Artisanal Marketing

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Morgan

My favorite type of marketing, by far, is artisanal marketing. Hand crafted, thoughtful, intelligent marketing. Not slick. Not aimed at the masses. Not average marketing for average consumers. But just the opposite. Thoughtful, insightful, honest, embracing complexity and celebrating the craft of the product or products themselves. This type of marketing eschews hype in favor of information yet still has a very strong opinion and point of view that it shares with those that choose to listen. It’s not easy. It takes thought to get and isn’t for everyone. And it is all of these attributes that makes artisanal marketing special, unique and, wildly successful.

In a world full of over-promise, under deliver, sell to the lowest common denominator marketing, the artisanal approach celebrates the simplicity (and complexity) of delivering a message about the value and use of a product or service. And in its own anti-establishment way remarkable and worth talking about. Artisanal marketing used to be the realm of small companies. Companies that didn’t have the Madison Avenue Madmen telling them how to package and process their message to hit the widest, most generic target possible. It was the realm of the companies who clearly “didn’t get it.” But their charm and earnest nature earned them raving fans who loved the product and felt a connection as part of a tribe that “got” what the company and the product was all about. The company didn’t settle and neither did their fans, who became passionate consumers and advocates for the brand.

That is the power of artisanal marketing.

But it’s no longer just the purview of those small companies. Big corporations are embracing artisanal marketing and cultivating that same down-home, honest image and approach that makes artisanal marketing so refreshing, appealing and successful. Not conicidentally the ones that do it the best are the ones that have done it all along – from the time they were tiny to now. The ones that haven’t succeed are the ones where the only thing artisanal about the product is the marketing. Without real, honest product the way you package it up becomes irrelevant.

One artisanal marketer that immediately comes to mind is Trader Joe‘s with their sales flyer that is unlike no other. The Fearless Flyer reads like a local newspaper, full of kitch and detail and opinion and bad puns and play-on-words and everything that you’d expect from a local publisher. Except its the sales circular for a large grocery chain. And it works, brilliantly. While most sales circulars, loaded down with high-gloss photos of studio shot food and triple coupon specials, end up in the recycling bin without a second thought, Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer gets read, like a magazine and enjoyed.

And it’s completely counter-intuitive to what you’d expect from a grocery flyer. Printed on newsprint without any photos of the products it is often 4 or 5 times as long as a traditional circular. Product descriptions aren’t two sentences, they’re two paragraphs. The copy is breezy, funny, and engaging. It takes time and energy to get the most out of the Fearless Flyer. It’s the time and energy the other chains are betting its shoppers don’t have. But Trader Joe’s makes the Fearless Flyer an experience. A hand crafted experience that insists that you slow down and enjoy it. It doesn’t hope to reach the thoughtless masses with cheap promotional calls. The Fearless Flyer says, I’m not mass produced. I’m not aiming for the lowest common denominator. I will not make it easy to consume and discard me.

The Fearless Flyer is artisanal. It embraces an honest, authentic point of view that celebrates the complexity and diversity and joys of food. It doesn’t try to win in the rat race – it connects with its shoppers who appreciate a more honest and artisanal approach to food.

It’s the perfect expression of artisanal marketing and the power the authentic, less-polished approach to marketing can have. It’s refreshing and wonderfully done. I’ll look at more artisanal examples going forward; but my question to you in the meantime is what can you do to bring a more honest and artisanal approach to your marketing?

Image credit

Embracing complexity

Posted on February 21, 2010 by Morgan

As marketers we’re repeatedly exhorted to make our messages simpler. To cut words, cut nuance, cut anything that may clutter or occlude the core message. Cut the rest and let the simplicity of the message shine through. This, our business leaders tell us, is the only way to reach customers in a cacophonous marketplace. Simplicity. Design your message so that a busy potential customer doesn’t have to think about you or what you offer. And it works. Often. It works for the middle of the market. If you’re selling cheese or milk for example you can get your key message down to a few words, Low Fat or Extra Calcium or Organic, for example. And it works when your product is inherently easy to understand, like the Energizer Bunny and it’s message, “Our batteries last a really, really long time.” But it doesn’t always work. And sometimes in our attempts to cut as much fat from the message end up taking some bone with it as well.

