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9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer

With all the talk in the media and trade mags of a new Renaissance, we’ve been taking some time to evaluate what exactly that might mean. Since the staff at XNet have never looked good in plunging necklines or crushed velvet we’ve decided to move the clock forward past the average futurist’s line of sight, buckle on our shoes, and start settling in for the Post-Neo-Renaissance Enlightenment.

We hope that things may have rounded out by then so that Marketing is no longer the handmaid to Deceit. To spur this desperately needed transition along here are 9 marketing axioms that eschew baroque emotional appeal and embrace the cold elegance of reason:

~ : 9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer : ~

1. We are conversationalists, not carny barkers. Conversing leads to engagement, barking just moves the shills along.
2. Engagement requires active participation. Remote islands with hostile inhabitants are rarely visited by the vacationing set.
3. To participate you must be present at the party, to be present you must be an agreeable guest.
4. A good message is mutually reciprocated like a brotherly handshake, not endured like blunt force trauma.
5. Uniqueness and quality are not easily copied, be wary of best practices that have gone stale.
6. Even with the philosopher’s stone of marketing in hand, conjuring in front of the wrong audience will get you burned at the proverbial stake.
7. No matter how artful, aesthetically pleasing, coercive or perfect, a product or service’s marketing message is only worth as much as the product or service being marketed.
8. However, a well crafted message that spends more time on universal concepts than on product placement can transcend its use-value to become valuable in itself.
9. When you realize that Shakespeare, Milton & Goethe were marketing their ideals you realize the bar for professionalism is set much higher than they told you in business school.

Aberrant Advice

It’s easy to get sucked into “best practice” blogs and tip lists hoping to find that little gem to really revolutionize your business. With busy schedules, active personal lives and an urge to participate in our communities the temptation to take short cuts is an ever present thorn.

Unfortunately our very cognitive structure means we lack objectivity when approaching this kind of information on the web. Savvy website designers have a bag of neuroactive grifter’s tricks that would make Felix the Cat blush. While looking for “best practices” we often end up filling our head with the run off content from someone’s marketing campaign. Content created to lure web-crawlers usually has little to do with providing real value and all too often in our search we’re subjected to a mélange of unexpected psychological cons.

Smiling Faces Tell Lies

One of the most prevalent tricks is as simple as a smile. Images of smiling faces tap into “mirror neurons” tricking our brains into an immediate sense of camaraderie and emotional well being. This mirror effect works best in face to face meetings, but remains successful even when still images or representational forms are used.

Another trick relies on easy curves. Our ability to recognize a pleasing image is related to how that image is processed in our brain. Crisp, professionally finished websites provide the round curves and image abstraction that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and cognitive philosopher William Hirstein posited are necessary for our brains to quickly process visual information. ( See their article: The Artful Brain )

By using this fact in strategic design, websites can lead the viewer to another automatic neurologically based form of engagement. These processes are keyed to such clearly identified brain traits that they don’t need to be artful in their execution to be effective.

The most subtle is something we all learned in grade school art class. That long forgotten friend the Color Wheel is a psychological tool kit often overlooked due to its inconspicuous nature. Within this humble wheel lies the key to evoking everything from a sense of nausea to salivating desire depending on the conditioning of the subject. Seems silly but research suggests more than gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s our psyches that are tied to the board by those 24 chromatic con-men.

The Mark Inside

You may think yourself a well tenured professional immune to such paltry parlor fair, but as W.S. Burroughs, American Academy of Arts and Letters, pointed out: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark that you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

We’re betrayed by our own brain’s functionality into concessions we might not otherwise actively decide to make. Even when designers aren’t fiddling with Photoshop color enhancement to stimulate your occipital lobe, low tech bait and switch still works the crowd like magic. For a few cobbled tidbits strung together to bait web crawlers we often sacrifice our innate ability to develop viable strategies.

If you’re truly searching for “best practices” Burroughs has some additional insight that might help:  “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

Good business doesn’t come from cookie cutter solutions.  You’re the only one who knows what your business does best and it’s going to be you who develops the solutions that bring it to the next level.

Resources:

Wikipedia: Neuromarketing

Neuroscience Marketing Blog - Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet

Neuromarketing: The New Science of Marketing Without Marketing (YouTube)

Andre Marquis - Google Tech Talks - Links Between Biometric Measures and Consumer Response to Media

Rules of Engagement

An important lesson gained from Ad:Tech is the necessity of engagement in all marketing efforts. Engagement is the quality that allows a person to interact, interpret and implement some aspect of your marketing message in their daily experience. It’s the quality that helps a piece of marketing go “viral”.

