We’re all familiar with this story.

A business is at the top of its game, makes a trajectory-decision based on an assumption, and subsequently misses the mark. In this case, the business is Netflix, the assumption was about its customer base, and – as we all witnessed (and were perhaps, as Netflix customers, privy to the news via e-mail) – Netflix missed the mark.

A year ago, if anyone had said that within the span of one month, Netflix would lose 800,000 customers and its stock would plummet, that person would have been laughed out of the “society of business punditry.” Netflix was the game-changer of how people consumed movies – arguably responsible for the closure of Blockbuster Videos around the country, as well as much of the Internet’s traffic. There was basically no current competition for Netflix; the business was at the top, gaining two-plus million new customers every quarter. Things were golden, until…

…until a haphazard blog post announced a price hike of 60%.
…until CEO Reed Hastings issued a disarmingly casual “I-messed-up” e-mail.
…until they decided to split the service into two different services
     (instant streaming staying as Netflix, and “Qwikster” for DVDs by mail).
…until they retracted that decision.

Netflix had a good business model. They had loyal customers. They had happy stockholders.

What went wrong?

First: Netflix made an assumption about their customer base, and this assumption was egregiously incorrect. They assumed that their customers were passionate enough about Netflix to stick by the business – that no matter what, these customers wanted their movies and would continue to use Netflix’s services. Although Netflix was right about their customers being passionate, they didn’t realize the passion would be railed against the company itself. In response to a price hike and change of services, Netflix’s customer base passionately informed the company of their disappointment and disapproval, and 800,000 of them jumped ship.

Second: Netflix employed poor communication and execution of the changes in service. Whether or not the new business model was good or necessary is one thing, but the way Netflix both announced and unveiled the changes fell short of their game. The announcement of changes first came through a seemingly slap-it-together blog post late at night, which sent the Internet ablaze in fury. Then Reed Hastings sent out an e-mail one might expect from a college buddy rather than the CEO of a company.

Finally, they retracted their decisions within a month of the first announcement. In the meantime, amidst all of these embarrassing communication flubs, the Qwikster website was not ready when the service launched, and the Twitter account was already in use by a drug-using teenager with foul language. All in all, the launch was sloppy. It seemed uncoordinated – like a last-minute decision gone awry.

We could spend all day disputing and defending the good and the bad and the ugly of Netflix’s recent business decisions, but I’m more interested in discussing the implications every business can take from this situation.

So what can we learn here?

What we can learn is that when you’re on top – when you’ve positioned yourself as a leader in your market, even if its just your local market – each decision must be well thought out (and hopefully the right one).

In the fast changing business world of today, it’s sometimes necessary to make drastic changes to a working business model. But before you are ready to go to the presses (or your customers) with these changes, make sure the model is carefully thought through in minute detail. Not analysis paralysis – but at least a thorough vetting with trusted voices. You have to at least try to do everything right or don’t do it at all.

If you are going to make business decisions based on assumptions, make sure they are the right assumptions. Validate them. Test them. Make sure you have the data to back it up before you go ahead and change your business model.

Once you have your facts in place, make sure you communicate well to all affected stakeholders. When you’ve amassed a loyal customer base, you need to keep them by respecting them, and respect comes through how you communicate. When all of these factors are set in place, ensure that your new business model is ready to launch from all sides of the company. You can’t cut corners – the market is too demanding and too connected for that.

5 Reasons Why Social Media is a Fad and Not Relevant for my Business.

Social Media is a fad. It’s something that will go away soon. It clearly is not going to be all that it’s being presented to be by the press and the pundits who want to promote it as something new and important.

