marketing fundi

Sometimes that drive to be the rooster on top of the hay stack is just too compelling. It can wipe out all reason. This malaise can attack anybody. So no sniggering is aloud.

The drama playing out between Porsche and Volkswagen is one such fight for the top of the hay stack. It has been quite something to watch this play out over the last year or so. Pity a few other folk got their fingers burnt at the same time.

The story goes like this. Just broad strokes to see an example of the games CEO’s and shareholders play.

March 2007 Porsche obtains 31% of Volkswagen. I’m not sure why. They are not exactly playing in the same market. But there you go.

October 2008 Porsche announces that it will take over Volkswagen. 50% by end of 2008 and in 2009 by 75%. This little announcement drives the share price of Volkswagen into the stratosphere causing many an investor to lose his marbles and jump on the bandwagon. A few senior investment managers commit suicide once the market corrects itself and sanity returns.

Porsche starts wielding the arrogant management stick with some quite strange proposals. For instance the 12 000 employees of the sports car manufacturers are supposed to hold the same voting clout as the approximately 360 000 Volkswagen employees.

Bring on 2009 and the recession hits the car manufacturers with a vengeance. First to suffer are the manufacturers serving the popular market, but eventually even the luxury car builders start to feel the pinch. In fact at this moment in time both Porsche and BMW are ready to feed at the German government bail-out trough.

How the mighty have fallen. Now the big deal bully conquerer is getting some of its own medicine back from the Volkswagen management whose senior folk have been insulted and humiliated for a fair number of months.

Latest news is that Volkswagen have refused to continue with any merger talks stating they have no common grounds anymore. Well they haven’t had those for a while, I should think. Oh and they are considering buying Porsche.

It’s such a bad business move to lord it over people, to belittle and to run them down. This includes your opposition as well as a company you may want to take over. At the end of the day you never know when the tables may be turned and you end up at the mercy of their scorn.

The power can change hands overnight. Be careful of what you say and what you do. You could need the help of the opposition you have been bad-mouthing. You might get trampled by a competitor because he just doesn’t like your bad manners anymore. I’m sure you got the point with the Porsche and Volkswagen example.

Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you. Even if you are a small business, be nice to everybody. You never know when it could be pay-back time. You want nice to be paid back to you.

I was reading Anja’s last blog post about the importance of customer-based service and I thought I’d add my say to the subject.

I am quite actively involved in the financial services sector in South Africa and it has been quite interesting to watch the definite shift in attitudes as this “financial crisis” has played out.

It has been amazing to see how important customer reassurance, customer-focus and ultimately customer retention has become to financial services businesses in the last few months as many of their big money clients have literally evaporated before their eyes.

Let’s be honest - financial services have seen some pretty good times in the last say 6 - 8 years. Profits at these firms have rocketed and many had become very choosy about the nature of the clients they “wanted”… Fast forward a few months into one of the biggest financial and economic crisis’ of our time and suddenly people who were telling you “sorry you can’t afford to be our client” are now wanting to “chat about opportunities”.

In the same way - those who were “too good” to talk to the press are suddenly vying for some time with journalists to get their message out there.

Earlier this week I went through to two new financial services firms and got walked through their two offerings. Now bear in mind I don’t have huge disposable income and (unless I get very lucky) am not going to generate big profits for them in my first few months. Despite this, their CEO’s both took the time to take me through their product offering. Not some impersonal sales guy - but the person who has attached his reputation to the brand that is being pushed to you.

That on its own is something that I think companies can learn from. There is little more motivating than seeing your most senior executives come down out of their glass or ivory towers, roll up their sleeves and get stuck in.

Don’t let anybody fool you - this economic crisis is creating a lot of opportunities - but the real entrepreneurs are not those who succeed when times are good - but instead are those who change the rules of the game when things are bad….

A few weeks ago I asked Andrew Rondeau from We Build Your Blog to help me update my self-help and personal power blog at www.pinkblocks.com. I know. Kind of weird name for that! As well as revamp my personal one.