Some products are not easy to explain. Others shouldn’t be explained easily, lest they lose their mystique and unique value. The first case is pretty straight forward. Some products have multiple value propositions and messages that need to be told. Trying to cull it down into a single, simple message hides inherent meaning and value from potential customers. It makes the product or service look dumb. Something is missing in the customer’s eye. The simplicity has made the value harder to see. This may have made the message simpler but did it do the product any good? Take the iPhone for example. Did Apple try to promote it just as the best smart phone out there? No. That would be an over-simplification that hides the inherent value in it’s complexity. In fact, watching the Apple ads they showcase the variety of applications and features of the phone. They don’t simply say “It can do whatever you want,” rather they show the value of the phone through it’s rich and unique feature set. The marketers simplify and clarify, but not at the expense of showcasing the value.

The second case, with a technically simple product is even more interesting. Consider Burt Bee’s or Kiehl’s body products. They are tied to a strong creation story that resonates throughout their messaging. Trying to read a bottle of Kiehl’s is like trying to read a VCR instruction manual. But it is this complexity that communicates an attention to detail, an artisanal approach to the product that can’t be met by a mass market brand. This folksy complexity is part of the value. It’s how Kiehl’s differentiates itself from the mass market brands that are all busy cutting their word counts and culling their message for the sake of simplicity.

A Kiehl’s label:

The moral of the story here is that simplicity is often the right approach; but complexity shouldn’t be ignored simply because of its nature. Complexity can be a good thing. It can stop and make people think. It can convey a sense of artisanal craftsmanship that adds authenticity in a world of soulless mass-produced products. It can be a big differentiator. Not every story was meant to be told in a sound bite – double check to make sure you’re not hiding your value by being overly simplistic in your message.

My Top 3 Google Buzz Tips

Posted on February 13, 2010 by Morgan

After using Google Buzz for a few days now I’m excited about the potential of this service to really bring together two important parts of my daily workflow, social media conversations and email. Ever since Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have become important parts of my daily life I’ve struggled with how to unify them. Friendfeed was the best bet, but a quick sale to Facebook killed that option, and didn’t address email. Now Google Buzz has taken the first big step to an overall unifying communication platform. And I’m excited.

There is a lot of, um, buzz, about buzz and it’s noted security flaws and it’s ability to drive you to ADD-delerium due to the way it integrates with Gmail. And the criticism is fair. And while these are early days for the product you can’t let some beta product ruin an important part of your private life and work – your email. So here are a few Google Buzz Tips that I’ve found work really well for me after a few days use.

To get the most of Google Buzz, try these tips:

1) Don’t follow weblebrities. Following someone like Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble or Pete Cashmore of Mashable is just asking to be innundated with Buzz updates from their fans that comment on everything they post. Each of their posts receives hundreds of comments and likes which does two things: 1) bumps their threads to the top of Buzz, so that every time you login you’re dealing with scrolling down through the same posts over and over; and 2) clogs your inbox if you’ve previously responded to the post (liking or commenting) which pops the threads into your Gmail inbox.

See an example below. 89 comments and 60 likes is a lot of activity to deal with in your email box. And you can get all of Mashable’s content on Twitter, where you don’t have to get the feedback of the masses.

2) Mute posts early and often. You can mute noisy posts, like the above, simply by clicking the drop down arrow next to comment. This allows you to mute the post and you will no longer hear updates from that particular post. This is particularly handy for when the argument devolves to back-and-forth banter between a few people on a post like the above. You’ve extracted the value you wanted, now mute it and move on.

Here’s how to mute on Google Buzz:

3) Move Buzz updates into a new label and auto archive them out of your inbox. If you don’t want to see when new comments get added to your Buzz items simply create a new filter in Gmail that takes your Buzz update items and moves them to a label/folder out of your inbox that you can read at your convenience. This article about moving Buzz updates out of your inbox from Lifehacker has all the details if you don’t know how to create filters in Gmail.

Those are my top 3 tips for making Google Buzz work for me – what are yours? Share any hacks and tricks in the comments! Thanks!

5 TED Talks Every Marketer Must Watch

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Morgan

If you’re a marketer and serious about improving not only your craft but how your profession impacts the world around you then you must watch these 5 TED talks and share them with fellow marketers and human beings around you. They will get you thinking, they will get you working harder and most importantly, they will get you caring more. If there’s a talk you love that I’ve missed please leave it in the comments!