Social media clearly does not apply to my business. This is true for the following five reasons:

1. It really doesn’t matter what people say about my company on the web. The only people who care about finding recommendations via the web are people who have too much time on their hands, and are not likely to be my real customers.
2. Being plugged in to social media can only give me an inaccurate view of my competitors. In fact, it will often mislead me, in terms of thinking they are more important or relevant, or being talked about more than they really are.
3. Social media is a real “time sink”– an almost total waste of time. I can’t “tweet,” update Facebook, update LinkedIn, participate in discussion groups, and still run my business effectively. After all, it’s not like that really impacts my customers.
4. I have a website, literature, and brochures. My sales teams do a more than adequate job of communicating why my products and services matter to my customers, and I believe my customers really make their evaluation based on those materials, not through social media.
5. I’ll always be able to catch up later… even if it is a real, significant trend in the way companies communicate with prospects and customers. I’ll just hire the right consultants and apply the right techniques then. After all, what can it hurt me to be a year or two late on something, if I have the budget to just throw at it later on?

If you read the above, and it sounded like what you’ve been thinking about, be prepared for your cheese to get stolen out from under you.

First of all, it’s important to remember that Social Media, and the proper use of it, is self-reinforcing. What this means is that the sooner you start and the more (of the right things) you do, the stronger your position vis-à-vis your competitors. You can’t suddenly create an active conversation around things that you could listen to and learn from your customers, and things you want your customers to listen to and learn about you – from scratch, overnight. It takes time.

Social Media for business is more like a farmer planting seeds, tending the field, and reaping the harvest than going shopping at Acme.

Top strategists have noted that social media is different from everything else in at least three key dimensions:

1. It’s bi-directional – and it’s not just communication that is bi-directional, it’s also bi-directional in terms of determining what happens in the conversation. “Listeners” or the other participants have as much to say about what happens as the people who might be sponsoring the venue.
2. It takes longer to gestate, but…
3. It also connects deeper with people in their passions – the things that really matter to them.

So does your business connect with your best prospects and customers on a dimension that really matters to them?

That’s really the question, and social media and the variety of tools, technique, approaches, and strategies available to businesses of all sizes afford a new opportunity to connect with your audience, in a deeper way and on a different timeline than traditional marketing and advertising.

Ignore at your own peril.

There are no magic words to cause your target customers to instantly come running to buy your offering. No subliminal messages or secret code will automatically make them realize they need the product or service you’re selling, much less that they should do business with your company, but a carefully crafted value proposition will let them know how your offering is valuable and relevant to them.

When a company’s leaders choose to launch a new product or service, they [should] have a specific market in mind. Market intelligence and identifying unmet needs in the marketplace led to the decision to build and launch this new product, so your value proposition should highlight the specific product/service benefits that most sharply meet those unmet (or under-served) needs.

To sell the product or service, state the benefits of your product or service to the target market in a way that helps them understand your offering– succinctly and powerfully. In essence, you have to communicate the product’s value to them with some urgency. Assess what attributes will be of highest value to the target customer– this is the value proposition’s “DNA” or core message.

In other words, a value proposition is the articulation of the promises that your company is willing to fulfill for its target market.

In the context of investing in a new product or service, one has to take a product to market with some type of purpose and message and this is the value proposition: “For the sake of whom are you offering what?”

This doesn’t mean making assumptions about a specific customer’s needs– there is no substitute for collaboratively solving a customer’s problem. A true solution-oriented sales professional will find out what a particular prospect’s issues are before assuming they have a situation-specific value proposition for that customer, which requires a meaningful two-way conversation with the customer. Then, the salesperson can match your offering’s benefits to a prospect’s needs and deliver a value proposition that states what the product is and why it would be important to a particular market.

Your salespeople should view their customers as allies, not adversaries. You aren’t looking to win something at your customer’s expense, but to consult with them to identify and deliver relevant solutions, figure out how to make it relevant and further, and whether it will continue to be relevant in target market.

In previous posts, we’ve looked at your historic customer‒ who you’ve sold to before, aligned prospects‒ who you haven’t dealt with before but you think would be receptive to your offering, and negatively aligned customers‒ who you’re better off not selling to. Considering those three, you should be able to distill all that down to a few key attributes and zero in on your target‒ your ideal customer.

