Archive : Series: Marketing Bullseye

[UPDATE 5/1/08 -- Rich passed away on 4/25/08. See How to LIVE RICH post] As part of the Marketing Bullseye series I will interview people who ‘get it’. Rich Lloyd is one of those people. Rich Lloyd and I worked together for 7 years at Dell. While I ran the consumer web site, he built the email and My Account capabilities for Dell. When I ran Consumer CRM, he was leading Dell’s Global database infrastructure & CRM efforts. Rich has an extensive background in database and direct...

The bulls eye concept because it not only helps describe middle-brain marketing of blending creativity with measurement, but it also conceptualizes the idea of choosing the most effective way to do things. So what’s the bulls eye in copywriting? Many marketers look at their competitors’ web sites and copy. In the end, every site looks like the other and clever white-paper-speak terms emerge. Terms that are not the language of the customer I don’t think that’s what copywriting means!. Hit...

There is an article in the recent MarketingProfs that is a great way to think about whether or not to do a marketing activity — and therefore a great way to prioritize marketing activities with limited resources. Essentially you must conscsiously ask yourself or your team a set of questions to determine if any given marketing activity will be a credit to your brand ‘checkbook’, or debit. The principle is brought from Starbucks. Here’s a snapshot of the article: Just as your...

In my father’s book, You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard he calls it the ‘First Brain.’ Malcolm Gladwell in his great book Blink calls it the adaptive unconscious. Without getting into a lot of detail, in the center of our cerebral cortex there is the limbic system (our emotions) and brain stem (our unconscious habits are housed here.) Together they make up our pre- or unconscious brain. The fact is that all of our sensory input — the nerve pathways from our eyes and ears...

Hitting the marketing bullseye is balancing measurement rigor with creative relevance. For example, Southwest Airlines maintains efficiency without losing creativity or soul. You can get a $150 flight (efficiency through operational rigor) while the flight attendant recites FAA rules impersonating Robert Deniro (creativity and ‘soul’). Up until now I’ve posted blog entries in the "longitude" dimension of the marketing bullseye –metrics, optimization, and finance. Now, for a...

I have spoke at several conferences on 12 principles to put eBusiness into the heart of your business. However, these principles are applicable to bring about any change to the center of your culture – assuming your culture cares about metrics. There is a heart in your business. It is often hard to articulate, but you know the people, meetings, and general culture from which most decisions and actions originate. Your project, program or department may or may not be in on this heart of the business....

Last week I was lunching at a barbecue restaurant when I saw a gumball machine with a coupon flyer on top of it. I wondered if the person managing the gumball machines was the same person distributing the coupons that sat on top. If they weren’t they missed out on a key bulls eye marketing principle: Piggybacking. In a world of limited resources, you should leverage and maximize existing marketing "working capital" to carry your messages. There’s a disproportionate amount of investment...

I grew up learning basketball from coaches that enforced learning the fundamentals (to stray meant line drills!). That meant practicing with proper shooting form, basic passes, game-time shots, etc. When he wasn’t watching I was perfecting fadeaway jumper, hook shot, half-court shot, and attempting to slap the backboard on a reverse layup! They were more fun, but I rarely used them in a game (or when he was looking). Bullseye marketing is focused on the fundamentals first. Sure, you can try...

A couple posts ago I talked about the P&L aspects of marketing cost scaling. A key factor to marketing costs scaling is for marketing programs to scale. In effect, any marketing initiative or process  created should be sustained and optimized for less resources over time. The best marketing programs are those that get set up, perform, and don’t require my attention. This is and was my philosophy as a marketer and online retailer, and I’ve heard this from many of our online retailing...

I once gave a presentation to an industry group called "Rivers of Revenue: How to Build a Marketing Machine".  In that presentation, I showed an approach to ‘processize’ your way to achieve a quantifiable goal. I call it a Workback Waterfall. It’s nothing revolutionary…but many things that hit the marketing bullseye are not spine-tingling. Essentially it requires you determine what you want to accomplish, then define the steps to get there and then work backwards...