Category archive: Promotions

Friday, March 31, 2006

Blog blindfolds should have no place in business

Last night at a dinner for my day job as Head of Marketing for the UK’s largest search engine marketing company, some of the attendees (from the online dating sector) were discussing their companies’ fear surrounding blogging. They know they’ve got to get in on this somehow, but they’re not sure quite how, and they are very afraid of ‘giving up control’.

As I said last night, it is natural that these companies are afraid: By and large, they have little idea of what they are getting into. Plunging in without an understanding of this space is ill-advised at best. The good news is, if they do endeavour to gain that understanding, and figure out how to control what they can and let the rest bring them benefits, there is really nothing to be afraid of. I have yet to encounter a business that understood this space, moved into it, and lived to regret it. 

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Woot? Woot! We say W00t!

A new entry in the category of online niche marketing--even, shall we say, novelty marketing--meet Woot!, which sells one cool electronic gadget a day, with a new item posting at midnight Central US time. If you don’t buy it by the following midnight, it’s gone for good. And if it sells out before the following midnight, you turn into a pumpkin.

What Woot! lacks in inventory it makes up for in personality, with Weird Al-style podcasts for each item and design contests--recently readers were invited to re-design the logo of a joystick manufacturer, the results being rather ribald--and shockingly professional. If you can inspire a customer to spend several hours in PhotoShop just to send you a visual pun based on your product, I’d say you’re having quite a conversation.

Woot! has also turned their lack of customer service into a selling point, by having a sense of humor and making you, the customer, feel like you’re too sophisticated and witty to need a bunch of hand-holding anyway. From the Woot! FAQ (where the short answer to almost every question is “No."):

Will I receive customer support like I’m used to?
No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don’t end up liking or you have what marketing people call “buyer’s remorse,” sell it on eBay. It’s likely you’ll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle. If the item doesn’t work, find out what you’re doing wrong. Yes, we know you think the item is bad, but it’s probably your fault....

The lesson here is that in an online marketplace, constraints and limitations may actually give you your differentiating edge, if you’re clever and brave enough to exploit them.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

BMW's Audio Books: Beyond Product Placement

I like to listen to moody, noirish mysery novels while driving around in the Southern California sunshine. It’s a sweet-and-sour thing. Never gets stale for me.

Which is why I was intrigued recently when I stumbled upon BMW Audio Books. The company has commissioned original fiction by some unexpected authors, and to judge by a first listen, they’ve done it right.

This weekend I downloaded and listened to James Flint’s Outer Limits-ish Master of the Storm this weekend while winding up the Pacific Coast Highway. The production was impeccable, far better quality than most of the books I’ve purchased on Audible.com, the story performed (rather than merely read) by Forbes Masson, a Shakespeare-trained Scotsman with an intoxicating, single-malt voice. Flint’s work has a distinctive style, and like the other authors BMW has engaged, he has enough edge-dwelling credibility that there’s precious little chance anyone will mistake him for a shill… even though the story does take place in a car--a BMW.

The presence of the car in the Storm has a nudge-nudge, wink-wink quality to it, and little to do with the story itself. But any expectation that the story would be advertorial in nature is quickly dispelled as the protagonist gets behind the wheel after one champagne too many and plows into an innocent bystander. Not a particularly safe plot point for a car company, but a turn that had the effect of instantly earning my trust and attention.

When you’re a successful luxury brand, your job is to keep your profile up and not lose your cool--all the while acting like you have nothing to prove to anyone.

That’s not an easy prescription to follow. Just ask Jaguar, which, under Ford, ran a series of banal suburbanite ads that left one wondering whether the product were a car or a washer-dryer set. Sales of the Tauruses--er, Jags--predictably suck.

Publishing slightly off-color, risk-taking fiction is a brilliantly safe way of owning the edge, I think. Unless you start slandering mullahs, literary fiction isn’t likely to upset anyone, even pretty out-there fiction. And it’s an art form in serious need of patronage.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Making companies pay for our time and attention

I’m in Los Angeles, and last night had dinner with fellow Engagement Alliance advisory board member Hillary Johnson and our friend Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist whose work is carried in more than one hundred newspapers across the US. (If you think her column is a great chance to be influential, you should see what she can do with her blog.) In Amy’s spare time, she fights the good fight:

If I have a hobby, it’s being a part-time detective. I’ve tracked down one stolen car and the dirtbag who stole it, then tracked him down again and made him pay me his court-ordered restitution. Then there was my hit-and-run driver, whom I also tracked down, and had prosecuted. I also tracked down a friend’s birth parents, figured out who was e-harrassing another friend of mine and made the person stop. (The friend wanted to send a person an email demanding they stop. Naw. I instead looked up their corporate email policy—all the small print every big company puts out about not using corporate email for nefarious ends—and we sent the harrasser a screen shot of it. That was the last my friend heard from the harrasser, of course.

Amy might best be described as a customer justice advocate; that, however, might be missing the point. The truth is that with the tools now available online, anyone can take back control of their time and attention like Amy has. It’s not that difficult. Just ask the companies that Amy has forced to compensate her for the time they’ve stolen from her with their intrusive, annoying, and disruptive marketing tactics. As she says:

The point isn’t really to make money off people (although I’m going after a telemarketer next, and because of the guy’s arrogance, plan to sue him in small claims court for my posted prices), it’s to show people that they just can’t just walk all over people with impunity and play out their lives as if they’re the lone member of the ME! ME! ME! generation...I’m all for freedom of speech...such as the freedom to hire somebody to stand on public property to ask us to give them our phone numbers so people in a boiler room can irritate the crap out of us. The freedom I’m not for is the freedom to hijack a telephone line I pay for to interrupt me at dinner time (or any other time) to try to sell me something.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Giving away value disrupts the state, too

Gervase Markham, who blogs at Hacking for Christ, works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit “dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet”. He writes about his recent encounter with a UK Trading Standards officer:

They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Many people would find the official’s reaction to that surprising, but they don’t call them disruptive technologies for nothing. 

"Giving away value disrupts the state, too" continued...