It’s worth noting that you might, in fact, have multiple targets. Much as you’d have concentric circles in an archery target, you may have your main target, the bull’s eye, and surrounding that, those that are not quite the bull’s eye but are still also valuable targets.

To make sure you hit that target, you need to get to know that ideal “bull’s eye” customer, and there are several things you want to look at. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, at the end of the day, the person who makes the purchase is a person. It is a human being‒ not an organization, not a company, not a household, not a family‒ a person. It’s always going to come down to somebody, somewhere deciding whether or not to buy what you’re offering.

The first thing you want to look at is what the personal or business objectives (or maybe both, in B2B) of your target market are. What are they trying to accomplish? Those accomplishments tend to look like either pain reduction or pleasure enhancement, but basically, broadly speaking, they are trying to do something within a certain period of time. If someone is buying an iPad, for instance, perhaps their objective is to lighten the load of the technology they have to carry around with them in order to have the internet at their fingertips wherever they happen to be.

Secondly, they have problems‒ unresolved issues. By that I don’t mean personal issues, necessarily, unless the solution you’re selling happens to be counseling for troubled psyches. The point is that they are trying to resolve something that they perceive to be increasing in pain‒ it is a bother for them, and that’s what they want to get rid of.

Challenges are things that are more aspirational in nature. They’re things that it may look like problems on the surface, but really have more of a measurement or goal associated to them. For instance, somebody who wants to lose weight, at the first stage they just want to get started on the weight loss process, but at some point it becomes more about getting fit, and the challenge is how do I get fit, and they move from losing weight to getting fit. It’s more positive. It’s an objective that actually is something they can get a little bit excited about.

That brings us to the fourth dimension in this‒ fears. Your ideal customer has fears. What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of yet another weight loss routine that will not work for them, or another lawn care service that will fall short of their expectations, or cost more. You have to understand this in the context of your ideal customer. You won’t resolve that fear for everybody, depending what your selling. If they’re afraid they can’t afford a new car, and you’re selling new cars, you have to break through that fear. Kia did that very well with their “hip-hop hamster” commercials, going right at the used car market, saying, “You can go with this, or you can go for that,” ‒and that’s an important message in marketing.

Lastly is opportunities, which could be business pleasures‒ market share gains, revenue success, those kinds of things, or it might be personal‒ looking for a promotion, or a way to look better to your boss. It might be where a company wants to do something that would otherwise cost them a lot of money to accomplish, so the opportunity would be to take advantage of what’s in front of them, and if you can show them that while you are, for example, looking at ways to save money on your human capital, if you have a service or a solution that actually makes hiring better people cheaper, better, faster, that’s an  opportunity. They want to grow their company, they’re seeking to exploit an opportunity.

How well do you know your ideal customer? What are their objectives, problems, challenges, fears, and opportunities? How can you shape your offering and messaging to meet those?

Have you ever thought about which customers you shouldn’t deal with?

All sales aren’t equally beneficial to your company, so it’s worth taking a look at which customers are actually negatively aligned with you. Which customers don’t you want? Which ones are you selling to now, that you might actually be better off not selling to at all? The surprising thing is, you may be putting a lot of energy into selling to more of those customers than you know.

For example, if you are selling a commodity product with some value added services, but your messaging is still price oriented, you’re going to attract people who don’t value those value added services – they’re just negatively aligned to you.

They won’t appreciate the things that cost you more money to deliver, while continually hammering you to lower prices, thereby eroding your margins — even your ability to afford the value added services in the first place. These value-added services are the ones you’re offering to attract customers that are aligned to where you want to be.

Are some of your current customers negatively aligned to you? Could your historic customer be limiting your ability to reach better-aligned prospects –your ideal customer? Have you looked at your messaging to make sure that you’re not actually attracting the wrong kind of customer?

Free eBook: Know Thy Customer
Carefully crafted messages alone won’t sell your product or service. You must target your message for your best audience and through the most effective venues for that message.

