Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Generosity

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

By Doug Stephens

Generosity: noun~ Willingness to give or share; unselfishness

All successful relationships are underpinned by generosity.

The willingness to give or share without expectation of repayment is central to healthy, human interaction.  It doesn’t matter what you give.  It can be your time, your praise or simply your attention but without generosity, relationships tend to vanish in a cloud of selfishness and resentment.

This is equally, if not more true with business relationships.  Long-term success in retail comes down to fundamental beliefs with respect to the whole concept of generosity.  Specifically, you either believe that generosity is almost always rewarded or almost always abused.

You can easily spot businesses that believe the latter.  They’re the ones that have you deposit a quarter to use their shopping cart.  The ones that refuse refunds without a receipt. Those who link any charity work they do to a sales goal or promotion.  They cut the holiday employee turkey to save a few dollars. And you probably can’t use their restrooms either.  All because their belief system suggests that generosity is something that is abused and taken advantage of.  As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote “…all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.”

Rare businesses, however, take the contrary view.  These businesses believe that the simple act of giving – whether to customers, employees or the communities they operate in is simply the right thing to do –it’s just good karma.  They provide their employees with great places to work, their patrons with great places to shop and their communities with businesses that give back.  They regard customers as people – not mere transactions.  Employees are part of the team – not simply headcount.   They give based on the belief that people are basically good and that their generosity will indeed be repaid – if not today then tomorrow and if not tomorrow then someday.

The unfortunate thing is that generosity is no guarantee of success.  Indeed, some of the most successful businesses in the world are also the greediest.    The consolation, however,  is that only those businesses who give generously will leave a positive impression on the world.  And perhaps that’s the truest definition of success.

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Posted in Branding, Marketing

Black Friday Results: You Can’t Take Traffic to the Bank

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Almost every news item surrounding this year’s Black Friday shopping ritual focused purely on store traffic and consumer turnout. The media was consumed with stories of which retailers had the biggest line-ups of overnight campers. News-wires were humming with up-to-the-minute reports and video of consumers sprinting through stores to get their hands on blow-out bargains. Details of price-cuts on everything from apparel to electronics dominated the press.  Even Canadian retailers got into the fray to keep domestic consumers and their now strong Canadian dollar above the forty-ninth parallel.

Meanwhile, retail analysts waited with bated breath for the results to be tallied so they could diagnose the general health of the retail sector. Sort of like a capitalistic version of Groundhog Day, with entire retail industry anxiously awaiting the consumers’ ascent from their hole. All that seemed to matter was that top-line sales numbers were better – even marginally – than last year.

What I found most disturbing was that in all the commentary surrounding Black Friday there was barely a mention of profit. Amidst all the talk of slashed prices and crowd-control, no one seemed the least bit interested if retailers would actually make more profit this year than last. Isn’t that kind of important? Isn’t the true health of a business measured by its profitability?

The fact is that the mathematics of discounting can be frightening. Assuming your costs don’t change, simply reducing price puts you in a position where your volume has to increase exponentially to make up the shortfall in profit. For example, a mere twenty percent discount on an item that has a forty percent  profit margin, represents a decrease in gross profit of fifty percent. Put simply, to earn the same profit, the retailer would now have to sell twice as much! I don’t know of any retailers who reported selling twice as much this Black Friday as they did last year.

The whole Black Friday ordeal seems oddly indicative of many of the problems that got us into this economy in the first place – the attitude that real growth is no longer a requisite for success. Whatever boosts the share price becomes the “strategy de jour”. And the media would rather churn out easily digested hype than examine the real facts and their implications. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

For my part, I’ll be watching the numbers too. The ones that will interest me most, though, are all on the bottom line.

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Posted in Marketing

6 Reasons Why Twitter Makes You a Better Marketer

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

By Doug Stephens

There are many reasons why retailers should be incorporating Twitter into their marketing mix. One important thing that no one seems to be talking about, however, is that using Twitter to market your business will make you an infinitely better marketer.

I know this may seem counter-intuitive given Twitter’s micro-blog format—which to the uninitiated appears to be nothing more than an endless stream of short information bites—but it’s precisely the abbreviated nature of Twitter that can make us better and more effective marketers.

Here’s why.

1. Clarity is Key: It doesn’t matter if you’re Al Gore or Ashton Kutcher, you get a maximum 140 characters, no more. Within that space, you need to clearly position your brand, product, or call to action. Amazingly, with some practice, this restriction can produce Zen-like clarity in your messaging. When you think about it, the best marketing messages are rarely wordy or complex. They’re clear and straight to the point. Twitter trains you to do just that.

2. Self Promotion Doesn’t Work: Blatant self-promotion has always been a bad marketing tactic but through the lens of Twitter it looks even worse. Twitter forces marketers to find ways of being important to consumers without being self-important. By promoting the needs of the consumer instead of promoting yourself, you’ll literally learn how to create a community of customers. A lesson many marketers never learn.

3. Reaction in Real Time: One of the huge problems with conventional marketing is lag-time. By the time the campaign is conceived, packaged and broadcast, we’re usually onto developing the next campaign. By the time consumer reaction begins to filter in, it’s usually too late to affect the positioning or execution of future communications. And so it goes. With Twitter, you know within hours if your message has resonated and spread. With real-time insights, you can fine tune your content to consistently connect with your followers.

4. Money Doesn’t Buy More Space: Marketers often complain that if they only had more money they could buy more attention, often resigning to being out bankrolled by their competition. With Twitter, everybody’s wallet is the same size: 140 characters. Sure, if you’re Best Buy, you can get more people in your company tweeting but that’s no guarantee of success. Look at some of the top re-tweeted Twitter users. Many are individuals and not large companies.

5. Twitter Models Real Life: Twitter is a great real-time representation of the sheer amount of marketing traffic consumers are subjected to every day. Therefore, it’s the ultimate testing ground for your message and your ability to connect to consumers. If you can break through the noise on Twitter, you can do it anywhere!

6. Twitter Makes You Smarter: Twitter is a proverbial fountain of information! Used wisely, you can vastly improve your knowledge and expertise as a professional. You’ll be amazed at the competitive advantage that this new level of insight can create.

If your a Tweeter and can add to our list of reasons to use Twitter, leave us a comment!

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Posted in Marketing, social media

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