Monday Marketing Moxie – Vision Without Execution

start your week off right with some marketing motivation! FEB ‘10     Got Moxie? mox•ie - [mok-see]: vigor; verve; pep; skill Monday Marketing Moxie is a weekly newsletter designed to provoke thoughts, incite action and start your marketing off right each week! Read on!     “Vision without execution is hallucination.” — Thomas Alva Edison   Executing Your Vision Vision and mission lead to high quality action I like to call this the “dual challenge” of an organization. First, you have to come up a vision. Now, I’m not sure if any of us recall the last time that you just sat down and “came up with a vision”, but it’s not like baking bread or assembling a piece of IKEA furniture. It’s much more like making a beautiful painting or writing elegant prose. It comes from within and it’s sustained through continued thought and focus. All of these are not easy in and of themselves, but day by day, you can craft a great vision. Second, you have the execution of that vision. When you ask CEOs “what keeps them up at night”, you will find on many surveys, stated in similar language, “consistent execution of strategy by top management” as one of the top concerns across the globe and in any size business. In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP citied the aforementioned quote about vision, execution and hallucination as he explained that many companies fail not from a lack of vision, but from an inability to clearly translate vision into executable plans and then follow through with concrete action. Knowing what you need to do, on its own, does not guarantee success. You have to be able to: Deconstruct what you know (the vision) in to measurable objectives and focus on crystallizing the ‘essence’ of these objectives. Chalk out business processes that center around this essence. Have the right infrastructure in place so as to be able to define, track, and continuously measure and refine the processes that your organization will need to follow in order to exceed business objectives. It’s really about writing it up, chunking it down and working on it every _ single _ day. The best go no more than 3 or 4 days without reviewing and focusing on their vision and purpose. I find that if I, for whatever reason, get away from this habit of focusing on my vision and working on executing it, the business suffers and my results suffer.     Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS What are you doing today to execute on the vision that you’ve set for yourself or your organization? What more could you be doing?   PLANNING AHEAD? Each week, we look at what’s coming up a month from now in Chase’s 2010 Calendar of Events to help you plan your promotions in advance. March is American Red Cross Month – Team up with the American Red Cross to make an impact in your community! March 8-12 is national Make a Referral Week – Small businesses choose this week to make referrals to another small business. Get your referral program going with your customers and clients! makeareferralweek.com   The MarketingSavant Group 1025 Emilie Street Green Bay, WI 54301 888.989.7771 main Click here if you’d rather not receive the weekly Monday Marketing Moxie e-mails from The MarketingSavant Group. You can always find our latest thinking, work and more at marketingsavant.com. © copyright 2010 The MarketingSavant Group.

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Marketing Seminar Series for Door County Business Owners

This is awesome! The Door County Economic Development Corporation, Door County Visitor Bureau and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College are presenting two awesome seminars on marketing for Door County businesses! I’m presenting one of them on Tuesday, February 16 and my friend Steve Tyink from Miron Construction is presenting Tuesday, April 20.

If you’ve never seen either of us speak…well, then I guess you never have. No, seriously, Steve is an outstanding and engaging speaker (I’ve seen him) and I’m not too shabby either… (at least a few folks have drunk the Kool-Aid…).

The February 16 event is on social media marketing and the April 20 event takes on the concept of Customer Attachment!

Here are the particulars:

When?: 1:30-3:30pm
Where?: Gibraltar Fire Station – 3496 County Highway F between A and 42.

Tuesday, February 16 – Dana VanDen Huevel: Using Social Media to Connect With Your Customers Online
Marketing on the internet is more than just having a great website and putting up advertising. Today’s Internet savvy consumer expects much more from companies large and small, but at the same time, organizations have a full suite of cost-effective online and social media marketing tools within immediate reach. Attend this presentation to learn how your business can benefit for using social media to connect with your customers and which tools can be most effective for your business.

Dana is a widely recognized expert on Thought Leadership and Social Media Marketing. He is the founder and president of The Marketing Savant Group. Dana is a regular speaker on social media and marketing at over 50 events per year. Recognized as one of the “50 People You Should Know” by the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce, Dana serves on several advisory boards for nonprofits and community organizations in and around Wisconsin.

Tuesday, April 20 – Steve Tyink: Standing Out: the Clues & the Cause
As business leaders today, how can you thrive in today’s ever-changing and demanding marketplace while setting your brand apart from the competition? This high energy, interactive workshop focuses on the revolutionary, breakthrough concept of Customer Attachment. Learn how to design an experience that will elicit the emotional outcomes you desire from your customers and employees.

Steve Tyink, Vice President of Business Innovation for Miron Construction Co. Inc., is known throughout the U.S. as the creator of Customer Attachment and the tools, methodologies and systems for developing the necessary strategies to identify performance gap behaviors. He will supply the award winning attachment dimensions required to create and sustain a relationship-driven, emotionally-connected, customer-centered organization. More About Steve Tyink

To attend either or both sessions, please RSVP via e-mail to janet@doorcountybusiness.com