If you have a solid grasp on your current customer base, the next major thing to look at is, who else could align with your offering?

Aligned prospects are those potential customers that you haven’t dealt with much – but who could become customers. If you’ve identified key attributes of your historic customers, you could actually start looking for other groups of prospects who share those attributes. For example, who else is in that geographic area, or in that industry, that you have access to, and think you might be able to connect to your story?

If you’ve been selling to CFOs in Industy X, you might be able to sell to CFOs in Industry Y. Or, if you’ve been selling to women through grocery stores and you want to have a direct-to-consumer offering via the web, then you focus on women. That would be a case of alignment.

You’re looking for those customers that naturally line up with your historic base – and more importantly – that line up to what you’re offering. If you’ve been selling accounting software to small businesses, and selling directly to their CEO, and you want to move upstream, you may not be able to get to the CEO of larger companies. Perhaps the best aligned prospect would be to market to the CFO at those larger companies because that level would be analogous to the smaller company CEOs. That is where you would start looking for opportunities for alignment.

Bottom line:
1. Identify the attributes of your current customer base.
2. Look for those attributes in other markets or other customer “pools”.
3. Align to the newer prospects – adjust your messaging and programs and…
4. Drive new revenue into your company.

Often, businesses don’t take the time to define who their ideal customer is.

Not simple stats on the status quo of current customers – but thinking through who their “ideal” – best – perfect –want more of these – customers are.

To define your ideal customer you first need to have a firm understanding of who your historic customer is – no time travel required. I simply mean the type of customer you’ve done business with until now. Really, that may encompass two phases of looking-back time. You’ve got the customer you’ve been dealing with most recently, and then there may also have been the “good old days” of a customer that used to buy from you in greater numbers, perhaps because of some trend in the economy or other circumstance that allowed you to tap a greater– or just different – customer base than you have now.

How far into history you want to go is up to you, but obviously, if you’re IBM, you don’t need to go back to when you made typewriters, but you might want to go back and start thinking about anywhere near the target market you’re looking to be in. Where have you had success before? Develop some characteristics around that market. For example, if it’s a retail service or product that you offer, what is the demographic that has typically purchased it? Have they been making this purchase directly from you online, through supermarkets, or at flea-markets?

Start putting down identifying markers such as age, gender, and other descriptors for the individuals who have bought from you historically. If you’re not sure who this historical customer is, maybe it’s time to create a survey or some other [obviously legal, inoffensive, non-intrusive] way. You could use low-key polls, such as through your Facebook page, or have a full-blown survey company take a statistically valid sampling of your customer base – but one way or another, understanding who they are is essential.

For B2B companies, it’s a little easier, but again, you need to slice and dice. Consider geography– where are the companies that are buying from you? What industry are they in? How big are they? Who, within those companies, is actually buying from you? (Is it the purchasing manager, the CEO, or the secretary?) Of course, it depends on what you sell – but really think this through.

All of this just gives you a framework of understanding your ideal customer. So, what you need to do is take a look at that, and start trying to draw out commonalities – those things that represent the success factors behind the sales you’ve been making.

If 70% of your sales, historically, are purchased by women, then you know that you have a product that skews towards women. That may be “duh” obvious, if it’s a product specifically designed to do that, but where it becomes an opportunity is when you discover things about your customer base you didn’t know before.

When was the last time you really looked at your customers and how they function?

What has really changed?

It’s a profound question that should  be asked when looking at all the new products, trends, ideas and things that are happening in the world of marketing, social media, and the web in general.

One can pause and look at it, and say it’s all different. Yet in some fundamental way, it’s all the same. People are still looking for things that are meaningful to them, through mediums they find trustworthy.

The message here is that trust is key.

I don’t believe an endorsement from an athlete who is being paid millions to say, “This soap is really good,” but I do believe it when Consumer Report tests a variety of soaps and then says, “This soap is really good,” because I believe they’re acting in my best interest. I believe it if my wife says, “This soap is better than other soaps”, because I trust her with my life. What has really changed is more about how to connect the dots.  And one more thing….