The major rule of engagement in business is the same as it is in war: never underestimate the other person and never overestimate yourself. Keeping your message focused on yourself leads to a very boring message and as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, “the only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

An engaging message is about the other person, but it is about the other person recognizing themselves in the reality that your messaging provides. When you underestimate the other person you can end up offending them, putting yourself in a position where future messages will require their active permission to be heard.

A good message, an engaging message, doesn’t require permission, it’s immediately accepted with active participation.

Exposure

We open up to participating in personal engagement when someone opens up to us. The same is true in marketing; the more open (perhaps even vulnerable) a message seems the more likely it is to engage another person. Again this is not about focusing on you or your company, it’s about relating to the other person through commonalities.

Think about the media messaging you’ve seen become prolific in the past, what is one of the most common themes that comes up?

Vulnerability.

Images of children, families, people in situations that expose their human frailty or the overcoming of that frailty; images that focus on commonalities amongst a larger group. These are themes that catch the attention and cause a message to be repeated, to become engaging. People repeat the message because they recognize themselves, their own victories, overcomings and failures in the message.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

As mentioned in a prior post, the movie American Beauty provides a great example of how carefully crafted (it might even be said - scientifically crafted)  imagery can invoke a sympathetic response and engage an audience.

This kind of messaging focuses on the following:

• It engages the audience in relating themselves, via pre-existent cultural cues, to the characters and setting the message presents. American Beauty presents the stereotypes of husband, office worker, house wife, disturbed army vet, insular teenage girl, etc. How can your marketing utilize character types/common settings to capture the viewer?
• It  takes the viewer’s previously held believes, values, and cultural position and realigns them to bring them into the reality presented by the messaging. In a car commercial it is assumed that the viewer drives a car and understands/relates to the driving experience. What is unique is that the commercial represents a specific company’s attempt to place their brand of car into the viewer’s assumed common experience.
• It becomes a mirror for the viewer to recognize themselves and to potentiate an ideal existence in the future. This means that the message  becomes a reflection of not only how the viewer currently sees themselves, but also provides suggestions for how the viewer should expect to see themselves in the future, ie. a customer seeing an ad might think “I recognize that person is similar to me, but with X product they look like a better version of what I am/want to be.”
• Finally, it assumes a reality to the message beyond the message itself. Good messaging doesn’t sneak around pretending no one sees it, it walks down the street like it owns the city and assumes people will follow. A successful message with a baseball player in it will assume to be, and achieve the illusion of being, the definitive message with a baseball player in it.

Are your messages asking for permission or are they engaging the audience in participation?

How Many Employees Does It Take To Stitch a Blanket?

From 2003 – 2005 Google only had one electrical engineer designing its servers . If you’ve heard of the massive data center operation Google runs this might come as a surprise. It also might be surprising that this single engineer helped design one of the most energy efficient and stable data center operations in existence.

Small and medium size businesses often find themselves in situations where it seems there’s just too much to do and too few hands, heads and hammers to do it. There always seems to be something getting in the way or slowing down crucial projects.

If this sounds like where you’re at there might be something in those last two sentences you read over too quickly… the word “seems”.

Tear Out the “Seems”

It doesn’t take an army to run a business even if it “seems” that way. As we’re fond of pointing out, with today’s technologies all it takes is a clear head and a solid plan to operate an internationally relevant SMB.

The illustrator/consultant Hugh McCleod is developing the idea of “global micro-brands”  to provide a model for this way of thinking and he’s just one of many discovering what Google discovered in 2003…even if it “seems” impossible, sometimes all it takes is one person.

Don’t mozy through the “seemingly” impossible day to day tasks of running a business, tear the “seems” out of your thinking and put your effort into the real task of stitching up a successful business.

Ask yourself, what’s makes the task seem impossible?

1. Are you focusing on something other than completing your current task? Prioritize what you are doing. It’s ok to be distracted, but be honest about being distracted and organize yourself accordingly.
2. Are you really working towards another goal? Don’t waste effort moving in one direction when you really want to be going somewhere else. Be honest about what you want and what you are willing to do to get it. Don’t try to eat the whole cow when you only want a burger.
3. Are you confident in your plans? Things move forward quickly when they’re motivated by confidence. Even if doubts linger it’s better to move forward confident in your actions than to stumble half hearted into failure.
4. Are you a dreamer or a doer? Some people like to read books about foreign countries, others like to travel them. The French poet Gerard de Nerval, upon visiting Egypt, remarked to an artist he knew “It is better that you stayed in Paris, there is nothing here of the Egypt we know, only the modern world…” Point being, it may be that you’d rather talk about success than work towards achieving it.
5. Have you applied what you’ve learned? We read up on best practices, go to seminars, networking events, webinars, the whole gamut of preparatory actions, but rarely do we put into practice the core lessons. Make sure you’re getting some ROI out of all that training and not just overlaying new words on old habits.