My Pinkblocks blog has been up and kind of existing since mid 2007. Originally I was going to post just self-help articles but ran out of steam and ran blog carnivals as an easy option to keep the blog going until I could decide what to do with it.

Then a few weeks ago I had the opportunity of placing some advertising on the site and thought I should get back into this topic. But the blog desperately needed some attention. As for my personal blog, that looked like it was out of the Ark.

I had been following We build your Blog for advice on how to run an effective blog. It offers easy to understand Information on writing articles, marketing and managing your blog.

For totally technically challenged individuals such as myself We build your Blog offers an excellent service to help with setting up and improving ones blogs.

What was especially wonderful was to find somebody who cared. Andrew Rondeau the brains behind We build Your Blog is totally customer focused. What a refreshing way to do business. Almost unheard of in these days where one becomes just a number.

No query was too much, no fussy client request to move the header by one fraction of a mm was ignored or laughed at or heaven forbid charged for with that ‘that’s an extra and that’ll cost you more than the full job’ kind of smirk one normally gets.

My revitalised blogs were up and ready for business at no time at all. And it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. In fact I think for what one gets Andrew is far too reasonable.

But not only was the experience great and my blogs look two hundred percent better and function well now but the other major benefit is that I am getting so much more traffic through and my subscriber base has jumped without my having to do any persuasive marketing for it.

Thanks Andrew for a great service. That’s what business is all about.

There are many reasons why some businesses fail and why some succeed. Having a great product or service is obviously the number one essential. Having a product that people or businesses really need is another important part of business.

Then there are the solid financial controls and enough money to get the business started, the right location is there as well, plus good communications tools. Well trained and committed staff would also be considered important business factors.

But many a small business has fallen down on the selling side. Getting a committed sales team in place is often the make or break factor to whether a company succeeds or not.

It’s of course even more essential for a small business or start up to get that selling part of the business up and running effectively as soon as possible. Without sales no business will survive. Obvious point isn’t it.

In terms of selling, I saw this wonderful video this morning. Gary Vaynerchuk, for me the essential modern business person, is on video pre-selling his book which is only coming out later in the year.

You can order it already. So nothing like getting the show on the road well in advance.

If you want to learn something about how to sell a product, watch this video. It is perfect salesmanship. He never once hesitates in his message that tells you that this book is an absolute must read and must have.

There is no doubt left in your mind at the end of the video. Put your name down right now!

Watch it and learn from the master.

What is his secret? There isn’t one really. He is just unbelievably passionate about himself and his knowledge and insights. Put that passion and belief into your sales presentation and you will win!

The last four days have been quite an interesting experience in dealing with corporate UK. Most of the time it hasn’t been pleasant! But let’s paint the scenario first.

A magazine publisher has set up a one day Summit with some fairly respectable speakers. I have been tasked with bringing more delegates to the event. The good news is that the tickets are free.

My target market is national and local government such as police, health and universities. Add to that a broad selection of large companies from financial institutions, telecoms, manufacturing and hospitality and it’s a good representation of organisations and businesses in the UK.

I’ve been given a list which should mean that the people I’m about to phone have heard of the magazine and if they have read it will know about the Summit.

The experience? It was a matter of gauging how rude the people were going to be! With other words I would anticipate at each call where on a scale of one to ten, ten being the rudest, the person on the other side would fall.

During four days of canvassing the number of times the needle smacked ten was fairly regularly. Mostly it hovered around 8. I phoned about 300 numbers. I must just say that there were a few polite people. And a handful were almost friendly.

There was one exception. The Low Wood Hotel group. It could be that their friendliness and total commitment to helping could be seen to be normal in the hospitality industry. Isn’t that what it should be?

However, I have had some mixed receptions phoning small B & B’s while planing for a short trip in the UK and I haven’t had such friendly service before.

So I am going to award the Low Wood Hotel group a five star rating in terms of friendliness. They went out of their way to help and I wasn’t even asking for information on accommodation. In a way they had nothing to win from this phone call.