That one more thing (something that’s really changed) can be best be referred to as an emergent property of the new realities: the collective dynamic of the crowd – the group offering an opinion on a particular product has created a new recommender in the marketplace. It’s no longer an individual. It’s not the expert, and it’s not the testimonial. Although, as marketers will tell you, those things can still be effective.

Now, however, it also really does matter what the multitudes “out there” have to say.  Almost like a hive coming together in a sci-fi movie to form the alien protagonist, together they are actually bringing a new voice to the market – one that needs to be listened to. As covered in the excellent book, Marketing in the Groundswell by Bernoff and Li, listening has now become one of the most cherished skillsets of the modern marketer– more so than ever before, more so than just simply market research, but really having an open ear to what that crowd is saying, because how you influence that crowd can now give you a new voice to your prospect audience.

Are you listening – really listening – to what the multitudes have to say? How can you influence, and leverage the voice of the crowd to your advantage?

It’s not easy. Successful integration of the sales and marketing functions is a difficult course. Salespeople often claim that marketers are out of touch with customers, while marketers argue that the sales force over-focuses on meeting the needs of an individual customer just to win the next deal. The balance between focusing on the overall market verses an individual customer is a difficult equilibrium to achieve.

It is a valid point that marketing tends to have a mountain top view, in contrast to the sales department’s ground-level view of the same marketplace. Generalizations are risky and it is important to note that both groups need to have at least a basic understanding of the overall marketplace as well as individual clients in order to make informed decisions.

Plus, even assuming that Corporate or Product Marketing has a high degree of accountability to revenue (which they don’t always have – at least not in the direct way that sales does), their decisions are made with quite a different time horizon than sales – before and after products are rolled out, while the sales time horizon is now. Naturally, this can cause some tension. Both parties are looking at the same set of facts, but assessing them quite differently – based on a different scope and scale.

Both views are critical for each function to do their jobs. Sharing views would be even more valuable to companies, most of which do not have successful integration policies for marketing and sales. To speak in metaphorical terms, marketing, with its high-level view, is able to see all that is unfolding on the battlefield below. Meanwhile, sales does battles every day on the front line, privy to a close up view of what’s going on at ground level.

Each group sees things the other cannot. There are things about customers and competitors visible at ground-level, that aren’t clear from a “bird’s eye” view. From the top, marketing sees clouds in the distance and the approaching competition that can change the way the marketplace will function in the near future. Prospects often tell salespeople how fierce or defeated the competition really is. Both have precious knowledge that becomes even more valuable when it is exchanged – and costly when the exchange does not take place.

Obviously, both marketing and sales professionals have the potential to see both sides of the coin and if these departments do communicate effectively, they will both have a much richer understanding of what is going on.

When successful integration and information exchange takes place, the sales “troops” at ground level know what is on the horizon and are better able to design solutions for customers. Likewise, marketing would be better able to support sales teams with what they need, when they know what is going on at ground level. Lastly, marketing can take advantage of the many thousands of hours their sales force is investing with clients in real conversations – an almost shameful loss of market intelligence in organization that don’t tap it, formally or informally. In your company, is that intel being used, or wasted?

Does sales share the details they can see from their “ground-level” perspective with marketing? Does marketing keep sales apprised of what’s happening in the larger market landscape?

What might help your marketers and salespeople understand each others’ perspectives, and feel like they’re playing for the same team? How can they work together to better meet both your customers’ needs and your company’s goals?

It’s a music video! It’s an iPhone ad! It’s… well, the internet-dwellers aren’t quite sure what it is, but this somewhat-enigmatic YouTube video features the band Atomic Tom performing a catchy tune on a New York City train… entirely on their iPhones!

My last post promised that this one would look at an example of clever marketing. “But!” you might exclaim, “We don’t even know if that video IS marketing?!”

