Dove soap has received deserved accolades for its “Real Beauty” campaign, which has run for over a decade. Running counter to the supermodel look of so many ads, it shows that women of all sizes, colors and ages can be beautiful.
The campaign grew out of market research done for Dove by Edelman – 3,000 women in 10 countries – which reported that only 2 percent of women interviewed considered themselves beautiful.
For decades physicists have searched for a unified field theory, because sub-atomic particles act so differently than the objects that we see in everyday life. It is a puzzlement.
We have a similar challenge in marketing because it can be so different for startups, SMBs and enterprises.
Of course they all start with understanding the customer, and the market, and creating offerings that they want. But once you get past product-market fit and enter the world of promotion and demand generation, it’s all different. Continue reading
This is about more than marketing, it’s about sales and marketing alignment and a sales tip.
When a serious prospect approaches your company – not someone just downloading an infographic or signing up for a webinar, but someone who says that they want to talk with you about buying – it’s very important that someone at your company respond within a few minutes. Studies have shown that responding in 5 or 10 minutes gives you a much greater chance of reaching the person than if you respond in 30 or 60 minutes even.
Just as importantly, the first responder has a leg up over all the later ones. You’re far more memorable if you’re first than if you’re third or fifth.
I know that the Bullseye Marketing Framework can produce tremendous benefits, but it’s not for everyone.
For example, are you a senior marketing executive at a…
Then maybe you already have this revenue generation thing nailed. You look at the Bullseye Marketing Framework and think, “I’m good, thanks.” And that may well be the case.
On the other hand, maybe you’re a senior executive (in marketing or another area) in a small- or mid-sized company that is feeling a lot of competitive pressures.
This should be a golden age of marketing.
More channels and tools exist to reach, persuade and gain customers than ever before. A new channel – social media, mobile, the Internet of Things, etc. — is added seemingly every year. Thousands of companies now offer some flavor of marketing technology in dozens of categories. Many studies have shown that companies that market more grow faster.
But the result of this upheaval for many marketers is a feeling of innovation overload. They are constantly bombarded with conflicting claims from vendors. They understandably don’t even know what all of those dozens of channels and types of martech do, let alone how to use them to produce optimal results.
The Bullseye Marketing FrameworkSM is my response to this challenge.
Last Friday I wrote about the need for speed, and (unrelated) on the same day Tom Peters tweeted:
I would never say “speed is all”. Or that you should be hasty. I don’t think there should be a tradeoff between speed and excellence.
“It is no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow.”
– Eric Pearson, CIO, Intl Hotel Group
Speed has never been more important in business, and no doubt it’ll just keep getting more important.
Fashion has always changed fast, and in tech industries many product lifespans are measured in months.
Customers no longer can afford to wait for perfect; they need good-enough now.
And that means that companies, and marketers, need to constantly launch and iterate.
Does marketing increase revenue? Or is it a cost center?
A recent study from ITC and Velocify says it definitely works.
The two companies surveyed more than 1,000 insurance agencies. Continue reading
Eight years ago United Airlines found itself in the middle of a social media kerfuffle when Canadian folk singer Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken by baggage handlers. Now they’re in the thick of it again.
A few months after his guitar was broken, and the airline refused to compensate him (he says because he didn’t make a claim with 24 hours), Carroll posted a Continue reading
I recently ran across a feature I’d never seen before on the Yahoo news site: real-time sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis can be a really valuable tool, such as when a company is evaluating social media conversation about it. Some high end programs also provide purchase and churn intent and predictive analytics about individual behavior. Those programs can start at few thousand dollars a month on up. Continue reading