The Wrong Idea About Friends

If you’re trying to use new media to bolster an archaic business plan you’re in for a few surprises. The old idea that you can’t sell without lying isn’t worth much when your customer can Google your name or your company and find out more than you might even know yourself.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review quotes Theodore Levitt from the 1960’s as saying that the average salesperson often thinks “the customer is somebody ‘out there’ who, with proper cunning, can be separated from his or her loose change.”

A Two Way Street

When those customers “out there” can get “in” through simple web searches, the salesperson quickly becomes the victim of their own cunning. Communications technology is, not surprisingly, all about communications, and this is a two way street.

How is your sales force using new media? Do they have the wrong idea about friends?

Here are a few points for SMB’s to keep in mind when trying to execute an effective new media campaign:

1. Keep in touch with your community – Yes, it is possible to reach out globally with the technologies available today, but it’s also possible to connect with your community and deepen the partnerships that are already formed by close proximity.

2. You’re helping neighbors, not pillaging the village – The social aspect of communication technology allows SMB’s to effectively leverage the person to person service that they are already good at, don’t waste this by turning technology into another means of mass exploitation.

3. Give back – Another useful aspect of communication technology is the immediate feedback loop it creates; instead of using it solely to find out if you’re marketing is effective why not use it to see what your community needs?

4. Help others prosper – You may be successful at getting the word out about your products and services, but if you’re not helping other local businesses get the word out about their offerings you’re missing an opportunity to develop valuable relationships and strengthen your community.

5. Nobody cares – Nobody cares about advertising or marketing, they care about people, they care about passionate ideas, nowhere does this become more apparent than in social media. Rather than pushing an agenda make sure you are reaching out to connect and reciprocate relationships that create value for everyone involved.

Forget the Naysayers

There are a lot of naysayers out there when it comes to emergent communication technologies. They talk about how useless services like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn are, but the proof of concept for these tools is obvious once you start honestly using them.

Ramsey Mohsen pointed out a very poignant truth in an article on his blog:

“Facebook sucks if your friends suck”

There’s an old saying, “If you look for the Devil, you’ll find him”, look for people posting garbage and you’ll get garbage, but that belies the whole point of communication technology. Connect to professionals and your network will be professional, connect to creatives and you’ll have a creative network, it’s a simple concept that so many seem to be overlooking.

Feedback Loops

Feedback is important in understanding the way social media works. If you feed bad data into the system (or ask something like “What are the most useless things posted on Twitter?”) you’re going to get a response based on the nature of the input.

Those critics don’t realize that due to the input/output nature of the net they are going to get exactly what they are looking for. They cheat themselves of a valuable experience by asking questions with answers that have no worth.

Why waste time feeding bad input into the system when you could be providing positive value?

Imagine what would happen if they started asking the right questions. With the amount of horrible content they’re able to dig up, how much good content is out there waiting to be found?

Or more importantly, waiting to be created?

Lost your ticket on the Twitter train?

Here’s a helpful set of articles from CIO Magazine outlining ideas for how businesses can better utilize Twitter to help increase brand awareness, customer communication and marketing: CIO Magazine’s Twitter Bible.

One great tip to turn your business around

This is a reprint of an article Arthur Zards, President and Co-Founder of XNet, wrote for the April 9th, 2009 edition of The Business Ledger, a newspaper focused on leading Chicagoland businesses.

This is not an article on the obvious things your business can do to survive an economic downturn. Cutting down your office supply expenses, not printing as much paper, and getting rid of the free coffee are all things that will help, but lets be honest, these aren’t magic bullets that will keep your business in the black. And as a small to medium sized business, don’t expect a government bailout either!

Thriving, not just surviving

Instead of all the obvious money savers, I would like to share a great tip on not just making it though a downturn, but something that can help you completely turn your business around.

One of the challenges of running your own business is that, well, it’s your own business. You’re in control, you make the rules, and no-one knows it better then you. And that can be a problem. It’s easy to gain tunnel vision on what you think works and doesn’t work. You’re wearing blinders right now and don’t even know it.

What if you could have an extra set of eyes and ears looking at your business from an outsider’s perspective, offering feedback and fresh ideas on what you are doing? Telling you from their perspective what appears to be working and what isn’t. Asking you probing questions that you would never think to ask yourself. It’s easier then you think.