Well… maybe…

We’re not certain who was really behind the video– whether it was, as claimed, just the band and friends producing it independently, or if Apple was stealthily involved – but either way, it was definitely marketing. Furthermore, it was good marketing, for both the band and the iPhone.

That is the power of subtle marketing. It’s being clever, not depending on brute force – really just using a simple idea and executing it well.

Atomic Tom certainly got quite a lot of publicity from this stunt, including nearly four million views on YouTube, appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live (view full episode), the Today Show, and on FastCompany.com, among others, but the iPhone got its fair share of the spotlight from this as well.

A recent article at techdirt.com asked if the video was “A publicity stunt or viral ad – or just a band connecting with fans?” Now let’s assume, for the moment, that Apple did sponsor this. The bigger question, or the bigger observation to be made here, that might be more beneficial to marketers it this: Apple– by stepping out of the way and not putting their brand front and center – but making this appear to be an organic happenstance– gets much more mileage out of it than if they put together a professional or polished-looking video touting their wares.

Of course, they’re very good at doing “polished”, as anyone who’s seen the recent Macbook Air commercials on TV or online knows. Tight, focused, and beautiful, is something Apple does particularly well. Gritty, real-world, and natural, however, is something, (if, in fact they’ve actually sponsored this activity,) – it would appear – they’ve also done equally well. Both are important.

The difference is, the first is something that you can throw money and professionalism at. If you put enough resources behind coming up with a professional-looking video, you will get a professional-looking video. But coming up with something that looks organic, natural, and spontaneous, is much harder to do. You have to be careful that you’re not too polished, where people start doubting that what you’ve done is organic and real. People who can do THIS well, will connect to their audiences at a much more visceral and meaningful level.

It comes down to understanding your audience. In this case, the subtle point is how cool (yes, I am old enough to think saying “cool” is cool) these phones are. So instead of just saying how desirable and versatile they are– “we have a million apps!” – they show you a drum, a piano, a guitar, and a bass guitar happening on these phones, so you just know how versatile they are, without them waving big arrows saying “look at me!”

The only way you can pull that off, is if you’re really in tune with your audience. You have to really understand what will actually make them interested in what you have to say, and then you have to say it in a way that isn’t in their face. This is especially true the more youth-oriented your pitch becomes – they just don’t want to be sold.

Making something that will “go viral” is a subtle art, and you can’t just dial in “viral” and expect results on demand (notwithstanding the many companies who claim to be able to do just that). Very few organizations, companies, or agencies have been able to do that consistently, and it’s hard to do! A brainstorming session might yield five or twenty seemingly good viral ideas, but only a fraction (if any) will actually catch on and join the ranks of “Internet sensations.”

The point is, that being subtle and clever, really trying to visualize what would be interesting to your target audience, and the willingness to make the subtle and not so obvious point, is something that many marketers have yet to master.

Did Apple? Who knows? Atomic Tom maintains that the idea and production was solely theirs, but Apple is certainly going to try to capitalize on the clip’s success, if they weren’t in on it to begin with.

• How do you connect with your best customers?
• Do you know what makes them tick?
• Have you thought about it for even 15 minutes in the last 30 days?

“The customer is always right” did not start out as an adage to be taken literally. Popularly attributed to the once major Chicago department store Marshall Fields, it used to mean to make the customer feel special.  It was a catchphrase that was drilled into salespeople’s minds to ensure they behave whenever they faced their customers.

The expression has since blown up into a powerful consumer argument, one that has driven businesses to turn a keener ear toward their markets. In many ways, this has helped leverage the success of many brands and businesses. By listening to what the customers have to say, companies get a better idea on what needs to be improved on their products or services.

The rise of social media as a marketing tool has helped give the consumers a more active role in the shaping of today’s brands. Fashion designers, for example, who have been locked up in their ivory towers for so long have finally been shaken up thanks to the online suggestions of fans and patrons. After reading so many tweets from followers wanting his brand to release more plus-size pieces, designer Marc Jacobs decided to heed their call. He promises his next project will be more plus-size friendly.

