The Science of Marketing

In January, we wrote a post, "Getting The Brand Together: Consistency", which discussed brand promises - that what you say better be what you do.   Well, to do this you need to sit down and think hard about what it is you do and how to reflect that in your brand.  Consumer product companies have institutionalized this process.  High tech B2B companies to a less extent and high tech B2B start-ups not so much.

In the beginning, the usual process with a high tech start-up is: start a company, get a creative designer to design a logo, pick some colors and fonts.  Sometime later, messaging is developed.  So, the look and feel (visual brand) and the language (verbal brand) of the company are disjoint and possibly out of sync.  With so many companies vying for your audience’s attention these days, consistency is critical - so it is critical that the visual and verbal brand act as one.

There are three main concepts to think about when architecting an integrated brand.

1. The Word - Think about what your company does.  What word does it bring to mind?  Now, how can you get your brand to look like this word?
2. The Core Values - Think about how your company does what it does.  What values does it bring to the market.  Now, how can you add flavor to your brand that reflects these core values?
3. The Market - Think about your competitors, partners and customers.  What do their brands look and sound like?  Now, how can your brand stand out while fitting in?

By approaching your brand development in this structured way, you are more likely to have a tighter bond between what you say and what you look like.

I love looking at Google Analytics.  I do it every day for both this blog and our corporate web site looking for patterns, insights and clues to help increase eyeballs and hopefully business. One of the areas that I focus on is referring sites - how visitors got to our web site.  For each referring site (including direct links), Google Analytics lists visits, pages/visit, average time on site and bounce rate (percentage of visitors that exit on the same page they enter). Here’s some statistics and observations for our corporate web site from the beginning of the year until now.

Visits

• 39% - direct link (someone typed our URL into the browser)
• 35% - search engines
• 26% - other referring sites
• Of the other referring sites, 9% were from this blog and 5% were from LinkedIn.

Pages Per Visit

• 6 - direct link
• 4 - this blog and LinkedIn
• 3 - search engines

Average Time on Site

• 7:45 - direct link
• 3:01 - this blog
• 2:33 - LinkedIn
• 1:47 - search engines

Bounce Rate

• 23% - LinkedIn
• 38% - direct link
• 44% - this blog
• 53% - search engines

The conclusion is that social networking sites:

• Generate additional visitors
• Produce quality visits (more time on the site, more pages per visit, lower bounce rate) as compared to search engines

So, why not beef up your social networking efforts?

One of my favorite marketing books is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk (Al Ries, Jack Trout).  Each chapter is a few pages, gets right to the point and gives a real-life example.  It’s easy to pick up and put down without forgetting what you’ve read before. My favorite law is #13: The Law of Sacrifice.

You have to give up something in order to get something.

Ries and Trout point out that there are three things you can sacrifice: product line, target market and constant change.  They give several examples of companies (Fedex, Smucker’s, Staples and others) that sacrificed one of these three things to increase revenue, improve margin and gain market share.

I think there is something to be learned here for high tech start-ups.

High tech companies are almost always started by engineers; and engineers can do anything - and often do.  Most of the technology that high techs introduce to the world could be applied to a number of problems.  And, it probably can.  So, what usually happens is the it-can-do anything technology is thrown at the wall like spaghetti to see what sticks.  The spaghetti approach, while perfectly understandable, can cause problems:  lack of focus, unfinished products and features, employee chaos and market confusion.  While the first three are internal challenges that can be sorted internally, once the market is confused it is hard to unconfuse it. So, while it’s OK to have long term vision and a five year road map; make some sacrifices in your outbound communications and make sure your messaging is simple, consistent and focused on one (or a small set of) problems and markets.   If you tell the world that you do it all, you probably won’t be believed. What have you sacrificed lately?

I really like Chris Brogan’s latest blog post, "Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss". If you are considering launching a B2B blog or you are getting push back from management about starting a blog, it is well worth the read. Chris’s #1 way to sell is

Social media tools like blogging, social networks, and social bookmarking are more effective in reaching the millions online than a traditional website.

While our web site and blog don’t reach millions, i thought I would look at the Google Analytics data to see just how many people visit each. I went back to December 2007, when we started The Science of Marketing Blog to make the comparison. From December 2007 to the beginning of August 2008, here are the (rounded) visit stats.

ImageArchitects.Net (Web Site) 900

TheScienceOfMarketing.Com (Blog) 3600

Not only are the visits 4:1 in favor of our blog, it should come as no surprise that our blog is the number one referral site to our web site (and number three source behind direct visits and Google searches).

Given that a blog is inexpensive to implement (Chris’s #3 way), why wouldn’t any B2B organization expand the reach of their brand and messages with a blog?

Jay Ehret wrote a good post on Starbucks "loyalty" programs. I say "loyalty" because, as Jay points out, most of these benefits - cards, free WIFI - are more of a pain in the java bean than anything else. I’m not a huge Starbucks fan, anyway, so reading Jay’s post won’t make me go to Starbucks any less (which is zero times a week). But, it did get me thinking about my coffee joint, why I go there and if B2C loyalty tactics can successfully be adapted to the B2B world.

Unlike Starbucks, the BeanTowne Coffee House has meanigful customer loyalty programs: buy ten coffees and I get one free, a drawing to win a free lunch after you buy ten coffees and free WIFI that just works. These benefits, along with a constant, friendly staff and good coffee, make the early morning choice easy. Now that’s the B2C world, where, it seems to me that customer loyalty programs are straight forward (if executed properly).