The “Unofficial Board of Directors”

What you want to do is create an “Unofficial Board of Directors.” In short, you create a small handful of trusted, experienced advisers to view your business at a board of directors level. You meet with them once a quarter, you share with them everything, and they offer you feedback and direction.

Share everything? Yes.

It’s not an easy thing for a business owner to share a full disclosure of your business, your profit/loss, even your own compensation information. But you will be surprised at the value of having different seasoned sets of eyes and ears giving you valuable feedback. I personally know businesses that have turned around 180 degrees after starting this practice and this process helped XNet weather some tough times during the Internet bust.

SCORE.ORG

Your board can be anyone, a parent, a friend, an old teacher, or a retired executive. The key is you must trust them, and you must feel that they bring a level of experience that you need. What seems to work very successfully is retired executives.

Organizations like SCORE offer easy access to thousands of retired executives who bring decades of business experience and are all aching to get back in the game. Your unofficial board will sometimes point out things to you that you don’t like, nor do you want to hear.

That’s the best part. These tough issues are the issues the very issues you must hear and become aware of. The things you choose to ignore while running your ship are often the key items you need to handle to keep your business afloat, or to get to the next level.

A Century of Experience

Still not convinced this will help?

Just three retired seasoned executives can add over a century of business experience Or imagine that all your competitors each have their own unofficial board of directors offering all their years of business experience and knowledge, and you don’t.

So instead of canceling this year’s Christmas party to save some money, get your own unofficial board of directors. After all, it works for free, doles out invaluable advice, and leaves you in full control of your business.

If you don’t know of any retired executives or trusted partners in your community check out the website for  SCORE . At the very least try using their online mentor search to see the talent pool that you can access. You’ll be impressed.

Phantom Partners

Everyone is a phantom partner in a local economy; you may not always see each other, but every business, professional and entrepreneur is partnered through the shared resources of the community. Small changes lead to larger ones and if SMB’s would open themselves to the possibilities offered by new technologies we’d see a transformation that would make the rising sun of the Renaissance look dim in comparison.

Putting Together the Pieces

Matching up business and technology has historically been a difficult process. This may still be true at the corporate level, but is it necessarily true for SMB’s?

While it’s difficult for large corporations to change course, SMB’s have the ability to quickly adapt to new challenges. As always, innovation happens at the local level first.

How can SMB’s utilize the current economic situation to finally fit all the pieces together?

Local Business Can Save the World

With technology available that can drastically cut costs it seems immediate adoption is the only solution.  Fortunately the very same technology that cuts costs can bring community partners together in ways that weren’t possible 10-20 years ago.

A recent article from the Financial Times by Glenn Hubbard (which we discovered courtesy of @bernardmoon via Twitter) highlights the special place that SMB’s hold in resolving the current financial crisis. One of the only ways for SMB’s to remain strong and vibrant is by quickly adapting to the partnership opportunities offered through New Media and shared service technologies.

What’s Your Perspective?

We see things from the perspective of a colocation provider and ISP so connecting businesses and communities is second nature to us, what’s your perspective?

Here are some links to TED (Ideas worth spreading) that take a deeper look at connecting communities as well as some organizations in the U.S. that are taking action:

TED, Ideas Worth Sharing
TEDGlobal 2009
Connecting Communities in New York
Connecting Museums & Communities
Even the Smithsonian is jumping into New Media
UK Official Twitter strategy

Have you heard of any other initiatives? Let us know.

Possible Effects

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister for the UK, recently addressed the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. His comments on Global ethics in a connected world are even more powerful on a local level.

He asks what the possible effects would be if “the power of our moral sense (was) allied with the communications facilities we have”?

Global Voices, Local Connections

We marvel at communicating with people in China on our iPhones, but in looking so far afield we’ve lost sight of our own back yard. The same technologies that let us communicate our ideas on a global scale are far more valuable in connecting us to the shared experience of our neighborhoods and communities.

What can we do to better equip our communities to begin this kind of dialogue? What can we do on a personal level to insure our worldwide communications networks are mirrored in our local networks?

Building a Base

The power to connect with each other in a shared economic and technological network is a wonderful tool. SMB’s need to leverage and build these networks to insure that the communities they serve remain solvent in these trying times. Entrepreneurs need to build a base, a solid platform, for these initiatives to take off in their communities and then the world.

This great article from the New York Times (posted by @valdiskrebs on Twitter) goes into some of the challenges and rewards that businesses are seeing from collaborative efforts:

Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork

What can we do as entrepreneurs and business owners to help foster collaboration not only in our industries, but also in our communities?

Check back later in the week when we’ll talk more about these relationships in a post titled, Phantom Partners.