Target in Trouble for Targeting?

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Marketing Musings

Recently, I read a fascinating (at least, to me) article about how Target is using data analysis to, well, target their marketing efforts. I won’t recap the entire story, but the gist is that Target used sophisticated data mining techniques in order to predict which women were most likely to be pregnant—based on their purchasing history. Target then sent coupons for pregnancy-related products to these customers.

One father got upset when his teenaged daughter received these coupons in the mail. Turns out, she had yet to tell her parents the news. Enter current brouhaha.

I found out about this story via Twitter (nearly my only source for news these days), and the commentary that accompanied it used a variety of inflammatory words, including: “creepy marketing,” “gross,” or―my personal favorite—“creeptastic.” Meanwhile, I found myself feeling a bit awestruck by how ingenious Target’s approach was.

I understand that the pregnancy thing is what makes this example stand out and seem a bit “creepy” to some readers. But, it seems to me, the real story here is just how powerful data has become for marketers. This story highlights the fact that you can learn a lot about a customer with the large amounts of data at your disposal, and marketers are going to do everything they can with it. Do marketers have a responsibility to use the data appropriately?

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My Journey from Seattle to San Francisco

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Careers, Company, Marketing Musings

Have you ever felt like you needed a new challenge at work? What did you do to make sure you felt like you were growing in your career and continually improving? For me, challenging myself and taking my career to the next level is one of the most important things.

Projectline works with customers like Microsoft, Dell, Intel, and SAP. These companies have large customer bases and need a savvy marketing agency to help tell their customer stories and bring in more sales. If you were to brainstorm the best place to build your business in the technology and software industry, where would you go? That’s right: San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. That’s why I moved to San Francisco from Seattle several weeks ago.

My goal in the Bay Area is to increase the visibility of Projectline’s services and connect more with our current clients in the area. It’s so important to have face time with your clients, to develop a relationship and really understand their business. Even with all of the conference-calling technology, in-person, human interaction cannot be replaced. So, I took this on as my new challenge: move to San Francisco and build a strong business in the area while deepening Projectline’s relationships with current clients in the area.

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Learning to Curate: How to Become a Modern-Day Trader in a Lost Art

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Remember back in your college days when one of your friends was always listening to the latest local bands or piecing together new and interesting outfits? Well, in their own way, they were curators. You may think of museums when you think of curation, but the truth is everybody curates in some way.

Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

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Getting a feedback loop started: 5 ways to get marketing and sales teams on the same page for better content

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Marketing Musings, Marketing Operations

Recently, we’ve been helping a client assess sales materials to figure out how they can improve relevance and quality. In talking to the product marketers and sales people, we discovered a few gaps.

Often, sales people modify materials to fit their prospects, presentation lengths, or personal styles—not to mention adjusting according to what works well and what falls flat. For marketing teams to capture what the sales people are learning and improve the materials over time, you need to build in a feedback loop.

Because everyone—not just customers, but sales people and marketers too—is getting used to interacting more directly through online networking and social media, our expectations have changed; we expect to be able to speak back, rate, and comment on things, whether they’re products, experiences, or even sales assets.

How might a product marketer enable that feedback and create the tools to capture it?

  • Assign a contact person or owner for each piece of material. Even if it’s not the perfect person, or several people should be involved, having someone “own” the material will prevent “not-my-job” and help ensure that there’s some accountability.
  • Create a central repository for the materials (many organizations already have something like this), but allow for commenting or rating of each asset. Think of how easy it is for people to “like,” “upvote,” or “downvote” something on Facebook, Reddit, or Digg – aim to create a frictionless way of communicating effectiveness.
  • Have the sales team nominate their most effective colleagues in the field, then ask those people to share the collateral that works for them. Ideally, they could also provide trainings or even example presentations, so that both product marketers and sales colleagues could see the sales assets in action.
  • Bring together some of those field champions to review content as it becomes available, using their experience to provide some initial improvements so the content can perform better right off the bat.
  • As a product marketer, don’t get too attached to your material. If you feel personally invested in the materials instead of the materials’ success, your pride can stand in the way of getting the best content for your audience. Your job is to shepherd the content to its best result, not to guard its wording.

Most of all, keep in mind that any solution needs to save time, not create more steps and tasks. Be respectful of your colleagues’ time—anything that costs them sales time won’t be sustainable beyond a few weeks.

Engaged in 2010

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

With the last few years’ escalation of conversation about customer engagement, it’s more than a little odd to note that some of the biggest marketing stories in the first week of this new year (and decade!) are actually about very traditional one-way marketing—or even customer dis-engagement. Case in point:

  • Last week dating site beautifulpeople.com made a PR splash by culling its ranks of singles who’d gained a little holiday weight. Seems like the exact opposite of customer engagement, right?
  • Polaroid named Lady Gaga as its new creative director: a perfect example of celebrity-centric splash-making.
  • Today, as CES hit its stride in day two, more and more of its live tweet-stream is mentioning iPhone trouble. With thousands of gadget fans, marketers, and tech bloggers in one place, the overload on AT&T’s network means they can’t engage the way they want to engage—online.
  • All the tech chatter is about tablets-to-be. They aren’t in consumers’ hands yet, so for now the chatter is confined to generalized hype and tech bloggers’ speculation.

What does this mean for those of use trying to engage customers in the longer term—those of us who care more about gathering customers’ reactions and responses throughout the product lifecycle than about an isolated PR splash?

Well, it seems like a great reminder that in getting customers’ attention, fun, surprising, and entertaining stunts still matter as much as ever. Creative diversions (like Lady Gaga), surprising moves (or even obnoxious ones, like beautifulpeople.com’s rejection spree), and big events (#CES) can kick-start the conversation. The trick is to make sure the tools are in place to support it, respond to it, and deliver on the promise—which is where the challenges lie for AT&T and tablets.

Beware the Disengaged Hashtag: Lessons from a Twitter Mess

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Marketing Musings

Whether or not Twitter made an impact on the outcomes of the Iranian protests—something we may not know for a while yet—the protests certainly made an impact on Twitter. As the election news and its aftermath unfolded in tweets and trending topics, people jumped at what looked like real chances to help: changing profile location settings, attempting to overload Iranian government websites, and even setting up proxy servers for Iranian users to maintain internet access. Some of it may have been good new-fashioned “slacktivism,” but it at least hinted at the possibility of more serious engagement with the events unfolding halfway around the world.

What didn’t show any engagement with those events, though, was Habitat UK’s tonedeaf marketing. Continue reading →

Bing’s ad campaign aims high.

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Marketing Musings

This post is by Ben Hawken.

Last week Microsoft launched its new search decision engine, Bing.

Bing comes equipped with some very cool features, and offers citizens of the intrawebs a unique, impressive web experience.

Although it’ll be quite a while before we can see the lasting impact of this effort from Microsoft, there are several features that do bode well for the future.

First and foremost, Bing is a quality product, and Microsoft has the resources and energy to maintain and refine it.

Second, Bing’s advertising has taken a decidedly positive tone, focusing on the product’s features rather than calling out any direct competitors by name. Continue reading →