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

Gladwell, best selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink talks about the pursuit for the perfect spaghetti sauce and how looking outside your preconceived limitations can pay huge dividends. Gladwell makes you think and his stories take a small application and suggest big ramifications. I love reading his work and listening to him speak; because every time you do you have a little moment of eureka that makes you better.

David Pogue Says “Simplicity Sells”‘

If you’re responsible for product design and development, particularly in technology, Web services or consumer electronics you need to watch this video. Simplicity is elegant and sophisticated. Simplicity is what has made the iPod, Twitter and countless other devices best sellers. Removing features, making things easier, more intuitive and consumer friendly. As Twitter founder Evan Williams said “What can we take away to create something new?”

Tim Brown encourages designers to think bigger

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, has presided over some of the most incredible “design” work in the world. IDEO is the leader when it comes to design thinking, especially their work put into the idea of Human Centered Design. In this talk Tim Brown encourages designers to think bigger – like not how to build a better ship, but how to move people from one city on one continent to one city on another. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you remember it’s ok, in fact critical, to think big.

Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation

Best selling author Dan Pink dives into what makes us tick. He uses a great psychology experiment called the candle problem to show how many of our corporate rewards diminish creative thought. If you’re in leadership in marketing, or you’re wondering how to get the best out of people around you watch this talk and read his new book “Drive.” Also, make sure to read “A Whole New Mind” his earlier work on the rise of the creative class – a must read.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nuturing Creativity

The best selling author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about coping with the pressure of creativity and success and the idea that maybe we’re not entirely responsible for our creative successes and failures. What I like about this talk is that it takes a very humble person to disown success or lay success at another place than our own feet. I also like how she talks about dealing with the pressure of being creative for a living and how it’s ok when we’re not creative.

Seth Godin on Tribes We Lead

And what would a marketing talk at TED be without a bonus one from Seth Godin? So here’s a bonus sixth one.

Hang in the Question

Posted on January 24, 2010 by Morgan

It’s amazing the number of “brainstorming” meetings I’m in that fail to inspire any truly creative solutions at their conclusion. And it’s a big problem. Brainstorming meetings are expensive. Take the hourly rate of the people packed into the meeting space multiplied by the amount of time spent, and you have yourself an expensive session with a negative return on investment. If you’re like me you’ve probably felt that same underwhelming feeling when you walk out of another one of these lackluster meetings. And if you’re like me, you’re probably trying to figure out how to fix them.

I think you fix brainstorming sessions by hanging in the question.

We’re often in too much of a hurry to reach a decision. To solve the problem. To find an answer which everyone agrees on. To get on with our busy work lives and out of another meeting. And this, in the instance of brainstorming, actually hurts our results. Because our desire to solve the problem hones our focus to the most visible solution. The low-hanging fruit, if you will. And because it’s readily visible other people reach the same point quickly too, creating consensus and forming a decision.

But is that the right thing to do? What if we hung in the question longer? What if instead of accepting the most visible solution as the consensus pick, we put it aside and kept pushing? What if we truly brainstormed in an environment where all ideas were welcomed and more solutions were proposed? What if there was more discourse, different ways of looking at things, and more spontaneity? I believe we’d get higher-quality thinking, and more often than not, we’d end up with higher-quality solutions to our problems.

So the next time your’e in a brainstorming session challenge yourself and your colleagues to hang in the question a little while longer. Even if you all agree to the obvious solution, put it aside and explore other possibilities. Even if you come back to the first choice it will be good practice.

The idea of “hanging with the question” comes from Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking (affiliate link).

What’s the problem?

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Morgan

As a marketer you always need to be asking yourself “What’s the problem my [product/service/company] is trying to solve for the customer?” This is the simplest, easiest way to figure out the best way to talk about what you do in terms of providing a solution for your customers. It’s easy to look at your product and say it solves whatever is the opposite of what it does. But that is company-centric thinking, not customer-centric. You need to solve a real problem from the customer perspective, not just a problem that that matches up perfectly with your product/service. Stop short of identifying that and you’ll be trying to identify where all of your sales are.

But not every product or service solves a problem you say? You point to the iPod and say that it was just a well designed gadget. You point to Starbucks and say that it was just an overpriced cup of coffee. I say you aren’t looking hard enough. The iPod serves a very real problem brought on by the digital music revolution. It elegantly solved the problem of purchasing and managing music from your computer to your MP3 player. Starbucks solved the problem of making people feel connected to one another and their community. They solved the problem of a communal meeting area where people were free to lounge, converse and share experiences over coffee.