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Monday Marketing Moxie – Completing the Sale

start your week off right with some marketing motivation! FEB ‘10     Got Moxie? mox•ie - [mok-see]: vigor; verve; pep; skill Monday Marketing Moxie is just what you need provoke thoughts, incite action and start your marketing off right each week! Every Monday, we’ll be coming to you through this newsletter with ideas, resources and most of all, a bit of insight and motivation to prepare you for this week’s climb! Read on!     “I do not consider a sale complete until goods are worn out and the customer still satisfied. We will thank anyone to return goods that are not perfectly satisfactory…Above all things we wish to avoid having a dissatisfied customer.” — L.L. Bean, 1912. These words were found in their first circular.   Completing the Sale The sale doesn’t end when the customer goes home. Think about the last time you ‘completed a sale’ in the vision of LL Bean. Can you recall one? Think of any products that you’ve just purchased to replace something else, did the company of the product you discarded really complete the sale with you? Marketing is a circular game, it’s end-to-end and then back again. Look around you on your desk and think of how the products you use right in front of you are marketed to complete customer satisfaction. Now think about what you’re doing to ensure complete satisfaction. Completing the sale means staying in touch with everyone that you sell to. Open the gates, bring down the barriers and invite everyone in on the conversation. Do everything in your power to avoid having a dissatisfied customer!     QUESTIONS & ACTIONS What will you do today to complete the sale with your customers?   PLANNING AHEAD? Each week, we look at what’s coming up a month from now in Chase’s 2010 Calendar of Events to help you plan your promotions in advance. JELL-O Week is the second full week of February – Whip up something fun to do with JELL-O this week at your company! Feb 7 is the Super Bowl! – Have a party, wear team colors or hold an in-office contest on which commercial your team likes best. If you’re an ad agency, you could do a post-Super Bowl commercial watching party!   The MarketingSavant Group 1025 Emilie Street Green Bay, WI 54301 888.989.7771 main Click here if you’d rather not receive the weekly Monday Marketing Moxie e-mails from The MarketingSavant Group. You can always find our latest thinking, work and more at marketingsavant.com. © copyright 2010 The MarketingSavant Group.

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Social Media for Non Profits

I had the honor of speaking to a group of non-profit organization leaders here in Wisconsin recently and wanted to share the presentation that they received as part of the program. This is a deck that I’ve recently put together on social media for non-profit organizations. Enjoy!

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Talkin’ Web 2.0 Blues

This is too funny! I heard this song this week while I was in Philadelphia driving around after conducting the AMA Social Media Bootcamp. You can be sure that this made it into day two of the event!

This just might take the place of my first favorite social media song from a few years back – the song recorded by Cruisebox called “On a Podcast”.

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Social Media: 13 Tactics to Make it Work Harder

Heidi Cohen had a great column on 1/25/2010 in ClickZ on “13 Tactics to Make Social Media Work Harder” that really sums up some of the best advice that many of us see as the most successful elements of social media strategies when we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.  Think of how powerful these ideas will be if you put them in place before you put the social media strategy to work!  This is a high level summary of Heidi’s article.  Read the full version here.

Here are 13 actionable tactics:

1. Understand how and why members of your target market use social media.
2. Develop content that meets consumers’ needs and interests. This should go beyond just broadcasting some offer.
3. Use a variety of forms of content and understand the role that each plays in social media. A combination of time specific and evergreen information is necessary.
4. Enable social media participants to share content. This applies to the content on your Web site and third-party social media sites.
5. Support and promote consumer-generated content.
6. Integrate product information into your content/story.
7. Leverage social media’s ability to serve as a search function. In part, Twitter’s time on site is low relative to sites l
8. Use content in social media to help build organic search optimization.
9. Listen to, interact with, and recognize consumers. They want to be heard and acknowledged. They want human interaction, not an automated communication.
10. Provide immediacy and nimbly react to events as they unfold.
11. Participate in social media with a human voice and a personal story. This refers back to “The Cluetrain Manifesto.”
12. Encourage employees to participate in social media. Trust them to build relationships outside of the traditional channels of sales, support, and service.
13. Track relevant conversations, responses, customer relationships.

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Fed up with ubiquity? Start a counter-brand

Personally, I like name-brand gear as much as the next guy. Brand become ubiquitous for a reason. Sometimes a brand gets uber-popular because of merit, the quality of the offering and the overwhelming public support. Other times a brand gets popular due to factors that bewilder us. Status symbol items usually follow this track. Cars, coats, handbags and things of that nature.

It’s that disdain for the omnipresence of some brands that makes this story on Jimmy Winkelmann’s “The South Butt” brand such an awesome story!

Fed up at the constant presence of nonathletic college students sporting the latest North Face goods that should be better served outfitting a Sherpa than a student, Jimmy created his counter-brand called “The South Butt”. As Jimmy puts it,

The South Butt idea is simple: stay comfortable, relaxed, and always be yourself. Never Stop Relaxing

I can get behind that! The North Face, on the other hand, is not happy. They’re taking Jimmy to court…so we’ll see who wins. Actually, Jimmy was offered $1M from TNF, but he turned it down as his clothing line is turning out to be insanely profitable!

All this “south butt” stuff got me thinking.

What are the dominant brands that are annoyingly ubiquitous in other industries that one could successfully counter? More to the point – what ‘counter-branding’ measures could you use in your firm?

I can think of one that I saw recently that’s a parody brand of “Life is Good” that’s called “Life is Crap“. The shirts are funny enough and they graphics depict life’s less desireable moments with a wonderful humor. While I’m generally a positivist and have my own stock of “Life is Good” stuff kicking around, the Life is Crap message is irresistible at times.

What’s your favorite example of a parody brand or counter-brand? What can you do with this idea in your own industry? This could be fun!

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