The Blog Turns 10

The Blog turned 10 this summer. Aside from disappointment that you missed the party, why should you care? Should you join scores of millions of organizations, pundits, and malcontents in creating a blog for your business, hobby, or cause?

I’ve not seen a really good definition of blog. I’d characterize it as organized web content, such as by date and subject, which is very easy to update. You as a blogger don’t have to know more than how to type or cut and paste and click a button or two. Blogs can be far more elaborate with graphics, audio, and full motion video; but in general, you need no more than an Internet connection and an idea. Far too many blogs seem to dispense with this second ingredient.

As marketers, we like to experiment. Blogs can be quick experiments. They do not require significant investment. If your blog is getting bogged down in design reviews and policy meetings, stop. Your blog doesn’t have to be ugly, but its purpose is to dispense content. As in so much of marketing, the KISS principal (Keep It Simple Stupid) applies.

What can a blog do for you? Occasionally blogs become a hit and get lots of traffic. When that happens you can profit by selling ads through programs such as Google’s Adsense. This does happen, but is as optimistic as panning for gold in your bath tub – not the basis for a business plan.

Blogging systems typically allow readers to comment, though this option can be turned off. If you enable this, a blog can be useful source of customer information and an early alert to problems. It’s also a way to engage customers, especially those who care about the product. These engaged customers could be the basis of a community of users.

Even unhappy customers have value. They could signal perceived or real problems you ought to know about, and the blog can be a vehicle to directly reach and respond to them.

Any visitor to the blog can comment, so a rude, lewd, or overly persistent commentator can be a problem. There are ways to deal with these such as moderating your blog, but they add complexity and labor to what is supposed to be an essentially simple system.

The key reason we recommend blogs is to keep adding new content to your site. Blogs are an almost spontaneous way for you to add relevant information, without another web design cycle. Indeed some blog software, WordPress comes to mind, could be used as a full blown web publishing and content management system. Having a blog can help your site’s search rankings. Because blog content can be readily refreshed and enhanced, it’s a reason for visitor’s to keep returning.

Because of their informal style, blogs can also be a window on the personality of your brand or products; and so a way to get closer to your customers. If you’ve got something to say, get a blog.

TNAR

Professor Robert Sutton’s latest book is short and easily readable in a few evenings. It’s provocative title is *The No Asshole Rule (Random House, 2007). It’s content is relevant to your business.

The book focuses on the disfunctions of teams and organizations caused by bullies, jerks, and “assholes”. The book is commendable in its cases, descriptions, and prescriptions for alleviating some of the damage caused by these toxic people.

In essence, the Rule is:

Avoid hiring them, even if they have other desirable skills. If need be include this formally in your job search requirements.

Failing this -

Find them. That is, diagnose and distinguish between the aberration and the occasional bad behavior, most of us occasionally commit, from the true chronic, certified jerk.

Fix them. This is problematic but sometimes possible. If an outright cure is not feasible, perhaps these bozos can be assigned a role, which best uses his strengths while insulating the rest of group from him.

Fire them. This can be tough to do. Very tough in some organizations. The result justifies the effort.

Sutton’s specialty is management not marketing, but his ideas are directly relevant. As marketers, we occasionally have these types as customers. The Rule should apply here as well. We’re not talking about simply difficult or demanding customers. We get paid to satisfy them. Their complaints and criticisms may improve our business.

What we don’t get paid for is dealing with tainted customers and prospects. Even if they’re “profitable”, and often they are not, they are not worth it. Even customer sovereign organizations, such Nordstrom and LL Bean, have come to recognize this. Ideally a CRM system would flag such individuals. In the real world, we shouldn’t be afraid to apply TNAR to our customers and if necessary fire them.

What Are Your Colors?

"The Customer Can Have Any Color He Wants So Long As It's Black" – Henry Ford

There is some dispute whether Ford actually said this. Regardless it has become a truism, whose influence persists. The message is also, if you don’t like our products, tough! Long after the decline both of Ford and his company, black is the one color in which virtually every model automobile is available.

Similarly, major appliances such as refrigerators and washers still tend to come in white and now a quite limited assortment of other colors. While consumer electronics and small appliances often come in metallic silver, white or black. This begs the question – why are developers of products from plumbing fixtures to household implements to tee shirts color blind?

Colors in product design are, subject to fashion. Remember the blizzard of beige a few years ago? Novel products used to be able to get away with superficial sameness but as product categories from mobile phones to sporting goods have become commodities similarity has become dangerous.

Those of you who stage shows and events as part of your promotional mix may have used tchotchkes such tee shirts. All too often they are white or black in size extra large. As a result, they often end up in trade show dumpsters.

The temptations, which attracted Ford, are still with us. Of course, it’s easier to have one or a small number of colors, flavors, or other features. One of our key missions as marketers is to differentiate our products favorably. We should also do this inexpensively. Here color can work, especially in the face of monochrome monotonous competition.

An interesting case is Dell. Personal computers are as much a commodity as any consumer product. Indeed computer “manufacturers” make none of the major components. Instead they assemble their products from standard parts produced by others.

Dell’s key differentiator had long been to compete on price – the typical strategy in a commodity business. Dell played that game for too long. Competitors caught up leaving Dell with neither cost leadership not profitability.

They have recently made radical changes from management to sales channels to marketing. And they’ve discovered color. Dell notebook computers now come in a choice of eight colors (7 plus black). The color option consists of replacing the top of the case with a plastic panel in one of the colors. This increases Dell’s bill of materials, but with it’s build to order products, it does not increase the number of SKUs. This feature is probably profitable.

Customers pay an extra $20 for color. As long as colored computers are unusual, this means the Dell logo is displayed on the top of an eye catching background. This not only polished the brand image, it builds a ruby, evergreen, gold, or azure box, which for now, is not a commodity.

Scientific Marketing

A recent commercial for Ocean Spray diet cranberry drink was, according to the Wall St. Journal (6/4/07 Page B8), created with the aid of “lab-coat-wearing scientists as it seeks to get deeper into the heads of consumers.” You can see the ad (along with another commercial) at here

The article goes on to describe that the agency, which created to ad, employs an individual with a Ph.D. in cognitive science. The ad superficially looks like an ordinary consumer spot, however the “scientist” is credited with changing the ad’s content to be less confusing and facilitate better information processing by the ad’s audience.

Should you add a cognitive scientist or any other scientist to your marketing team or is this a case buzz word invasion in marketing. For the commercial in question, we cannot yet say.

Physicist Richard Feynman, in his perennially interesting Feynman Lectures On Physics, characterized science as the discipline in which disputes are decided by experiment. Yet for the Ocean Spray commercial, data on outcomes, such as sales, are noticeably absent. Until they are included, I’ll go light on the diet cranberry drink.

Give Your Communications A Basque Treatment

After a recent trip to see a client in Northern Spain, we spent a few days traveling in Basque country and neighboring La Rioja. Here the road signs are in bilingual in Basque and Spanish. They also tend to be in large letters in a highly readable sans-serif type. Our Spanish is so-so and our Basque, that unique language unrelated to anything else, non-existent. We were, however, better able to navigate the roads than in US cities we don’t know.

Where it’s important, such as entrances to traffic circles and narrow unlighted mountain tunnels, the signs are vivid graphical icons. We had never seen some of these, such as those for dimming lights, but we understood immediately.

Can you say the same about your package design, web pages, and ad layout? If not, we suggest giving your communications the Basque treatment. Think about what it would take to deliver a single message to prospects, who often don’t already know who you are and why they must have your products.