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Marketing and Karma
I know this is violating most rules for a blog, but I’m asking you to stick with me through the first part until we get to the brass ring. I’ll never ask again, honest. I had a couple of concepts bang against each other and I felt really insightful as a result.
The first part is about memes. If you haven’t heard about them, don’t feel bad. A meme is a unit of cultural transmission. You can read more in Wikipedia. It is a symbolic entity that is easy to notice, understand, accept, and express. Marketing people love memes when they can catch them. The Mac-PC commercials caught it. “Intel Inside” and that little sticker sold a lot of computers. You can even sing a couple of verses of “Oscar Meyer wiener” because of those cute kids that keep showing up. Memes are also a central part of the success of the citizen owned web. What makes blogs, videos, and my place so popular? Part of it is their ability to hit a core meme. Commercial sites have a built in bias towards making money and will “sell” their meme to do that. Citizen web portals don’t. They want to express part of their core being, and that is why they spread. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba write in their new book about Citizen Marketers that, “A meme spread, typically, because it matches the experiences of others and exposes a truth.”
The second part is about karma and truth. I admit that I don’t know about karma from a life long learning perspective. In fact, I probably know more about karma from watching My Name is Earl than from anything else. For Earl, karma is expressed as “what goes around comes around.” Marketers, sales people, and web portals that seek to manipulate have bad karma. Think about blogs that are supposedly private and later get exposed as corporate manipulation of the media. Fake blogs like the ones from Walmart and Sony created horrendous backlash. That’s bad karma in action. Blogs that just express a personal truth or that are out to connect have an opportunity to successfully do that. Good karma in action.
So those are the two metals making up this brass ring. The question for every sales person to ask themselves is a very simple, “Would I want to be treated in that way?” You reap what you sow, and as Earl would say, “Karma is a funny thing.”
Focus in the Midst of Chaos
A friend of mine was recently released from his position as the President of a direct selling company. I know he is taking it hard, but he is a survivor and will soon land back on his feet. The curious thing is reactions of several people in the sales force who have been in contact with me. They are very creative people (as I knew they would be as entrepreneurs). In the absence of information, they can make up all sorts of possible explanations for the corporate machinations. Reading between the lines, one of the main questions is “What does it mean for my business?”
The answer is really very simple and straightforward—probably nothing. Direct sales is a simple business that we make complicated. You make money by selling, recruiting other sellers, and growing the abilities of people on your team. None of those have anything to do with the company.
When I was a shiny nosed beginner with Tupperware, I had 6 Presidents in my first eight years. Guess who the excited and growing sales people were? They were the ones with a laser-like focus on what they were doing with their customers and their team. Like most situations that an entrepreneur encounters, corporate activity can become an ominous distraction from what is really important, your own work.
The touchstone is “High Touch”
I finally came across the phrase I was looking for and our web redesign fell into place. We want to use our website as a “high tech for high touch” place. In other words, a virtually personal place. This became our raison d’etre for the website. If it was part, it stayed; if it wasn’t, it’s gone. If it could, it was added. The first phase of the changes will be done in about 45 days, although we should be able to start using some of the new channels before then.
We had a couple of fascinating side challenges as we went through our redesign process. Our first challenge was to make things noticable without being intrusive. This is almost an oxymoron. This means that we will be giving away some free stuff along the way. Our second difficulty was trying to decide if the offerings made sense. We took a big swallow and sent some of our ideas out to current and potential customers. Their responses started coming back today. Some were gentle, some were not. Hearteningly, the huge majority want the offerings sooner. That’s a great way to start the week.
Cell Phones are More than Just Talk
There was an interesting article in the New York Times on May 6. It cited some research indidcating that over half of the cell phone users in the U.S. use it for something other than voice. Seventy-eight percent of the 18-26 age group use data services of some type. Is your sales business ready to use this technology?
Just imagine a conversation that leads to text that leads to video and then back to a three way call. Or think about podcast or video training pieces that you can produce and people on your team can download and play. 716-870-7697 I’m waiting.
Healthy Roots
I grabbed one of those rings this morning. We’ve had a lot of rain in the Dallas area, and it has caused some damage in my flower bed. The other night we had a real frog-strangler and it overflowed the gutter and washed most of the dirt out of a small bed of marigolds that were planted next to the house. When I looked at them the next morning, their very lowest roots were all that was holding them in place. So I got out some soil, stood the flowers upright, and packed the dirt around them. When I looked this morning, you would never know that they came so close to becoming history. That was when the brass ring appeared. Strong, healthy roots can keep you going even when all else appears lost. Even if you have to prune back to those roots, you will grow better from the experience.
Word of Mouth Marketing
For several years now I have read about buzz marketing, early adopters, word of mouth marketing, customer evangelists, and other possible permutations of the paradigm. I know it works; it’s part of the core of direct sales. Most of the time it happens unconsciously, but I think we can be in explicit mode when we want to sell.
After all these years, I finally met somebody who used the phrase “early implementers” in a casual conversation. I was talking with Gilles Dana, owner of Gildan Media and publisher of our audio series, Direct Selling 101. We were talking about audio downloads and he started talking about Audiofy and audio book chips as what the “early implementers were getting into.” So now I know, there really are such people. They are cool looking. Makes me want to get one. Check it out. http://www.audiofy.com/
Can’t Stop the Change
I found an interesting article about the future of web music. Based on their research, Mike McGuire and Derek Slater argue that consumer taste sharing will drive about one-quarter of all music downloads by 2010. It’s less that 10% now. Their research is downloadable as an Acrobat document here.
I’m not sure what that means, but a 15% change in three years is enormous. Personal recommendations and web buying have got to become a cornerstone of your business.