Church of the Customer: April 2005 archives
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April 19, 2005
Our shortcut culture, Part 2
The Wall Street Journal reveals that quite a few well-known companies pay product "experts" to tout their wares on news shows ranging from local TV stations to the "Today" show.
For years, this quid-pro-quo payment system wasn't a problem for product companies, television networks or television stations until the Journal sniffed it out. (It's just like the Bush Administration's practice of secretly paying TV pundits; that wasn't a problem, of course, until the Times revealed it.)
Not that we really expect television to be as honest as our mothers, but perhaps it's more like Courtney Love than we had realized.
April 18, 2005
CUES presentation
A special post here for the people who attended my keynote at the Credit Union Executives Society (CUES) Nexus conference Saturday in San Diego..
Kudos to Jan, Mindy, Cindy, Tim, Ruth Ann, Gary and the rest of the CUES team for putting on a terrific event!
I promised audience members that I would share the presentation slides here on the blog. Click here to download the slides. It's a PDF file, so you'll need Adobe's free PDF reader. Using your browser, save the file to your computer or network, and you're set.
April 17, 2005
Military marketing is opt-out
With all of the hub-bub some groups are strirring up about marketing to children, one practice has remained rather stealthy: military recruiters have unprecedented access to every school's information to contact kids directly.
The law that teachers and states love to hate, the No Child Left Behind act, requires schools to provide the military every student's name, address and phone number and the right to contact them directly. It's an opt-out system, meaning families must tell the military not to contact them, rather than granting contact permission, otherwise known as opt-in.
With military recruitment goals falling short, the heat has been turned up on the access to high schoolers, as the Chicago Tribune reports (short life-span, registration required).
No one wants military recruiters to fail, including me. But if they are granted marketing access to teens at the exclusion of everyone else, that's high hypocrisy. A level marketing playing for everyone, including the military, is an honest, democratizing market force.
April 15, 2005
Customer loyalty: The real focus
Darrell Zahorsky, the Small Business Information writer for About.com, has penned a strong primer on customer loyalty for small (and maybe, not-so-small) businesses.
From Darrell's piece: "It's easy to think you put the customer first. However, take a closer look at your marketing communications. How many times does your literature refer to 'we' the company versus 'you' the customer?"
That's a still-too-common reality among many, many small business websites.
April 14, 2005
Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, the final chapter
WOMMA has posted speaker presentations, audio recordings of the sessions, photos and more from last month's Summit here. (That's Ben in the picture at the left during the Customer Evangelism panel.)
If you missed our podcast from the event, you can download it here.
(Transparency note: Ben and I are advisory board members of WOMMA.)
April 13, 2005
"Mommy is waiting for you in the light"
Sony Ericsson will commit "about 75 percent of its North American (marketing) budget to ads in movie theaters... across 14,500 screens," according to today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
The 350 marketers who attended the March 2004 Word of Mouth Marketing Summit heard numerous speakers dismiss Sony Ericsson's fake-tourist buzz campaign of 2002 as an example of poor, or outright deceitful, buzz marketing.
Now the company is focusing on ads in movie theaters. Sigh.
From fake buzz to interruption marketing geared toward a captive audience... Sony Ericsson, there are more authentic and effective ways to sell your cellphones.
We promise.
Definition of "consumer"
Consumer: "One that consumes; A heterotrophic organism that ingests other organisms or organic matter in a food chain.”
From: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
April 11, 2005
Better than a bake sale
A neat idea for democratizing the support of micro-causes: DonorsChoose.org.
Cash-strapped schoolteachers can appeal to people outside their districts for funding student-learning projects. Since DonorChoose is web-based (and non-profit), that means an exponentially larger pool of contributors (and probably better-focused fundraising arguments).
For contributors -- whom DonorsChoose calls "citizen philanthropists" -- it means funding specific projects or teachers in their area, rather than supporting a program and the overhead of an umbrella organization.
Citizen marketing and Tiger Woods video
Joseph Jaffe assembled a simple example of potential citizen marketing for Nike based on an extraordinary shot made by Tiger Woods at this weekend's Masters tournament.
Chances are these homemade ads (he created 30- and 60-second versions) will be viewed by thousands of people... That is, if the lawyers at Nike (or CBS) resist sending him a cease-and-desist nastygram.
Tip o' the hat: Micropersuasion
April 10, 2005
Brand evangelists
