Buying is irrational...like investing

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Tip: for marketing inspiration, read up on common traps in investment management psychology and behavioral finance. The same emotional wiring kicks in just about any time people buy stuff.

A quick example from both the Miller Heiman world of sales training and the Warren Buffett world of investment management:

Emotional capital.

Just like monetary capital, emotional capital is a finite resource. The more I expend, the more committed I am to my course of action. This can make an obviously bad deal difficult to unwind. It means that the further two (or more) parties go into a dealmaking process, the more either (or all) will be tempted to act against their own interests in order to reach a given outcome.

This is reportedly why Warren Buffett has played a lot of card games in the course of his career. He saves up emotional (and financial) capital for good deals by ignoring most deals as much as possible.

Savvy buyers and savvy sellers walk away as quickly as possible from deals, because they know that this conserves emotional capital. It helps hold down the error rate. We're only human, after all.

Related article

To know us is to love us - right?

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Awareness is a common goal of marketing.

The assumption, of course, is to know me is to buy from me. Image advertising. Being funny, memorable, businesslike, serious, whatever we think will help the customer remember us.

You know the textbook example of great awareness/brand marketing? Movie marketing for Snakes on a Plane. It went viral months before opening day. It had incredible word of mouth. Heck, half the movie was designed by the target audience. Prelaunch estimates projected box office earnings in excess of $100M.

The problem, of course, is that awareness did not translate into sales. Actual U.S. box office? $34M. If you account for both production budget and marketing expenses, the franchise broke even at best. A spectacularly successful failure.

That leap of faith between awareness and sales doesn't play well for marketing teams in tough times, either. How does marketing show me the money?

First, here are my assumptions:
- Your company doesn't already have a century-old storied brand.
- You don't have money or time to build one.
- You are under the gun to drive sales this fiscal year.
- You understand your customers well enough to talk to them in a manner they will consider directly and actionably relevant, or if you don't you're willing to roll up your sleeves and figure it you.

If those are your parameters, then the marketing answer, in my view, is two things.

Thing One: Strategic coordination between operations, marketing, and sales.
Someone is driving the conversation internally and externally so that your company is able to make promises it can keep and live up to the promises it does make. This isn't about perfection or even operational excellence. It's about understanding the reality of your operations, having some clue of your customers' mindset and needs, and being able to put your company in a relevant position between the two. If your marketing message makes either your operational delivery team or your customer facing sales people cringe (let alone complain openly), do some more work before you take it to market.

Thing Two: Direct marketing.
Direct marketing teaches us to question anything that (1) can't be measured, and (2) doesn't lead to revenue.

Run campaigns which intend to get a carefully identified set of persons to take specific actions to move through their buying processes. Measure what actually happens. Then tweak your approach based on prospects' behavior and feedback from sales people.

Awareness building tactics that help you gain credibility with your target buyers and influencers can help. But you should be able to draw a line from those awareness tactics to a step in your demand generation process or in your sales cycle, and identify some evidence of lift. Even if it's anecdotal.

The meat of your marketing budget should go into getting buyers and influencers to take concrete, measurable steps toward you, which lead to other measurable steps, which lead eventually to a sale.

Marketing voodoo...the fluff formerly known as collateral...and why we made the logo blue.

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A friend and colleague was recently describing common failings noticed at marketing departments, especially in startups, with a number of companies where he has consulted (not as a marketer).

His first observation:
What marketing VPs do often looks like voodoo to him. And a lot of it looks like a me-too game. "If I pull up our website, and a competitor's website, they sound like the same company. And I can't tell what either company actually does."

His second observation:
When he asks honest questions about the how and why of marketing tactics that are going out the door, he often gets a huffy response.

Now, even a patient professional (in any discipline) can tire of being second guessed within their zone of expertise. But I think my friend is correct in viewing these 2 observations as signs of trouble in a marketing effort. Here's why.

- Even if your strategy has all the validity in the world, if the rest of the company doesn't understand the marketing message, you're in trouble.

The rest of the company doesn't necessarily have to understand why the CIO picked Microsoft or why the COO closed the plant in Guangdong province. (Though it's better if I understand how these visible decisions serve the same larger strategy that my daily chores do.) However, the marketing message is closely tied to the entire company's strategic purpose. We shouldn't all parrot the same canned phrases to describe why customers buy from us. But if we really have no shared ideas about what our customers expect to get from us in exchange for their money and trust...that's going to breed problems in delivery. Marketing messages are greatly handicapped if they are concocted in a vaccuum. They are much more powerful when rooted in past operational results, and in companywide shared beliefs (okay, how about overlapping beliefs?) about customer needs.

- Differentiation isn't what I say it is in my meticulously crafted positioning statements. It is what my customers say it is.

Quite frankly, good line managers and strong sales people know more about the customer than their marketing executives do. They also know more about what the company does and how the sausage gets made. Carefully observe the reaction of your delivery organization and sales people to a big redesign of your website (or other marketing materials). I would argue that any silence, hesitation, question, or concern they express is a red flag.

If they want to know why the logo is blue, well, you may not need the most sophisticated of answers to that. If they think the logo is ugly, it's worth hearing why. If they don't understand your tactics, you can be gracious about others' lack of expertise in your profession. And not everyone has to love your tactics.

But if good people in other parts of the company don't see a connection between what you're telling your customers and what those people think the company is about, then drill down and understand that one.

Even if your campaign tactics and strategic approach are "right", getting questioned about them creates a chance to lead. You're never going to be through building that shared (OK, overlapping) vision of what the customer needs and what we're all supposed to be doing about it.