This is not to say that businesses should immediately reach for the drawing board when they see any customer comments or complaints. When fans of Ann Taylor commented that her newest pant design for LOFT only looked good on skinny, tall, model-esque frames, she and her fashion brand responded by uploading photos of employees wearing the same pants in sizes ranging from 2-12. Her company didn’t change anything but it did succeed in reassuring consumers that it understands their concerns.

Reflecting on the two cases, perhaps it is better to say, “The customer is never wrong.” Changing the adage into a double negative changes its implications. With, “The customer is always right,” it implies that the hand of power lies solely in the customers’ side. This is not always true. Like I’ve said before, it is one thing to cater to the consumer’s specific needs, and another to spoil them. The balance is better seen in the modified saying.

The Millenial’s, also known as Generation Y, never go out without their cellphone and seem to have their iPod earphones forever plugged into their ears. They are always online, tweeting, going on Facebook, or updating their blog. They like speaking in acronyms, like LOL and OMG. And for some reason, they laugh every time your playlist starts playing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The Millennials are the new emerging breed of consumer, with behaviors that are far differentiated from the preceding generation.

Born during the 80′s and 90′s, at a time when technology had already established itself as a staple in everyday life, the Millenials are remarkably proficient when it comes to operating different gadgets. Some are even quite dependent on it, using it as a tool for gathering information, procuring entertainment, or communicating with their friends. With a large part of the generation already starting to mature and entering the position of financial independence, the Millenials are posing as a powerful consumer force. And many brands are already out to woo their interests.

They say TV and print advertising is dead and perhaps it’s somewhat true for Generation Y. Today’s teenagers and 20-somethings are more glued to their computer screens than to the TV set. News tends to pass on through word-of-mouth. They are more influenced by their peers than by calls to action from even the most authoritative sales entities. For marketers to reach the Millennial market, they must understand that it is not enough just to tell them the product is good. They must be able to resonate with the very lives they lead.

This is why many brands and marketers are starting to actively engage their youth market. They create Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages, which the consumers are able to interact with. Not only does this reinforce brand loyalty, it allows the marketers to gain more accurate insights about their target market. Because a growing fraction of the market is most accessible on the Internet, making the brands more visible online is only a matter of course.

However, because of their savviness, the Millennials can easily sniff out hard-sell promotion, and run away from it faster than one can say, “For the Win!” This is where other strategies come into play to ensure the consumers don’t shun the brand altogether, including Value Proposition.

Having a shop in an area alongside well-known names such as McDonald’s and Starbucks may come off as intimidating to some. But sometimes, little shops can actually hold a great advantage by learning how to take hold of the local market and catch their attention. And there are many ways to go about it as well.

One thing to do is to step away from marketing your brand as also having excellent products or providing excellent customer service. This doesn’t mean  putting these marketing tools away entirely. Instead, the idea here is to focus on something outside of that. The big brands already have proven their products as excellent and their service as reliable, but what can a local shop offer to set itself apart?

As we all know, a relatively recent concept that has come up in local marketing is the growing power of social media. Through Twitter, Facebook and blogs, companies of all sizes are bringing out their social side into the digital scene. This actually can prove to be a boon to small businesses. Through these mediums, businesses can get in touch with their customers better. Also, it gives the business a real place on the internet.

Through blogging, it is possible to give your brand an identity, or perhaps more appropriately, a personality.  By giving your customers a personality to communicate with, it becomes easier to set the brand apart from the larger players on the field. This is even more apparent when you use your locale to channel your brand’s personality. With this in mind, there are a few things to consider when it comes to marketing on the local scale.

