Seat at the Table

This week’s Unsolicited Advice column at Forbes.com offers marketing advice that every marketing orietened public relations professional should read.  Focusing on marketing to the Internet consumer, the column lays out four strategies that companies should look at not just as marketing strategies, but as the pillars ofproduct and brand reputation.   Read the full column first.  Then, with credit to Marc Babej and Tim Pollak, the columnists and partners at Reason Inc., here are their strategies translated into reputation pillars:

1. Assume your customer is armed with all the information you have about your product and your competitors’ product.  These days, consumers can access all types of product technical, pricing, quality and customer service information, and compare it to competitors.  Assume the consumer has all this when laying out the companies positioning.  This means companies can no longer say they have great customer service if they don’t.  A consumer can easily find out it’s a false message, and that affects the consumer’s belief in anything a company says.

2. Defy comparison (I love this one).   Any product should have something unique – it may be it’s design/simplicity, a technical feature, price or product quality.  Find that unique aspect that appeals to the buy base and focus the message around that.  This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for competitors, media and other influentials to make potential negative comparisons.  For example, Motorola’s Razr isn’t a technical marvel (in fact, it turned out to be a minor technical mess) and many would argue there are nicer looking phones.   However, it was the slimmest when it first came out and that’s what the messaging centered on.  It turns out, people loved slim and, ignoring the technical and feature quality, consumers bought a ton of these phones.

3. Match the message to the target.  This was always true for public relations but it’s become for more critical.  Today’s communications and marketing environment is one of a highly segmented target audience.  Demographic A watches one show,  B surfs a specific Web site, C is a sports fanatic, etc.  Mass messaging is like throwing out a giant, expensive net to catch several fish.  Instead, figure out what bait (message) and fishing spot (demographic group) matches up, and go fishing.  Don’t do this and lose out to companies catching more customers with fewer marketing dollars (i.e., better businesses).  And, yes, it’s the start of fishing season here in the Northeast.

4. “Deliver what you promise.”  You’d think this was a Duh statement.  Remember the statement, ”you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time”?  For years companies seemed to focus on the latter group and get away with it.  Cigarette, anyone?  In today’s environment, there’s a good chance that a broken company promise will be a top search result when people search for the company. 

It can seem quite simple – treat your customers as educated consumers, position your product as unique, match messaging to audiences and keep your promise.  Like so many things, it’s easier said than done.  But in this case, not doing it isn’t simply bad business, it’s an exposed business.