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April 29, 2005
Priceless
- PR Agency Fee = $200+/hour
- Professional photograher = $5K
- Having your #1 competitor use your company name as the cover story headline instead of yours = priceless
This is absolutely terrific. eHarmony gets lovely placement of it's founder on the cover of this publication (about what a great online marketer it is) and the title ends up being the name of it's hottest competitor, PerfectMatch. You couldn't pay for better.
Keep up the good work ;-)
Posted by johnza at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 26, 2005
DMA Slides
Several folks said they liked our talk at the Seattle DMA earlier this month, and asked it we could post the slides.
So here they are: Download file
Posted by johnza at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The 5 Marketing Plays
Just a short post to point out that we've updated the entries on the plays to show the illustrations from the book. Kinda helps visualize what we're talking about:
Posted by johnza at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2005
New way to keep tabs
Check out Googspy, a new tool from Velocityscape. It's a great way to see what your competitors are up to marketing wise.
Type in your own company name or that of your competitor and you will see what adwords they are buying. You also see a list of who else is buying those words. A great way to make sure you are on top of your playing field, and to think broadly enough about it.
It is fun and really interesting (kind of a competitive spending Zeitgeist).
I've already run it on all of our portfolio companies and come up with some pretty interesting results - both in terms of what adwords they are running and based on this who their top (at least mindshare-) competitors might be.
If you are running a dragrace, nice way to find out where you must go and if you are stealth, where you should avoid being.
For more read the press release.
By the way here's the list for Velocityscape itself.
Posted by johnza at 07:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 12, 2005
It sure beats a plastic digital alarm clock...
Boy, this iPod thing sure has hit main street. The Economist of all things is offering the chance to win an iPod as an incentive to sign up for online subscriptions.
I used to do circulation for Amex publishing and compared to the stuff we used to try on prospects (like 5 year old surplus Food and Wine Recipe of the Year cookbooks), this promotion has all that a bang you over the head direct marketing promo ought to have:
- "Free"
- "A $300 value!" (nice juxtiposition)
- "Last Chance"
- "Just one week left"
- "Now"
- And of course a very, trendy, not boring premium.
Click here to sign up for your own chance. BUT ACT NOW! LIMITED TIME OFFER!! EXPIRES IN A WEEK!!!! FREE FREE FREE NOW NOW NOW
Oh yeah, and COOL COOL COOL.
Can't wait for the Economist Podcasts.
Posted by johnza at 02:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
Another take on strategy and tactics
Once again, "the map is not the terrain."
I just can't stop finding stuff about the distinction between strategy and tactics fascinating. Here's another great quote, this time from Baron Henri de Jomini's Art of War:
"Strategy is the art of making war upon the map, and comprehends the whole theater of operations. Grand Tactics is the art of posting troops upon the battle-field according to the accidents of the ground, of bringing them into action, and the art of fighting upon the ground, in contradistinction to planning upon a map."
via 1000 Blacklines
Posted by johnza at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Thanks Tara
Tara went to our little talk at the DMA World last week. And had some nice things to say. She called our keynote the "standout" of the show. This is especially flattering, given the company, which included Ernan Roman, whose Integrated Direct Marketing was one of the first marketing books I ever actually read and really used.
Click here for Tara's summary of our talk. Also stay tuned, I'm kicking myself for not recording it as a podcast and posting along with the slides but will do so in the near future.
Thanks again Tara and looking forward to what you think of the book.
Posted by johnza at 08:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
My apologies to the Sock Puppet
A few weeks ago I suggested that the Pets.com sock puppet was out of work. My apologies. I am way behind. He is alive and well. Sometime in 2002 Barnone auto finance bought the guy. Now he is back on TV doing spots and flirting with women. He even has his own personal news site.
Well, maybe some of those random ads I did are worth something on eBay and maybe we can find the MS Office PaperClip gainful employement as a spokesperson for H&R Block or something.
Posted by johnza at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 07, 2005
Expectations
Comments for: Sony fails to sell 1 million PSPs in first week - ja.zz. This is a classic case of missetting expectations.
Nintendo allocated 550K machines and sold 500K of them so they were doing this at Christmas. Sony launches and sells 600-700K but says they are going to do 1M. Who looks dumb?
Anyway, now the DS looks like a runaway and Sony is "struggling" despite selling more. There were other issues, but the big one is that if you set low expectations and beat them then you are the winner. Caveat Emptor.
Posted by rich at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 05, 2005
It's not just for marketing anymore...