But, a lot of us live in the B2B world where, beyond providing great products and services, customer loyalty seems a little more complicated. So, have any of you adapted customer loyalty tactics of the B2C world to the B2B world? If so, What has worked brilliantly and what has failed miserably?

As I was surfing the YouTube the other day, I decided to tune in to the Politician Channel and was surprised at what I saw.

Barack Obama: 1,150 videos and 55M views

John McCain: 219 videos and 4M views

That’s a 5-to-1 difference in number of videos posted and close to a 14-to-1 difference in views.

I’m not trying to wax political (something I would never do in a blog) and I know the whole John-McCain-is-old-doesn’t-use-the-computer-and-hates-bloggers thing, but, with all due respect, what the fig?

There are something like 60M broadband subscribers in the US. Now, knowing that, if you

1.) Needed to get the word out to a large audience

2.) Had a communications tool that hit that audience and was (practically) free

Wouldn’t you take advantage?

Something for us B2B marketers to think hard about. If social networking tools could change the outcome - why not?

On Sunday, I had some time to kill in Boston while I waited for my daughter to get off work and decided to walk over to the Museum of Fine Arts. However, I was derailed by a stop at the Summer Shack. Since it was muggy and I was hungry, I stopped in for some fine New England seafood and a few innings of the Red Sox game.

On the way out, I noticed a container of small boxes at the hostess station. These small boxes contained wooden matches. With the demise of indoor smoking, I thought restaurant matches were gone forever. Yet here they were. Cigarettes notwithstanding, matches are still good to start a fire in the wood stove, light a candle on a birthday cake and spark the occassional cigar on the golf course. But, you never seem to have them around anymore. I was delighted to get some.

Now I have something useful to remember my dining experience (along with a list of Summer Shack locations). I wish more restaurants did this.

What useful item could you give your customers to make you memorable?

Every now and then, it’s fun to take a walk down memory lane.  So today, I logged into Google Analytics and punched up the content page to find out what our ten most popular posts are.  I was surprised at how diverse the list is, ranging from the very tactical to the very strategic, and covering just about every topic we’ve ever written about.  I’m glad to see that our readers enjoy variety, so we’ll continue to mix things up.  If there’s anything you’d like us to write about, please comment below or send us an e-mail - we’d love to hear from you.

With that, Our Ten Most Popular Posts: 

1. Internal Communications: Own It
2. The Blogosphere: You Don’t Have to Blog to Belong
3. Mission Statement: Make it Possible
4. Slogans: Say What You Do
5. Market Segmentation: How to Prioritize Targets
6. High Tech Blogging: Why?
7. Lead Generation: The Bell Curve
8. Communications Part II: To the Right People
9. Age of Conversation 2: The Deadline
10. The SEO Triple Play: Message, Mechanics, Maintenance

In the movie Happy Gilmore, despite his on- and off-course antics, Happy was allowed to continue on the professional golf tour because he attracted a whole new crowd of enthusiasts. He represented a new approach to a traditionally closed sport and a way to expand its market appeal.

In 2005, Nike introduced the Mojo golf ball with the slogan "Get long. Get feel. Get real." This was a significant deviation from the status quo of names and descriptions targeted at the long time golfer. In an attempt to gain market share, Nike took a club from Happy’s bag by talking in plain terms and making the game accessible to the fat of the market - the high handicapper. Nike followed this up with the Juice in November 2006 ("ginormous and hugantic distance") and the Karma in November 2007 ("a little karma goes a long way").

Cool idea, but why don’t other manufacturers reach out to us hackers?

Well, now one has. Top Flite was the top baller until Titleist introduced the Pro V series in 2000. Since then their market share has free fallen and they were subsequently acquired by Callaway. In order to resurrect the brand, Callaway is attempting to transform Top Flite into the hacker’s performance ball with the introduction of the Gamer ("if you’ve got game, this is your ball") and the Freak ("it only cares about one thing - nasty distance").

Maybe more golf manufacturers should "get Happy".

Are there any other examples of markets taking drastic branding chances to reach out to new consumers?

Last week, I happened upon a LinkedIn Question that offered a glimpse into the challenges that have been keeping companies out of the blogosphere.  So I did what any self respecting blogger would do, I wrote about it and promised an update when more data became available.  As the answers trickled in, I found myself craving more responses to try and arrive at a meaningful conclusion, so I posed the question to our newsletter recipients via a "1-Second Survey" - and many of our readers accepted the challenge. 

With a little more to go on, I think it’s safe to say that most respondents agree: time is the biggest impediment to corporate blogging.  But behind the reason given lies an implication - that blogging just isn’t a priority for many businesses…yet.  For months, we’ve been talking to companies that are using their blogs to communicate more efficiently and effectively with their key audiences and company ecosystems, and their stories are inspiring and compelling. 

One company is blogging to put a personal face on its operations, and learning tons about its customers in the process.  Another is using a blog to share real-time data with industry watchers, positioning itself as a leading authority in the process.  Yet another has moved its blog from the edge to the epicenter of its corporate communications program, amassing mounds of message-driven media coverage with each new post.  None of these companies cite time as a barrier to blogging.  In fact, one now cites time as a barrier to writing press releases.  My, how times are changing…

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