Another good example of worst marketing practices: a guy named Andre Larabie has been spamming me for almost a year and is now sending “last chance” offers to receive an electronic version of his most recent book, “Business Turnaround Methods.” This is like the fifth last chance notice I’ve received over the past couple of months and I’m assuming it will not be the last. There are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to start.
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: customer value, gimmicks, marketing
Don Peppers, the visionary author, speaker and consultant who brought us The One-To-One Future is now warning business leaders that it doesn’t matter how many products you have; if you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business (apologies to Peter Drucker, who I believe stated this back in 1958).
Peppers and partner Martha Rogers had a great run with the one-to-one approach to marketing for more than 15 years, eventually selling the 1:1 magazine and consulting business to Carlson Marketing Group, which itself has since been sold. Don seems to have disappeared from the scene, though he’s still active on the speaking tour; in fact he’s got a gig coming up in the UK, where he spends a fair amount of time — he’ll be speaking at the Call Centre and Customer Management Expo on September 21.
“Spring has officially arrived.” So says the spam email I received from Brian at Phenix Investigations this morning. “It’s time to think about using surveillance to deal with employee-related issues.”
I don’t know Brian and have never heard of Phenix Investigations until today, but I did find it a rather curious email. For starters, spring officially arrived about five months ago. And frankly, I can’t think of a worse idea at any time of the year than spying on my employees, especially in the current business environment.
My curiosity moves me to do a little investigating on my own.
One of the most profitable and sustaining business models is the razor and the blade concept. In this model, there exists a synergistic coupling of two compatible products, one dependent upon the other, requiring a capital purchase (the razor) and then the continuing need for necessary consumable products (the blade), which is of course where all the money is.
The key to sustaining this model is the continued reinvention of both the razor and the blade. As consumers, we know this. Yet, because of our need to always have the next new thing, we invariably get sucked into the razor and blade syndrome.
Imagine my good luck at receiving a credit adjustment in the mail for $161.64.
Not knowing exactly what a credit adjustment is, I rip open the nondescript, official looking envelope to find that I have been included in a select group of individuals chosen for a special publisher’s offer on a three-year subscription to Motor Trend magazine — an offer not available to the general public.
The regular subscription price is $179.64, but with my special credit adjustment of $161.64, the price is only $6 per year. Wow.
Recently I received an offer for a new personal productivity application called “RescueTime” that claims to help me better manage my time by tracking my everyday activities, at work and in my personal life, thus making me a more productive person.
I’m all for self-improvement but this seems a little invasive, like self-imposed Big Brotherhood, looking over my shoulder at everything I’m doing.
Okay, I get that Google has changed the world and the way business is done, and their leading-edge apps are leveling the playing field for smaller companies; but, if they’re going to employ traditional media to market those apps, they might want to bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s an embarrassment, or it should be. Either they don’t realize this, or they’ve become too arrogant to care.
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it very interesting to watch what appears to be a desperation move (or is it a Kamikaze mission?) by Domino’s Pizza, as the company has launched an aggressive mea culpa campaign using traditional advertising and social media, including a high visibility video on YouTube, in an attempt to resuscitate its dying brand. The campaign is essentially an admission that their pizza sucks — at least in the minds of customers. Domino’s has listened and is responding with a complete overhaul of the product.
Domino’s president Patrick Doyle speaks to us from his corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor about how painful it was to hear focus group participants describe how bad his pizza is; the crust tastes like cardboard, the sauce like ketchup, the cheese tasteless and processed. The average frozen pizza is far superior. A vocal leader in the focus group sessions, a woman named Adrian, proclaims it to be the worst excuse for pizza she’s ever seen. Ouch. That’s not a wound, it’s a head shot.
With advertising saturation levels at a tipping point in just about every medium, both offline and online, where do advertisers go from here? Well, there’s a new ad medium that promises to break through the clutter, getting to captive audiences in a highly intimate environment: the bathroom. So now your business can reach new prospective customers while they’re doing their business.
All we need to do is replace all our existing toilets with the WOW Toilet.
It’s a universal retrofitted transparent toilet tank engineered with a space in the front to insert an advertising image or poster that is clearly displayed to users who have nothing else to look at. With more than 1.2 billion toilets in the U.S., this represents a massive new opportunity just waiting to be exploited as every one of them can be transformed into a billboard, turning otherwise wasted space into ad revenue and offering advertisers millions of potential impressions… or is it exposures?
And now, in the category of worst practices for online direct marketing, the winner is: the Survival Seed Bank.
This seems like something right out of the back of a catalog mail order advertisement for bomb shelters back in the 1950s. In this case it’s targeted at a growing population of survivalists who believe the end is near, and the first thing to go will be our food supply.
The worst part is it appears to be working, which validates the premise of marketing best practices — that emotion drives response more effectively than rational consideration, with the two most powerful emotions being fear and greed (both of which come into play in this campaign).