Well actually they did. If I ever visit the Lakes District in the UK, guess where I will most definitely stay? You got it. It’s a no brainer.

What does that say for your own small business? No matter who you deal with, the good will you can build up by being friendly and helpful even on non-core business issues can assist with building your business.

No matter who the person is who contacts your company, whether it’s a health inspector, the post delivery person or even somebody from a telemarketing company welcome these people with open arms.

Be friendly, accommodating, patient, helpful and more. It will impact on your business in a positive way. You might not see it straight away. It could be an investment that might not pay too much dividend.

Of course it could give you a return such as the Low Wood Hotel could see if I ever book a holiday with them. If I don’t manage it, the least they got from me was a glowing mention in a blog read by a couple of hundred people.

Isn’t that a great return for just being friendly?

Now you might think to yourself that sure you can always be friendly but you have no control over your staff. Wrong. Very wrong. Instilling a culture of friendliness and helpfulness in your organisation is possible.

I spoke to five people at the Low Wood Hotel, that is one of their hotels in the group. Each one was superb. It can be done.

Thinking of the response by people working for the other 299 it amazes me that these businesses are still in operation. Of course the authorities probably don’t need to worry too much. They will be around while the taxpayers fund them.

Still, a very sad state of affair with respect to businesses in the UK. Could it be that some major attitude cleansing needs to take place? Could be. And could this kind of bad behaviour be contributing to the economic gloom? Could have!

One thing the recession is bringing with it is a sense that rampant consumerism isn’t working at the moment. One of the disadvantages of consumerism is the fact that one has so many customers that they become statistics and stop being people.

Just to provide an example. Recently I have had some dealings with our bank. It involved signing some paperwork. Our account has been open with them for over four years.

The paperwork had to be sent through to us and and a second lot would need to be signed at the bank. I was assured that the second lot of paperwork would be at a branch near us when calling in.

When we took batch number one of papers to the bank to sign I requested the second set of papers. However the branch had not received any papers and assured us that this was all that had to be signed. I asked three times.

I checked up on all of this ten days later and discovered that we still had to sign further papers said papers having been routed to the branch the account had been opened at. We live about 260 miles away from this branch. It’s not convenient to pop in to sign anything!

The number of times documents or new cards have gone back to the original branch are practically uncountable. I have not been able to have a permanent change of address included in our profile. Impossible.

And there is nothing one can do. Because between the one person one speaks to and the next it gets lost in translation that all stuff needs to go to Brighton instead of Leeds.

Nobody, neither the person at the end of the telephone at phone banking or at the branch is able to make a decision on anything.

Consumerism has lead to this huge drive to get more and more customers with an attitude that if one customer is unhappy and leaves then so what. That attidue does nothing for a great customer experience.

The thinking is that we’ll just get loads more consumers by running another TV commercial or full-page spread ad in the newspapers.

But it’s not working anymore. TV and the print media have discovered that their advertising revenue is shriveling away. The reason for this? Companies have seen a dwindling return on investment on their adspend. With other words people are not buying anymore, regardless of the frequency of commercials.

How are you going to get those customers back? It’s certainly not going to work by throwing money at social media and online advertising in the hope these will bring back the glory days of consumerism even if all so-called social media experts shriek this from the roof tops.

In fact social media could be incredibly dangerous for most of the big companies targeting the consumer goods market. Why is that? Because social media encourages word of mouth and word of mouth is a killer if the product is not up to scratch.

What to do then? It’s really easy. Get closer to the customer again. Be a friend, a confidant, a supporter and a fan of your customer and he will come back. Make him feel important again.

If your company is too big to be able to do that, you will need to get smaller, more agile, more real. Bear that in mind when building your own company. Bigger is not better. Better is better.

Would a website work for you if you have a tiny business? Now that’s a good question isn’t. Many people, especially those participating in the home industry arena, tend to think that their business does not warrant a web presence.

So let’s have a look at an example. I’m going to use a cake baking business. One from home where the owner of the business uses the stove in the kitchen and supplies cakes and cookies to the customers in the immediate vicinity.