Both were problems that aren’t easily visible. Both probably aren’t the first problem that come to mind. And that is the second challenge.

The problem Starbucks solved wasn’t that there wasn’t any good coffee out there. If they just went after that one they would’ve found themselves in a commodity industry, fighting with Dunkin’ Donuts over the cheapest mega-sized coffee they could offer. Instead, they solved something much more important and were rewarded because of it.

As a marketer you have to dig for the essence of the problem you’re trying to solve. Often times your customers can’t even consciously identify the problem, but when they see the solution they know they needed it all along. And some problems they don’t even know they have at all until you present it in a way that grabs their attention and spurs them to action to resolving this suddenly very real problem.

So what is the problem your product or service solves? And is it really what it seems to be at first blush, or can you dig deeper and get to something much more profound and important. Because without a problem, there is no need. And without a need you severely cripple the demand for whatever you’re selling.

Are you high fidelity or high convenience?

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Morgan

In his book, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, (affiliate link) Kevin Maney examines the importance of being either exceptionally convenient or exceptionally high fidelity if you hope to resonate with consumers. If you’re somewhere in the middle, look out. You’ll get clobbered by one end or the other. As a marketer it’s important to evaluate your product and see where, on that continuum, you fall. And if you’re in the middle you need a product plan to get the hell out of there or suffer the consequences.

Maney got this idea from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who saw that consumers would trade ultimate convenience for less quality, and vice versa; but were unwilling to settle for the middle ground. To continue this example, Netflix is the ultimate in convenience, movies are mailed to you or streamed right to your TV. You don’t go anywhere, they come to you. On the other end is IMAX, stadium seating movie theaters. This is inconvenient. Movies play at prescribed times that you have to plan for, you need to drive to get there, and you pay an exceptional premium for the privilege.

But guess what? Both parts of the industry are thriving. The super-high end and the super-low end.

Guess what’s getting killed? You guessed it. The middle. The Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Videos of the world. Things that are a little more convenient than the theatres – you can take one of many movies home with you – but not so convenient – you still have to drive there and back – and it’s not so much better than watching a movie on HBO in terms of fidelity. This middle ground is what is killing Blockbuster.

The recipe for failure today? A little convenience, a little fidelity. The market no longer has room for moderation when it comes to new products and services.

So what can you do to move your product one way or the other? That answer may be the difference in making your product or company a success or making it one that we wonder what happened to it.

Rewarding Hard Work Rewards the Wrong Thing

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Morgan

Hard work and good work. Two things that should be rewarded and are. But sometimes I believe we place more reward on hard work then on good work. I think this is backwards, and it hurts companies more than they know.

It goes something like this. Stay late, get rewarded. Deliver a day ahead of a deadline, get rewarded. Create a great design in half a day and cut out early? Well, the boss wants to know, what else could you have done with that extra 30 minutes?

It doesn’t always happen like this, and, in the long run, good work is what is rewarded, by the market. But for the day-to-day it’s the martyrs that tend to get the kudos. Regardless of whether that extra work is of any real benefit to the company at all.

Why is this? I think it’s two fold. One, good work is much harder to do than hard work. Hard work, ironically, is the easiest pursuit in business. It’s easy to put your head down and grind out a ten hour workday. Much easier, than say, creating a product that resonates with your audience. Two, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate good work as it is happening; to the point where it’s easier to revert back to the tried and true, and ask “how hard are they working?”

In this TED talk Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (affiliate link) describes a fascinating study call the “Candle Problem” wherein a group of people motivated by financial rewards based on performance (speed in this case) perform worse at solving the problem than those without any incentive to solve it as fast as possible.

And I believe that this thinking, that rewards for metrics like speed and volume over quality, is what ruins many work places and diminishes the value of the employees that work there. For example, it’s been said that Apple’s upcoming tablet computer has been in prototype for at least 6 or 7 years. Never quite ready for the big time in the world of high Apple standards. Is there any question that it will crush the slew of PC-based tablets just released at CES last week in order to get “ahead” of the Apple launch? There shouldn’t be. Apple will own the dominant tablet device.

Now, do you think that the product managers and designers on the tablet are more worried about making the tablet their life’s work, or shipping something quickly? The answer is obvious. Apple values good over hard or fast or any other attribute. More and more the successful companies are the ones that value good thought and products over hard work and speed.