Last week I had breakfast with a very old friend of mine, Ray Ziganto. He is head of marketing/sales for Bi-Link and a fan of the Bi-Link and a fan of the marketing playbook.">marketing playbook. Anyway, in the course of long, pleasant, wide-ranging set of conversations, Ray shed some interesting different light on a number of the playbook ideas and their application.
Bi-Link is the leading global contract metal stamping provider of metal parts, subassemblies in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics devices (i.e. they make all the metal stuff in your Blackberry). This is not what you would normally think of as a classic "marketing" company. But hey, Ray has a lot of marketing DNA, and he felt excited (i.e. obligated) to figure out a way to use the concepts in book his friend wrote in practical way in his business.
Well, most of the people Ray works with are either mechanical/process engineering or straight-up-the-hill sales types. ABCs, Plays, Positiong/Messaging had to be practical to this business and to these people. So in the process of brainstorming he hit on a few things that are really of note:
- Doing your ABC/Gap analysis is not just a big, strategic, abstract analysis of the "landscape"/"playing field", it is actually a way for you, as a sales person, to empathize with your customer and better manage the account. Understanding A) their situation B) their goals and C) the challenges they face in reaching them is just a plain simple way of making sure your sales people are in synch with their INDIVIDUAL customers
- A customer = a market. Your individual customer can actually be the best way to get educated on the market anyway. Rather than commissioning "market" research across the whole market, start with a customer you have or already close with and get them to walk you through their ABCs and their view of the competition. Their view is in many ways more important anyway - they are paying you money.
- Working with A customer = marketing. Beyond just using them to understand the market, sometimes working more closely with a strong "enabling" customer will help you break into a market a lot more than doing what we normally think of as "marketing." Sales people often look to "marketing" as sales support and lead generation. Ray asked the obvious but critical question "Should we spend $200K on a tradeshow booth or give $200K more in resources to our most strategic customer to kickstart a project in an area new for them?" What will be more strategic in the long run, another media outlet for making claims or real value creation that lends proof of your abilities in a new market?
Damn good question and good way for companies to think about marketing - not just as this abstract input and output but as the right way to acquire, leverage and extract value from customers, even if the people doing it are not "marketing people" but sales, product, engineering, receptionists, you name it.
Posted by johnza at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 04, 2005
Simplicity with Action
While recently on the topic of cool jobs, just finished having a fun little chat with Dave Cotter, CEO of MPire who is looking to hire the VP of Marketing of the American Dream described below.
We chatted about eBay, Venture Capital, entreprenuership, hiring and more.
We thought it would be fun to capture it as a podcast.
His whole company is focused on helping small businesses get started, so my favorite quote is his advice - based on his recent experience - to new companies:
"Keep it simple. Simplicity with action will take you far".
Hear, hear!
Click here to listen:
MPire CEO Interview Podcast
Posted by johnza at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 03, 2005
Damn, Hugh is Great
Wow. We are flattered. We have long thought that Gaping Void is just plain, you know, well, great. We are clearly only one of zillions who think Hugh MacLeod's blog beyond creative, inspired, funny, intelligent and fun to read. It is one of the best blogs period. About any topic - including marketing, suits, sex, work, etc. He somehow manages to consistently cut throught the BS and capture the whole blog Zeitgeist
(sorry, I just had to find an opportunity to say that word - majored in German you know) with wit, style, cynicism and a fair amount of - ahem - direct language.
Anyway, it's especially meaningful then that he actually likes our book. Thanks man!
Posted by johnza at 09:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Collins Likes It
Collins is an old friend and we sure spent a bunch of year working on marketing and PR together. Really great to see that he likes this playbook stuff and also that he's got not just Bill's book, but a great new one about Starbucks under his belt
“I had the privilege to see Rich and John in action for a decade. If other marketing “experts” were introduced to the idea of an “automobile,” they would study its design and do extensive, abstract research on how it might be used. Rich and John would build a car from the design, drive the car all over the country, learn how to fix it, and get direct feedback from actual people on how it might be used. They know as much about marketing theory as anyone, but they never rest until they have drilled down to the deepest level of nuts and bolts. As a result, you don’t get theory-in-the-abstract or generalized approaches. You get specific solutions to practical marketing challenges that work where we all have to live—in the real world.”
Collins Hemingway, co-author of Business @ the Speed of Thought
with Bill Gates and co-author of Built for Growth with Arthur Rubinfeld