Gang not making most use of guerilla marketing strategy

Analysing graffiti as a marketing campaign

Go on read it…

If it’s not art *or* porn what is it?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or you’re not in Australia) you’ll be aware of the media frenzy over Bill Henson’s latest exhibition.

I’m not going to comment on what I think about Henson’s photography – but I was vastly puzzled by the results of the Daily Telegraph Poll

If they’re not art or porn – what are they?  something to do with muppets?

Executive Briefing Programs…

For a variety of reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about Executive Briefing Programs this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them and EBP is one of those things where Company A invites its most valuable customers (usually on a 1-to-1 basis, so you’ll have a bunch of people from Company X) to a day of presentations about how Company A can help Company X.

When I first encountered the concept I assumed it was just a very fancy product demo or sales pitch. But it turns out – that yeah – while Company A will almost certainly make more money from Company X as a result of the EBP, if you approach it like a sales presentation you won’t get the full value out of it..

Essentially it’s real-world proof about the supremacy of the 4Cs of marketing over the 4Ps

The 4 Ps are the traditional way of looking at Marketing

Product: Defining the characteristics of your product or service to meet the customers’ needs.

Price: Deciding on a pricing strategy. Even if you decide not to charge for a service, it is useful to realise that this is still a pricing strategy. Identifying the total cost to the user (which is likely to be higher than the charge you make) is a part of the price element.

Promotion: This includes advertising, personal selling (eg attending exhibitions), sales promotions (eg special offers), and atmospherics (creating the right impression through the working environment). Public Relations is included within Promotion by many marketing people (though PR people tend to see it as a separate discipline).

Place: Looking at location (eg of a library) and where a service is delivered (eg are search results delivered to the user’s desktop, office, pigeonhole – or do they have to collect them).

As you can see – the 4Ps tale a very product focussed way of looking at the issue. The 4Cs take a more customer centric view…

• Place becomes Convenience
• Price becomes Cost to the user
• Promotion becomes Communication
• Product becomes Customer needs and wants

Modern marketing thinking says that if you take a customer centric view – you’ll be more successful – and the EBP experience would seem to bear that out. Traditional sales presentations are not particularly effective – but there’s pretty solid research that shows a good, customer focussed EBP can reduce the sales cycle by about 3 months – and identify, on average, 2 solid opportunities for up sell per meeting.

Now that’s measurable return on investment

Kid gets killed by a helicopter while collecting mail – Headphones to blame

Youth Killed By a Helicopter While Getting His Mail Sparks Debate About Headphone Safety

As Gizmodo says “You couldn’t make this stuff up.”

How do you spin this?

Austrian kills entire family with axe

This was the bit that gave me a WTF moment

The suspect, who gave his profession as a freelance public relations consultant

A Public Relations Consultant?!!

Oh man

Firstly you’d have thought that at some point when he was hacking into his family he might have thought “hmm it’s going to be hard to put a positive spin on this” and secondly, if we thought we had a bad rep before…

Still I guess we’re still better off that postal workers – who after all have to live with the “going postal” tag

Holy Cow!

Chilli – a 6 and half foot (About 2 meter!) tall Friesian…

But mostly I’m wondering about that harness and lead – surely if that cow decides it’s going someplace that woman is not stopping it..

More about him in the Times

Social Media, New Media, Digital Media… What’s the diff?

Laurel Papworth has a great post about how “New Media is not Social Media” and while Laurel and I don’t always agree I think she’s onto something here – although I might have put it slightly differently…

New Media/Digital Media is about the technology – it’s about using cool new tech to communicate the same sorts of things Broadcasters(1) have always needed to communicate – and that, to be fair, many, many people want. If I just want to find out the precise size of a Crumpler backpack to see if I’ll be able to take it as carry-on luggage then all I need (or indeed want) is a good “brochureware” website where I can find out those details.

Social Media is about the conversation. The tech is a tool to make the conversation faster, more fluid, less linear – however you want to describe it. If I want to find out if the peculiar shape of my backpack means that even though it conforms to the guidelines air-crew frequently give grief over it – Social media is how I’ll find out – I can ask the twitterverse, or check fora(2) to find out if anyone’s had issues.

Which weirdly leads me back to something I think of as being Journalism 101.

1. If you just need to check a fact – ask 1 expert
2. If you need to create a debate – ask 2.

Sometimes you want a debate – they’re fun, they’re interesting, and they more accurately reflect the complicated shades-of-grey world we live.

But sometimes – you just want to know if it comes in red.

1) Broadcasters in this sense is any organisation that engages in 1-to-many communication – think companies with annual reports, shops with catalogues, employers with employee benefit schemes….

2) Fora is the correct plural for Forum (in the same way that Media is the plural of Medium)

No-one asks the guys who collect shopping trolleys for career tips

Last weekend I was reading a column by Mia Freedman about work experience kids not having a clue and one of the stories made me think about how some of the work experience kid’s behaviours are kind of the fault of the stories we tell….

What happened was the work experience girl emailed an editor direct with a story idea and signed off with “Get back to me ASAP”

…And although I too read that and though “geez – what a moron – way to go to piss the editor off and ensure you never get an internship” I can actually understand why she probably thought it was a good idea…

How many times have we heard inspirational high-successful people stories that feature some kind of “then I did a very brave and confident thing which was immediately recognised by senior management and that’s how I got to be senior-guy by 20“

This poor girl probably just thought she was demonstrating the drive and ambition that would get her instantly appreciated.

See – the thing is, no-one ever asks the trolley guys how they ended up collecting trolleys…

Well, I was doing work experience at this newspaper, and I emailed the owner with a great idea for a new publication – I thought he’d fund it and make me editor because of my brilliance, but instead he was so offended he ruined me and now this is the only job I can get…

It’s a sad fact of life that many people who are supremely self-confident and genuinely believe in their talents and abilities – aren’t actually all that good…

…an the thing is – if you’re going to act like an incredibly talented prima donna – you’d better *be* incredibly talented – otherwise you’re just a wanker.