006

CK told the story far better than I could…but Servant of Chaos’s Gavin Heaton’s family has experienced a crisis this holiday season and we’re linking arms to send prayers, support and if you care to, a financial boost for what will no doubt be a long and expensive recovery.

Go. Read. Care enough to send a kind thought. At the very least.

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A picture is worth…

December 30, 2006

…a whole lot of z-listers!

Sandy Renshaw from Purple Wren has created a collage to shout about the Mack Collier’s z-listers in a whole new way.

Kudos for Sandy for not only paying the meme forward but doing it in her own style! Not to mention the incredible amount of work it must have taken.

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Is that your ego shouting in the background?

December 29, 2006

Boy will this one get you every time.

It’s not about you. And it never was. When marketers let their egos drive decisions, craft reactions or trigger responses — it has never been fruitful. But today, it’s worse than that. It’s fatal.

Popular is very different from valuable. We need to shift marketing from being a popularity contest to being one of providing genuine value.

It’s a noisy world out there. The consumers are grabbing at the reins. Your competitors are multiplying and geography is no longer a safety net for you. Dog eat dog. Right?

Sure. If it’s a win or lose. And it’s about you. So you’d better win. Hear that? It’s your ego shouting in the background.

But what if it was about sharing? About creating intimacy with someone before you tried to pry some money out of their pocket? What if it was actually thinking about your product or service from the customer’s point of view? Not giving it lip service — but really listening. Learning. Adapting.

We’ve all heard the phrase "the small is the new big." I’d like to modify that to "the valuable is the new popular."

It probably always was. But now the consumers’ voices are louder than ours, so we actually have to listen.

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Thanks Santa Seth!

December 24, 2006

There’s been a list that’s been flying through the blogosphere for the past week or better. I posted the story of the list’s origin and added to the flurry. It’s been building up steam since then with more good blogs getting the attention they deserve. So many voices, so many new ideas and perspectives.

Then, on Saturday, Seth Godin added his voice to the mix, but as always with Seth — with a twist. He not only posted the list, he created a plexo on Squidoo. (who says bloggers aren’t creating a whole new language?)

Bottom line, you can cast a vote for marketing blogs you enjoy. Another way of voices being heard. If you’re getting some insight and ideas from the Marketing Minute, I’d very much appreciate your vote.

Here’s all you have to do:

Go to Squidoo.
If you have an account, click here, log in and vote (see #5). If you don’t, sign up for one. (free, easy and no spam promised)
Up in the upper right corner, you’ll see "find a lens on"…enter z list in the box
In the search results, you will see The Z List by Seth Godin. Click on it.
Scroll down the list and find Drew McLellan: The Marketing Minute (or other blogs you love)
Click on the up arrow (it will turn green) and then refresh (right next to the vote count)
Watch your e-mail to confirm your squidoo account and you’re all done!

Thanks to Seth for turning up the volume on these great blogs and thanks to all of you who will take the time to go vote!

This whole "experiment" reminds all of us that blogging is a great equalizer. It allows voices of all pitches and tones to be discovered, listened to and learned from. Is your voice in the mix?

Update:

Not cool. About 24 hours after Seth tries to do a nice thing — people are doing a not so cool thing. Someone(s) gone through the squidoo list and "downgraded" a bunch of the blogs so that lots of people are in negative numbers.

You know…call me naive and idealistic — but come on. If you like someone’s blog, vote them up. If you’re not crazy about it — just leave them be. All of a sudden Mack’s fears are coming true — now it looks more like a popularity contest rather than giving some good blogs their due.

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