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Marketing Consultation and Planning on the Digital Spectrum

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I Love Pablo!

I love Pablo

Once I went into a shop to look for snow pants for my daughter. As I came in there was no one in the store. In a little while a man comes out and when I ask him whether he has any snow pants for a 9-year-old girl he points absentmindedly in to a corner and says; “if we have them, they are over there”. He then took up a newspaper and started reading! I didn’t find any snow pants, and if I had, a don’t think I would have bought them. Why should I? I got zero service.

Then recently I went shopping at Wrentham Outlet just outside Boston. Like many women I know, I hate buying jeans. I love my jeans, use them a lot, but hate trying them on. But as I was in the land of the blue jeans, and there was a huge Levi’s store with great deals, I figured I’d undertake the torture of jeans shopping.

I entered the store with my heart thumping and anxiety levels spiking. Confused I scanned shelves after shelves of jeans and tried to tell myself it would be all right. [Read more…]

Blah blah bla bites, blah RAM, blah blah MHz blah… – Talk Like A Human!

blah blah blah talk like a human

What do you mean you don’t get it? Really?! There are actually a lot of people out there who think a lot of other people get it and can’t understand why there are not lots of people lining up to buy from them! :)

A few local IT companies have approached me about their marketing. These are smaller players in the market, offer various IT services and often also sell hardware. Most of these don’t sell a lot to IT specialists. Their main customers are individuals and small and medium sized businesses who don’t have an IT person, or if they have one, they are general IT managers who have a good overview of things, rather than specialists in anything.

The thing about these IT companies is that they are all pretty much the same – well, at least the ones I have checked out. They don’t set themselves apart in any way, and none of them talk like humans about what they can do for their customers. They all seem to get lost in techie jargon. Because they are all the same, and because they all speak tech jibberish, people don’t really care where they buy things. They will buy based on price and the whole market therefore competes on prices – and if people buy because of good service, it is more often than not because they were lucky enough to be serviced by Steve or Johnny or someone who is naturally good at customer service, rather than it being because of the company’s focus on customer service.

There are huge opportunities for differentiation in this market. Speaking [Read more…]