Okay, let’s talk about some down and dirty marketing. I have a bee in my bonnet about something, and a survey says a bunch of other people do too. I haven’t come up with a catchy title or neat phrase for it, but it will be a series of posts tagged around the main topics concerned: customers, brands, and loyalty. Surely I can come up with something better… (or maybe you can).

Forgive me, but I’m going to use a little industry lingo because hey, I’m not a philosopher and we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re all used to looking around at marketing and advertising stuff–the articles, the blogs, the case studies, the campaigns–and we can get really inspired by them. I mean fired up about the kinds of things that are possible. They’re not easy to do, as evidenced by the multitude of failed ad campaigns. They take a team of people working really hard to pull off, and even then they might not be successful. That’s not the intimidating part for me. No, the intimidating part is that they’re B2C, for companies that have a loyal, energetic tribe of followers.

People out there have logos of computer companies tattooed on their bodies. They start blogs to track and detail new products and interact with other fans. How on earth can we inspire that kind of loyalty–even a portion of it–for brands and products that aren’t part of our daily lives? I don’t see anyone getting a RefreshWeb tattoo any time soon, but getting the clients we get because someone raved about us? I’ll take that kind of loyalty over the inky kind any day. But I want to take it and blow it up, make it huge, make it a big part of what we’re about. If we’re not providing work and service people rave about, then we’re doing something wrong.

This question has its teeth in me and won’t let go. I’m up late thinking about it, it distracts me from other tasks, I went to everything at SXSW that I thought might apply to it, I’m reading books… Am I going to find a panacea that applies to all SMB people? Of course not. But surely I can come up with some general rules, a set of questions to ask, a strategy…something! If this is something that interests you as well, here are some of the sources I’ve found particularly engaging and thought-provoking:

• From Frontline, on PBS, “The Persuaders” episode on market research and creating “tribes” is probably what planted this seed about a year ago. You can watch it online for free or get it from Netflix. To a lesser extent, but worth adding in as consideration for who and what the future consumers are like and accustomed to is the “Merchants of Cool” episode on marketing to teenagers. It’s from 2001, and things have ramped up with the ease of interactive, but still worth considering.
• The book Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message by Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba lives on my desk. It’s engaging, totally pertinent and dead-on, and I recommend and reference it often. I’d say to start here, but watching an hour of documentary is a faster place to jump in. They run The Church of the Customer, which is an excellent read.
• There’s a lot more, but it’s specific to certain aspects of this discussion. And since every professor I had told me, “Sara, it’s just a paper, not a dissertation. Stay on one topic!” I’m going to try to do that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under customers brands and loyalty, marketing, search marketing, social marketing, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.