It’s not that hard work and speed to market aren’t important. Of course they are. But on a continuum of business priority in what order do they fall and in what way are they rewarded? Is good thought rewarded above hard work? Is it even rewarded in the same way that hard work is? Highly doubtful. Highly foolish.

So back to you. When is the last time you evaluated how you reward your people? If successful companies are more successful at rewarding good thought over hard work, it seems imperative that your people are rewarded the same way.

The Problem with Minimum Viable Product

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Morgan

If you work in the online space long enough you run across the idea of “minimum viable product” (MVP). The MVP is the minimum product design/functionality that you can launch with that will give you the learning you need about your customers with the least amount of time and resources poured into the project. It’s an important concept that stresses speed to market, agile development, and iteration on the learnings to build toward your ideal product.

Eric Ries (who I can’t recommend reading enough) has an excellent description of the MVP:

The idea of minimum viable product is useful because you can basically say: our vision is to build a product that solves this core problem for customers and we think that for the people who are early adopters for this kind of solution, they will be the most forgiving. And they will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the direction of where we’re trying to go.

So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

The problem with the MVP is that too often companies launch the MVP and then don’t build the roadmap to come back and take it to the next level. The business demands leave you with a string of unfinished, unpolished products. And while they meet the basic requirements of the early adpoting users they hamstring you trying to jump the chasm to the mainstream audience.

If you don’t have a road map in place to come back and continue to iterate on your MVPs you create a series of unpolished products which stop meeting the demands of your audience as more people outside the early adopting crowd try your product or service.

As you’re running you end up with an island of misfit toys which ultimately frustrate your customers.

While the MVP is a great concept, and keeps you from waiting too long to launch (and overdesigning for a non-existent audience) it can come back to bite you if you don’t consciously build a road map to improve it after the launch. So if you’re launching a new online service or product and you’re using the MVP approach do you have the time line, road map and resources lined up to take it to the next level once you learn what your customers really want?

If you can’t change frequency…

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Morgan

In my last post I wrote about how changing purchase or use behavior is one way to improve sales of a product when you have a product that can’t be changed. Motor oil was the example I used. Avocados are another. But what if you can’t materially impact purchase frequency? Then what?

Then it comes down to loyalty and referral.

There are plenty of examples of this type of product marketing need. You have very little control, for example, over how often a customer buys a new house or builds a new nuclear reactor. In these types of markets the best you can do is win on loyalty and referral.

It’s easy when you think about it. If you can’t get the Smith’s to move into a new home faster than the every five-year clip their moving at the next best thing you can do is guarantee that they use you when the time comes and that they’ll refer you to their contacts in any discussion about real estate.

In these markets it’s not about changing purhase frequency. It’s not about rewriting the rules around use. To create loyalty and referral requires two different elements: a remarkable first transaction and diligent and thoughtful follow up.

Both fall into Godin‘s world more seamlessly than the commodity marketing in my last post. Creating a wow first experience is really the key to this type of marketing. Because it powers the rest of the cycle. The virtuous cycle of loyalty and referral is kick-started by that first experience.

A wow experience out of the gate gets you halfway there while a ho-hum or unsatisfactory experience leaves the cycle DOA. The follow up is what gets you the rest of the way and makes sure the wow isn’t wasted. (That’s a post for another day.)

The tough part is defining the wow. Because wow is different to everyone. Each customer has their own need. So you can either tailor each experience to your customers’ needs or you can seek out customers who appreciate your style of business. Continuing the real estate example, if you’re completely automated and tech driven you may do better to seek out people who don’t want to “waste a lot of time” on pleasantries and phone calls. Whereas if you’re the warm friendly type, targetting type-A personalities who answer your phone calls with text message replies might not be the best market segment for what you bring to the table.

Regardless of your approach one thing is certain. Being marginally better than the competition is the least fortuitous route to the virtuous cycle in these marketing arenas. You really need to be at an extreme to succeed. You can’t be somewhat friendly and somewhat convenient. You need to be at one end or the other. Otherwise you’re like everyone else.

And when you’re like everyone else you don’t command loyalty and you don’t command referrals. And that is not a good spot to be in when your customers only make a buying decision once every 5 (or 50) years.

P Morgan Brown

A work in progress

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