Of course it doesn’t have to be cake making. It could be a carpenter making beautiful rocking chairs, or a busy gardener selling seeds. seedlings and baby plants. It could be a person offering small moves with a van or a lawn mower repairer with the home garage as his office.

Any little business will do.

But let’s do cakes.

How would that business work? Orders taken at church, school where kids attend, the office where you work, the office park where your offices are situated, the local sports club, your little hand written note at the supermarket gets you special event cake orders. And the list goes on.

All good marketing ideas and they truly work.

How would a website fit into your existing marketing? Of course your website, which could just be a blog may still be used for local marketing. Many people use the web to search for small business services in their area.

The real benefit though comes into it when you expand your business to reach beyond your immediate market. But then how can a fresh cake maker expand his or her market beyond the immediate delivery area?

This is where one might want to get ones creative thinking cap on. What of your business can you share online? If one is a baker, what about sharing recipes? The recipes can be written up with a beautiful pic as decoration.

There could be scope for a full-on video series on how to bake a cake, or the art of cake decoration/icing. A section for tips and tricks. A recipe book to sell or download for free to entice subscribers.

What about becoming a performance marketer (affiliate member) for companies selling cake making utensils and ingredients. And what about selling cakes, using overnight or same day delivery services, to areas further than you might have considered possible.

Cookies to supermarket chains?

Ok, I’m getting a bit carried away here. But you might have gotten my drift by now. It’s so cheap to go online now. Hosting is cheap, posting on YouTube and Flickr is free or inexpensive. Facebook and Twitter are great free tools to chat to possible customers with and the list goes on.

All it will cost will be your time. And that could end up being a very worth while investment.

On Friday I set up the MarketingFundi Twitter account. Although I have had a small and not particularly active personal presence on Twitter since March 2007 - yip I’m one of the oldies - this is the first time I am seriously experimenting.

Friday is a good day to start as the Twitter world goes into a #followfriday mode. In principle one sends out messages promoting one’s Twitter friends to others so that one can meet and greet new folk and expand ones own Twitter follower base.

For about three hours of work of checking Twitter profiles and following ones I thought might be of interest to Marketing Fundi I ended up with about 200 twitterers that I was following and 60 or so followers by the end of Friday.

This bit of work created a momentum of its own and since that time without further promotion from myself I have now 331 followers which is getting to a better ration to the number of 420 that I am following.

Enough of the stats. The point is that Twitter has an invisible engine room now. And it’s driven by business interests. No longer is it a social networking place. That is social as in people connecting with other people.

Oh sure, some people are still using Twitter to connect with others. But what has driven Twitter close to or already over the tipping point is that business interests have sat up and said - be there money to be made.

The followers now attaching themselves to me on an hourly bases have been driven to me by software that collects and accumulates Twitter profiles. There are a myriad of little apps and schemes available to drive your follower numbers into the thousands. Or so they say.

I can see it happening. I’m getting invites even though I have done nothing to encourage the growth. Check this graph on TechCrunch to see Twitter’s phenomenal growth. Of course the publicity generated by Oprah and Ashton Kutcher’s little challenge all helped.

As with all society in general Twitter is also a reflection of our world and amongst the followers I have had to weed out the porn invites and other unsavory bits. One amused me the most. A half naked avatar with the words of “I’m a nice girl’ in the profile. Yeah right.

I’m not opposed to this at all. It’s just something that people need to make a note of. What started off as a service for folk to communicate with each other and share what they might be doing at that moment is morphing into a serious business tool.

Do follow Marketing Fundi on Twitter. And there’s the RSS feed as well or e-mail newsletter. Loads of ways to keep in touch. Thanks!

Sign of the times isn’t it. One of the fastest growing social media tools allows you to chat to others for no more than 140 characters. And that includes spaces. We just don’t have time for more, it seems.

So where do you fit into this in terms of your presence online. Probably the easiest answer is to look at Twitter and business first. Do you have a business? Any size business from selling lemonade from your front garden to running a global franchise business? If the answer is yes to any business, then the answer is yes to Twitter.

