Get off my lawn – The new rules of marketing

I am old.  It’s official, I don’t understand music today.  When I turn on the music video channel or listen to the radio, I hear myself saying the same things my father used to say.  Then I saw this.

“There’s nothing quite like the feeling, when you’re listening to a song, written by someone you don’t know, who you’ve never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life…”

What a wonderful introduction to a modern hit that I actually like.  I was thinking about this quote in the context of what I do for a living.  I’m a marketer.  As a marketer perhaps I should aspire to something greater.

Traditional marketing was about interruption.  Interrupting your favorite TV shows, interrupting the newspaper articles, interrupting the landscape you see on your commute to work.  Surveys will say that people hate marketing.  Marketing interrupts your day and yells at you.  Marketing tries to sell you things that you don’t need.

As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with technology, and fascinated by what it can do.  I believe that innovation in technology can make people’s lives better.  Even something as frivolous as social media has proven this year, that it can transcend simply being just a medium to distribute lolcatz images.  That new channel for communication showed that it could be a catalyst for revolution and real change.  That’s pretty amazing if you think about it. 

I think perhaps the new marketing can be about that.  It can be about teaching the world the value of new innovation.  Teaching the world about how tomorrow will be a better place and the role technology can play in paving that road.  Maybe the new marketing can be like this song by Adele and deliver messages that resonate with people beyond a catchphrase and help them understand how something simple might just make the world a bit better…

We hate our customers...

There I said it.  Nobody would ever use that as a marketing tagline (Though maybe if I wanted in some fashion to prove how big my umm balls were I’d try it) but this is the impression a lot of vendors give off.

Take my own consumer experience.  I recently completed an arduous 7 month journey.  It was a quest I had to undertake to get a $42 credit refunded to me by one of the Canadian telco providers.  It seemed like such a simple scenario.  I was leaving the service because of moving to an area their service didn’t cover, as a result I was entitled to a small credit since I had prepaid for the next month.  The process to get that check in the mail however was not so simple.

The funny thing is they kept sending me notifications letting me know that I was entitled to the refund credit, without ever sending the check.  And so began a weekly calling routine to see if I could finally find a customer service agent who could print and send an actual refund check.  Some said I simply had to wait for their systems to kick in, some said they could find no record of said refund in the system, others tried to escalate to management, and finally one day, someone was able to confirm a check was sent along with a tracking number.  Huzzah, I got $42.

While I was actually subscribed to the service I was actually quite happy.  But the customer service experience I had when leaving has made sure I will never go back.

I have a product manager friend with whom I often to talk to about how many organizations forget that the most important part of a product is the user experience AFTER a purchase has been made.  This includes everything from the experience of using the product itself through the experience of dealing with the support when something goes wrong.  Really good sales people (but sadly not all salespeople) know this as well.  For them the most important part of the sales cycle isn’t when a customer sends in a purchase order.  Rather it’s when they send in ANOTHER purchase order.

Where can marketing fit in here?

I think marketing and content in particular can be a great way to keep in touch with customers throughout their user lifecycle. 


In my experience many customers never take full advantage of all the capabilities of software solutions.  More depth of knowledge around the capabilities of a solution and more importantly perhaps more depth of knowledge about the problems they can solve to begin with can be tremendously valuable to end users.  Not only can it better position your end users as subject matter experts (and maybe even position them for a promotion) but for vendors it can ensure your products get better ingrained into business processes.

Had that telco provider kept better in touch with me through the lifecycle of my contract maybe I could have given them feedback as to why exactly I was happy with their service.  Maybe I’d have more patience with them at that point when it came to my refund.  Or heck maybe that way they’d have more notice ahead of time that I was moving to a region they didn’t cover and thus could have had my refund ready.

Sigh…