marketing Archives - Page 7 of 56

The end of demographics

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

I think demographic segmentation should be added to the bundle of tools from yesteryear. The redundant list. Note just because it is a cold and dehumanizing concept, but because we no longer have to use economic and social indicators to guess who cares about something. In a connected world, where we opt in to tracking our own behaviour guessing is no longer required. Instead we can know precisely who cares, and what matters to them.

Age, Location, Income, Education levels, Employment, Race and Gender are all proxies. Estimating by proxy is very quickly being circumvented by knowing through tracking and connecting. In the old world we’d imagine a potential target audience or we’d research a target audience if we could afford it. The good news today is that none of us have to guess anymore, and all of us can afford the price (very often zero) to find out who they are. And most importantly we should remember our people are not some statistical cohort we attack, but a group of individuals that we should be bending over backwards to help out.

Reinforcing decisions – Wikipedia feedback

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

My post yesterday was about the simple yet great fundraising effort by Wikipedia.

Well today I got a lovely follow up letter, which although I’m sure much of it is ‘form, it didn’t feel like it. It was also from ‘Sue’ with her actual email address and phone number (not included) not a ‘thankful robot’. Actually it said some smart stuff which reinforced my decision – which is something few brands bother to do.

—-

Dear Stephen,

Thank you for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. You are wonderful!

It’s easy to ignore our fundraising banners, and I’m really glad you didn’t. This is how Wikipedia pays its bills — people like you giving us money, so we can keep the site freely available for everyone around the world.

People tell me they donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because even though it’s not perfect, they know it’s written for them. Wikipedia isn’t meant to advance somebody’s PR agenda or push a particular ideology, or to persuade you to believe something that’s not true. We aim to tell the truth, and we can do that because of you. The fact that you fund the site keeps us independent and able to deliver what you need and want from Wikipedia. Exactly as it should be.

You should know: your donation isn’t just covering your own costs. The average donor is paying for his or her own use of Wikipedia, plus the costs of hundreds of other people. Your donation keeps Wikipedia available for an ambitious kid in Bangalore who’s teaching herself computer programming. A middle-aged homemaker in Vienna who’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. A novelist researching 1850s Britain. A 10-year-old in San Salvador who’s just discovered Carl Sagan.

On behalf of those people, and the half-billion other readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites and projects, I thank you for joining us in our effort to make the sum of all human knowledge available for everyone. Your donation makes the world a better place. Thank you.

Most people don’t know Wikipedia’s run by a non-profit. Please consider sharing this e-mail with a few of your friends to encourage them to donate too. And if you’re interested, you should try adding some new information to Wikipedia. If you see a typo or other small mistake, please fix it, and if you find something missing, please add it. There are resources here that can help you get started. Don’t worry about making a mistake: that’s normal when people first start editing and if it happens, other Wikipedians will be happy to fix it for you.

I appreciate your trust in us, and I promise you we’ll use your money well.

Thanks,
Sue
Sue Gardner
Executive Director,
Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org

—–
I wonder how many startups are this thankful to their first customers?

Consumer is a dirty word

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

For a long time I’ve hated the word ‘consumer’. It has very little to do with marketing, let alone delighting people who give you their custom. After a recent tweet about it – I was asked by Marketing Magazine to write an article about it.

Click here to read the article I wrote about it. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this dirty word.

A message for misfits

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

This is a really interesting piece from the late George Carlin – who, despite all his success took the best part of 35 years before he thought he found his place. While all of this 4 minutes is interesting, and it isn’t so much for entertainers, but really appeals to the spirit of any entrepreneur or employee with the entrepreneur wanting to break out. The bit I find most compelling is when he discusses the choice he made at the age of 30. That he was living in the middle of a generation gap and had to choose a new audience – a new young crew who got it, or an older crew who bought into it. We too need to choose our audience carefully. Should our audience be a bunch of senior managers in company XYZ who believe in the status quo, or should it be a new breed of entrepreneur / intrapreneur whose enthusiasm might be the missing ingredient to change stuff?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZGo6mWjk4Y]

– thanks to Ender for inspiring this post.

Definitive Advice

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Advice is an interesting thing to give because by it is opinionated in nature. It is influenced more by the previous experience of the giver, more than it is by the taker. Because advice we give is usually one of many possible courses of action, there will always be doubt in the recommendation. The only way of really knowing what advice to take, only becomes evident after it has been taken.

Where doubt is an omnipresent reality, the best advice we can give is definitive advice. Advice which is acted upon quickly and fervently. When advice increases self belief in the receiver, it is often more valuable than the advice itself.

The duality

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

With great change, comes great tension. This tension often leads to a split between the opposing forces from which re-alignment may never occur. A favourite past time of many of us is predicting a winner – the eventual pattern that we’ll all follow.

No category is less pervasive in this arena than technology. But in reality it is becoming less and less about winners and losers, and much more about choice, fragmentation and tribes. An old axiom by Stewart Brand we’ll all remember is the one about “information wanting to be free”…. but it turns out that this story has an oft left out post script: He immediately added after this that “information also wants to be expensive”, which was a far less quoted caveat.

In a world were control is dissipating, and startups are changing everything, we ought remember that both directions can be equally valid.