First, pay attention to your surroundings and the people in it. As you treat your brand as a personality, it should become part of the local scene and not simply another business waiting for people to come. Second, keep it interesting. Whether it’s by blogs or tweets or even little details like a selection of weekly specials in the shop, it pays to bring something new to the table. And finally, keep things fresh. Talk to your customers and get their feedback. It’s definitely one thing you can do as a small business.

How would you want people in your community to see your business? What personality attributes would you want them ascribing to your business?

Related reading:

• Local Business Has A Head Start In Social Media (smallbusinessmavericks.com)
• Social Media Gives Local Brands Home Field Advantage (searchenginejournal.com)
• Balihoo Highlights How Local Marketers are Driving the New Economy (prweb.com)

Moms are such sociable persons, moving from one social event to another, not only get-togethers or work-related events, but in social networks online! The new mom is really the master social networker – making the rounds of her children’s parties and school events, employing her smartphone and computer heavily as she manages a home or online business. While this is happening, she also has a thousand Facebook friends and hundreds more following her on Twitter.

This makes mothers a formidable force in the wonderful world of consumer marketing. And marketers must sit up and notice. The new millennium ushered in smart, tech-savvy, discriminating moms who can really rave about a product or service that they really like and rant and beat you to a pulp if they’ve been had. But that’s just one Mom. Imagine this mom telling other moms who will tell other moms who will tell other moms…you get the picture. Moms can really spread the word around like some kind of virus and voila! You have an effective viral marketing strategy already working for you.

There’s no magic trick in knowing what clicks well with moms. Just get to know her. Some tips:

• Know your mom. Some moms stay at home, some work at home, and some work away from home. All moms are different with varied styles in running their household. Get to know them well and what appeals to them.
• Go online. Moms need not lug their children around to various stores to check out new products to try anymore. All they have to do is just go to the Net and surf to shop. Ideally, moms should be able to easily purchase your product online. Come up with a good website that will appeal to the mommy market.
• Give something they can learn from. Moms are smart. They study, research and make comparisons and contrasts about anything that they’ve heard or read or seen from somewhere or from someone in the Internet. Have some valuable content handy in your website that could validate your claims and make them want to purchase your products.
• Time is gold. Moms are the greatest multitaskers, but they’d really appreciate it if you maximize their productivity. Make it easy for them to understand your product or service. Zero in on how your product or service could benefit her and her family.
• Savings, savings, savings. Offer free shipping, discounts, freebies, gifts or anything that will entice them and make them feel that they got extra value for their money. Remember, value is key to many a mom’s buying decisions.

You’re at a party or business function and you are introduced to someone you’ve admired for a long while.

Immediately following the introduction, as you say something intelligent (hoping to impress), you notice that the person you admire is not making eye contact. Instead, he or she is looking down at her phone, or looking over your shoulder at someone else. Ouch.

This person is obviously not interested in you, so he or she is not giving you full attention. Rather than focus on you and your story, that person seems to be just looking for a way out of the conversation. The worse part is, she may not even realize she is doing it to you.

Now let’s change the setting to home life: Your kid is telling you a funny story about what happened today in class, and you appear to be listening, but you reflexively glance down at your phone constantly throughout the conversation. Your happy kid notices the distraction, and he suddenly slumps, understanding that you are more interested in your iPhone than you are in him. Double ouch.

This happens more often than we think, but when it comes to winning customers, this is display of disinterest is definitely a big no-no. It’s apparent that we are not paying enough attention to what is most important in our lives. Our attention is divided in so many ways, by so many different distractions. Come to think of it, when was the last time you gave your full attention to something or someone?

We are constantly distracted. Each day, there always seems to be something that presents itself as another obstacle to our focus. This is the challenge for marketers and salesperson everyday. It’s easy to say that we can to make the sale, but if you really think about it, it’s how we focus and give our full attention to a potential customer or current client that really matters. When you do other things when you’re having a conversation with them, you’re not really multitasking. You’re simply not paying attention.

• How do you signal your genuine attention?
• How self-aware are you of your genuine inattention habits?
• Have you noticed when others do this to you – how do you respond?