Marketing Metric Myopia.

The rise of Jeremy Lin continues unabated. Six games, six wins culminating last night in his scoring of the game-winning basket with 0.5 seconds left on the clock.

Ten days ago, he didn't have a contact and had spent two years struggling to find a team. Perhaps, that was because he graduated from Harvard rather than Kentucky, or perhaps it was because he is Asian-American.

As he became an international celebrity, the story was framed as an example of the triumph of perseverance, but it's really a story of managerial myopia. He didn't fit the normal profile, so he didn't get the role.

What is worse, in the age of Moneyball, he didn't get the role even though the metrics had been positively analysed over eighteen months ago.

Knowing your market is crucial, but you need to back up those instincts with a respect for and full understanding of the numbers. If you don't, you lay yourself open to running with the crowd and acting on conventional wisdom.

The Marketing Wisdom Of Yayoi Kusama.

Amongst the weird and wonderful installations at the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at Tate Modern, I noticed the following marketing snippets from a letter she wrote to a gallery owner and one from a press-release.

I believe we should furnish good planning and material to the no-good magazines to make them more interesting, rather than simply avoiding them because they are no good.

They have the handmade look that comes from expert craftsmanship.

Both date from 1968. Both apply today.

Popularity Doesn't Pay The Rent.

There's liked and then there's popular. Marketers must be alert to the difference and remember that awareness is only part of the battle.

If they had been genuinely popular, they wouldn't be closing down.

Make Marketing Customer-Centric.

My apologies for the poor photograph, but it's very lack of detail actually serves to back up one of the points I'm going to make. It features one of a series of advertisements that have appeared in train carriages in recent months and illustrates some dangerous business thinking. It's technology-centric, marketing-focussed and customer-indifferent.

It's technology-centric because it's promoting some dubious technology-enabled utilities. In this case, "travel alerts"; in another, "personalised timetables" and; in all of them, services that are cheap add-ons derived from the train company's ability to manipulate data rather than from any genuine customer need or request.

It's marketing-focussed because it's promoting these services by intruding on the eyeballs of paying customers who might prefer the inside of their carriages to be more aesthetically pleasing.

And it's customer-indifferent because of both its technology-centrism and its marketing focus and also because of its remarkable use of a QR code. No, this is not yet another post about the industry's fixation with this questionable technology. Just look again at that photo and note the angle of the poster. Now consider how that relates to me the passenger - something that the marketers clearly hadn't done.

Are they really thinking I will stand up in the middle of a train carriage - that hive of self-consciousness and timidity - just so I can aim my phone at an ad? Unsurprisingly, I didn't - hence the poor photo, but even if I had chosen to draw attention to myself, what chance would I have of contorting my phone to the right alignment as the train moved along?

Veritably, a multi-layered example of marketing because you can rather than marketing because you should; of marketing to the client and the industry rather than marketing to the customer; and of marketing to the future rather than marketing to the here and now.

Marketing Data Granularity.

This week Nike launched its FuelBand accelerometer. It’s the latest extension of their Nike+ ecosystem and is predicated on the conclusion (derived no doubt from all the data Nike+ has allowed them to collect) that goal-setting is the key to successful exercise campaigns.

The FuelBand represents this through a single number that users can use as a measure of their progress. Its simple and elegant, but I was struck by their suggestion that people don’t need extreme granularity.

I can see why they might conclude this. Most people are looking for an easy life and tend to characterise extra detail as complexity and when I first started hearing the term (a couple of years ago) I had no idea what it meant. But the time I’ve spent around “self-quantifiers” has shown me that “amateurs” will go to extraordinary lengths to acquire granularity once they know what it is.

This and the time I’ve spent with the VRM movement convinces me there's a big group of people who would be thrilled with extreme granularity if there were third party intermediaries to interpret it for them. To interpret it in a way that stretches beyond a single number.

Now, FuelBand does seem to offer some degree of extra parameters but it's not clear that they won't also be similarly condensed. Maybe true user access to all their data will be the next stage. It needs to be because further engagement of already engaged people has to come from intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic gamification. It’s not just about how much they improved, but how they improved. That way lies even greater branded utility.

Why People Hate Marketing.

 

It's not marketing of course. It's an amalgamation of ideas that have been knocking around for the past few years bundled together with nonsensical jargon and a ripped-off presentation style.

The thinking isn't bad, but the most impressive thing is being able to say "Liquid linkage to big fat fertile spaces" with a straight face.

Research Groupthink.

I recently sat in on a research group. There'd already been home testing and diary writing. Now there was a discussion about what the product/service category meant to the assembled group and, lastly, there was an element of further testing. It was a long, informed and opinionated session. And then they left the building and went home.

The research company will, no doubt, host other groups, write reports and make presentations that the client will digest, consider and have meetings about. But these engaged, informed and interested users will probably hear nothing more.

What a missed opportunity. One I've seen repeated by innumerable businesses employing a variety of external agencies throughout the process of product development and market research that make no attempt to leverage the enthusiasm of the potential customers they ultimately view solely as "participants".

Just think what might be unleashed by sending them a trial subscription or samples and discounts once their project finally gets to market. They're invested, they're interested and they're primed to promote and yet nothing happens because of the increasing compartmentalisation of marketing and its separation from product development.

Or, perhaps, the enthusing of a handful of people is not seen as a sufficiently grand gesture to feature on the marketing plan. A marketing plan that will pay lip-service to the importance of "lighting lots of small fires" but will ignore what's right in front of its face.