Category archive: Marketing

Monday, April 17, 2006

Exbrayat: An author's (posthumous) blog

The grandfather of my fiancé (and EA advisory board member), Antoine Clarke, was a famous French writer known simply as Exbrayat. He invented the genre of the humorous detective novel and wrote more than 100 books (plus several plays and films), on which his first name, Charles, never appeared. You can read more about him here, at the Exbrayat blog that Antoine and I set up yesterday.

We hope the blog will be something very special for Exbrayat’s fans. We will be adding more never before published family photographs, podcasts, and other goodies for fans as time permits. For Antoine’s mother, who has always been very publicity shy and has refused all interview requests, it’s a genuine case of blogging and social media as DIY PR - actually conversing with the public, bypassing the traditional media owned by others in order to speak directly with the people who really count, on a platform owned by the family. The network that nobody owns is a million times more valuable and useful to the family than any other.

May 5th would have been Exbrayat’s 100th birthday, and we’ll all be heading to France soon for the various Exbrayat centenary celebrations in that country. Antoine and I will be taking photos there for the blog, as well as noting the family’s observations on the events in France. And yes, we’ll be doing it in English. 

Blog advice for marketers

David Weinberger writes for AdAge:

The opportunity is not for marketers to pick off the chickens one by one but for marketers to unlearn what they have spent so long teaching themselves. The blogosphere is a vibrant human conversation. If marketers can learn to enter that conversation as humans first, talking honestly about what they care about, identifying themselves and exposing themselves, then they will be welcome in the blogosphere. But, of course, that means they cannot enter it as marketers.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Seth Godin, dreams, and nightmares

[W]hat people pay for when they buy most anything these days is the anticipation. The feeling of self-satisfaction, the way it feels when you put it in the bag, the dream of how it’s going to make you happier or more attractive tomorrow. When it comes down to using the [product], in practice, it’s way less important. What’s important is the dream.

So says marketer Seth Godin in a profile feature on American Way Magazine. And why does post-purchase service matter so much? Because you’re not just making someone glad they bought your product and encouraging them to buy again; you’re trying not to disturb the dream. Is it any wonder that so many people describe their customer service woes as ‘nightmares’?

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Reenchanting consumption

Thanks to The Consumerist for linking to University of Chicago grad Jesse Friedman’s term paper on how the Southern California-based specialty grocery store chain Trader Joe’s has succeeded (wildly) by offering something other than speed and convenience. It starts like this:

The success of McDonald’s and other large chains characteristic of modern consumer society follows, according to George Ritzer, from an extremely successful business model of rationalization offering enormous benefits to both company and customer. One consequence of such convenience and efficiency, however, is a sense of disenchantment: a lack of human interest or excitement in the consumption process. Some firms in recent years seem, and often purport, to directly counteract the downsides of hyperrationality through reenchanting the consumption process, while still applying modern operational procedures to ensure profitability. Trader Joe’s, a grocery store specializing in high-quality foods at surprising prices, provides one such intriguing, and very successful, reaction to this so-called McDonaldization. This study draws on visits to two locations, the company’s literature, and observations of customers, and uses Ritzer’s work on the disenchantment of rationalization, as well as Daniel Miller’s understanding of thrift within the framework of shopping as love and Colin Campbell’s discussion of the Romantic background of modern hedonistic consumption, as theoretical frameworks. It seeks to show how Trader Joe’s reenchants the consumption process by trusting its demographic base — which has sophisticated tastes yet appreciates value — to be more than mere lemmings.

CipherTrust: Don't trust them

How not to respond to criticism online, written with the ‘help’ of CipherTrust.