The hidden truth of marketing as a service.
Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loupiote/
A year and a half into Zeus Jones, one of the biggest differences from what we originally thought our lives were going to be like is in the kinds of ideas that we are creating and building. Our vision had us doing lots of programs, services, applications and content that were fairly separate from our clients’ operations. Essentially we thought we’d be creating marketing ideas – useful ones of course – but marketing ideas nonetheless. Ideas which were separate from how the company typically makes money.
But what we’ve realised is that the flip side of turning marketing into something that’’s useful for customers is to find a way to turn the things you’re already doing for customers into marketing. Put another way, we’ve found that the best marketing isn’t always separate from operations, often the best marketing is great operations.
Some of the ideas that we’re proudest of are programs that improved or altered an aspect of operations to the point that they also became interesting to customers. Ideas like Fashion Feed (branding the fact that RSS feeds can be generated from advanced search). Or programs like Designed to Inspire that brought operational best practices from one part of the company to others (using designers online to sell and cross merchandise their own designs in the same way that salespeople would in store).
Ideas that come from operations have a number of benefits:
- They are intimately linked to that company in a way that separate marketing ideas can never be
- They can be tracked and measured directly through their impact upon sales or another internal operational measurement rather than needing to be measured as a marketing idea against secondary measures like awareness, engagement or so on.
- They don’t require a huge change in internal processes to implement making them much easier to bring into a company (in the best cases they actually improve internal operations as well)
- They can be often produced or executed by a company’s internal resources making them even more efficient.
I was reminded of this by this morning’s flurry of stories around Apple’s “brick.” By all accounts this isn’t a new product at all, it’s a way of making Macbook cases out of aluminum “using lasers and jets of water.”
While it’s true that almost anything that Apple does can get some fanboys all hot and bothered, it’s still a sign that people are often more interested in the real things a company does to improve its products and services than they are in its marketing ideas.