With other words, let’s make it easier, if you have a customer or as much as a million customers you need to be on Twitter. Phew. Why? Because Twitter allows you to talk to your customers immediately and all the time.

But that’s not all. The VERY important point is that Twitter allows your customers to talk to you, immediately.

Now that makes you sit up doesn’t it. Because up till now, especially with respect to big business, the customer has had no voice, or if at all it was a tiny thin pitiful voice that nobody listened to. No two way conversation.

Of course big business didn’t want that, otherwise it would be easier to get hold of somebody in authority. Domino Pizza found out the hard way that sometimes it is really important to be able to have a one on one chat with the customer.

They had not realised that the world had changed. The customer wants to have a two way conversation because with the internet it has become so much easier to talk to a string of people whether important or not.

So when the drama of the viral videos happened they had no way of re-assuring their customers that not all staff do unspeakable things with food before serving it up to them.

What is there for you to learn about this? If you have a business ensure that your customers can talk to you and you to them. The easiest, quickest, cheapest way is via Twitter.

The bonus is that the service is free, it just costs your time and secondly if you discipline yourself a little, it isn’t that time consuming. Only 140 characters remember.

As an example, your customers are on Twitter and you have a good two way relationship. You have a delay in a shipment of really important parts. In fact the delay is going to impact all of your production by two days at least.

A tweet to this effect immediately you know will assist in keeping your customers patient. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to also phone your large customers, send out further mail to apologise. But Twitter is immediate. Your customers will be thrilled to be notified so quickly and a lot more forgiving.

So where does Twitter fit into your personal online presence? The answer to this, and you have heard this one before, is that it all depends on the image you wish to build online. What do you want to achieve. Who do you want to be, if not yourself, who else?

If you want to prepare for a business venture, this could be a start to get some pre-launch interest from people. If you are looking for a job it might be an idea to hang out with people who are important in your industry. Association is a great way to further yourself and gain some credibility of your own.

It could also just be a way to chat to friends and share news about what you are doing and reading what they are doing which is what Twitter started out as initially. It has morphed into a great business tool if one wants to use it that way.

Build your Twitter presence to suit your goals and support your strategy with respect to your online presence. Ever little helps.

Should you be on Twitter? Of course. Until the next big things happens. Keep your eyes open. It’s about time something new gets us all flocking off to pastures greener. Been a Twitterer for a while catch Anja on Twitter, or brand new as MarketingFundi. Follow me on both or pick one! Would love to have you in the same flock.

How often does this happen in the business world? A company or interest group fights new trends in the hope of keeping the status quo. In the meantime the new trend sweeps past them at high speed.

One such instance has just happened in the eBook environment. The latest version of the Kindle, version 2.0, Amazon’s electronic reader was launched with a text-to-speech feature.

The Authors Guild has managed to curtail this feature. This will now be optional for publishers. The Guild has been fighting this feature stating that it had the potential to turn the Kindle 2 into an audiobook player.

Amazon has given in to pressure from The Authors Guild and in future publishers will have the final say as to whether the books may be read aloud by the reader.

How many organisations out there miss the train because they are so busy trying to protect their interests they do not see that a) progress will happen despite all their objections and b) there could be opportunities if only they stopped raising the drawbridge to hide in their castles.

It would not surprise me if a fair number of business failures, especially from companies that had been around for a while, are due to the fact that they either did not recognise the changes that were happening or were fighting them until the day they had to close their doors.

There are of course some great successes too. For instance bicycles. Although they went through a major slump when cars came about, the industry re-invented itself as a sport accessory. Let’s see if the car industry can re-invent itself. And what about the music industry and it’s form of delivery the CDs?

As the world goes through another wave of technological changes it will be interesting to see what manages to stay with us, albeit in changed form, and what disappears for ever.

If you run your business thinking that you are doing everything right and that no new technology can affect you, it is surely just a matter of time until you are forced to close your doors. Stay with the times. You never know. The opportunities could be even greater if you run with the new stuff!