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Word of Mouth From the Inside Out

Navel Marketing helps create organizations worth talking about and then arm customers to spread the word. On the surface, this may seem like a simple enough task, but too many companies today focus the majority of their efforts on how to get the word out with little thought as to why someone would care. Whether you choose to use more traditional tactics, such as advertising, or new methods, such as social media, your target market needs to know why you matter before they invest any time or emotion in your brand.

Marketing today is about meaning. Customers buy products but evangelists buy causes. You have to mean something in the marketplace before someone will take notice of your communications and, most importantly, tell others about them. Navel Marketing helps you develop the inner tools that create meaning for your customer, such as a cause, a unique and compelling position, a culture that reflects your cause, a simple repeatable message, a viral customer experience, and more. We then implement word-of-mouth marketing tools to help arm your customers spread the word.

November 15, 2010 at 3:09 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

E-Book Readers Are For Influencers

Recently, I was struck by a statistic that was highlighted in a July New York Times article. The article pointed out the fact that Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, is now selling more e-books than hard covers for the first time in history as of the second quarter of 2010. In fact, it was selling almost 1 1/2 times the number of e-books to hard covers. This trend doesn’t show any sign of slowing down either. In the 4 weeks prior to the article, that ratio was approaching 2 e-books to every hard cover.

Many credit the proliferation of e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Reader, or Apple’s iPad for driving the consumption of e-books. Though Sony’s Reader has been out for several years, it was the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle in time for the Christmas shopping season in 2007 that launched this rapidly growing trend. The combination of hardware, content, and wireless access was the missing spark that lit the e-book powder keg. It is no coincidence that what started it all was a product called the “Kindle”.

As the proud owner of a Nook, I am amazed at how easy it is to buy, read, and share e-books. I have always been an avid reader (in my adult life anyway), however, I read significantly more with the device than I did before. There are always free e-books that are on promotion and many authors are even giving away the first book in a series in order to get you hooked (I can attest to the fact that it works). I have an e-wishlist with 30 books on it and add one every time I hear about a new book that interest me. Sometimes when I am just sitting around (which isn’t often) or waiting for a plane and get the hankering to read, I just surf the Barnes & Noble eStore to see what’s available.

However, there is an even bigger reason for the growth in e-book sales. In fact, it reminds me of a client I had in another industry. Roaring Springs Water Park is the largest water park in the Northwest. Their season pass program gave the deepest discount to its customers and they considered getting rid of the program. What we did was help them understand that those people who buy season passes were the influencers. They were people who were so passionate about Roaring Springs, they knew they would come to the park enough to warrant a season pass.

Instead of doing away with the season pass program, we helped them add significantly more value through added perks and offerings. One of those was Buddy Tuesdays, where season pass holders could bring a friend for $10. They also stayed open an extra hour on Mondays, just for season pass holders as well as offered a 4th of July BBQ for $1 – again, just for those who were members of “the club”. The result – increased season pass sales and a 30% jump in profit the first year from people who would not only come to the park, but stay longer and spend more money.

How does this relate to e-books? Those who purchase e-book readers are like season pass holders at Roaring Springs. These are the influencers and evangelists. These are those who read so often that they know an e-book reader will be worth the investment. As such, they are shifting their reading habits from regular books to e-books and the book sellers as seeing the shift.

How are Amazon and Barnes & Noble appealing to this crowd? By offering a package of value that goes beyond just buying books cheaper. Those who own e-book readers are part of a club. They get special deals, can lend books to friends, and (in the case of Barnes & Noble) even have dedicated content when you bring your Nook into a store.

What does this mean for the future of the industry? Books will never go away, however, as your influencers and evangelists shift their reading habits you will continue to see a shift in the balance of power. Before, the publishing and distribution process was controlled by a select few. Now e-book readers are making it much more simple to publish and distribute your intellectual property. Barnes & Noble even has a new program called Pubit! that allows to publish your e-book directly to their library. Amazon has its Digital Text Platform which accomplishes the same thing. ePublishing sites like YUDU and Scribd make self-publishing simple and social. The iPad even allows you to have all these ePublishing libraries on one device.

When your influencers are on the move, so goes your industry. The publishing industry is seeing a seismic shift similar to digital music, television programming, and movies on demand. Some might say these earlier movements paved the way. However, one thing is for sure – the book industry is changing forever. Who will lead and who will follow? Who will be caught saying, “it’s just a passing fad”? How will the democratization of publishing affect the quality of the content? All these questions and more have yet to be answered.

Where do you think the growing demand for e-books will take the industry?

October 15, 2010 at 2:21 pm bcritchfield 2 comments

Marketing is About What You Are NOT

I have been lucky enough to work with companies large and small. Each does have unique challenges depending on market size, industry, and business life cycle. However, no matter the size of the company, it seems everyone struggles with many of the same problems. For instance, every company has to develop something worth talking about before prospects and customers will tell others about it.

One principle which is true no matter the size is that marketing is as much about what you are NOT as it is about what you ARE. No matter the size of the company, it seems everyone struggles with focus. This became apparent again during a recent workshop I conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for senior marketing executives at Pfizer, Abbott, and Phillip Morris. No matter what industry you in, the natural inclination is to cast a wide net. The prevailing thought is that if you focus your efforts, you risk alienating a portion of the market. In fact, the opposite is true in marketing. The more you narrow your focus, the more you broaden your appeal – because you mean something.

This means there is more power in being the company that specializes in software for the education market rather than the general market. There is more power in being the legal firm that specializes in IRS tax issues than the firm that does everything. There is more power in being a marketing firm that specializes in digital marketing rather than being a “full service” agency. It gives your employees a direction and your passionate customers something to tell their friends.

When you sit down as a team (or possibly a team of one) to create your marketing plan, don’t just determine what you are, decide what you are not. This takes discipline, self-awareness, and the slaughtering of a few sacred cows. However, especially when you are introducing a new product, division, or company, focus becomes critical to staking your claim and establishing a brand.

What DON’T you do?

October 14, 2010 at 3:50 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

Word of Mouth Marketing – Dilbert Style

A recent Dilbert cartoon nailed most companies’ approach to word of mouth marketing:

After you have yourself a quick chuckle, you’ll realize how much truth there is in this simple comic strip. How many companies today have heard of word of mouth marketing as a tactic and decide they need to add it to their “marketing mix”? I know have had too many companies approach me asking if I can do some of that “word of mouth stuff” for them. The problem is that marketing doesn’t happen in campaigns.

Let me share a secret I shared with the attendees at a recent workshop I conducted. The secret to word of mouth marketing is this:

Create an organization worth talking about
Engage with your customers
Arm them to spread the word for you

Notice step 1 is to have something worth talking about. How many companies do you know who miss that first, critical step?

How do you become a company worth talking about, you ask? Check out the “innie” model for a few ideas.

Any examples of companies you have seen who seem to epitomize the comic strip above?

October 4, 2010 at 4:15 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

Strategy First, Then Tactics

(The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of the upcoming book Marketing From the Navel: How to Become a Company Worth Talking About and Arm Customers to Spread the Word)

I have a favorite saying by the famed war strategist, Sun Tzu, that says, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” In the marketplace today, there is a lot of noise. Anyone who learns how to use Facebook is all of the sudden a social media “expert” and the bookstore shelves are littered with publications giving their take on what this new reality means from a marketing perspective. Most of this literature tries to tell you what is going on in the market but few give you the tools to do something about it.

If you were looking for a Twitter or Facebook “tips and tricks” book, then you have come to the wrong place. There are plenty of excellent publications available that will help you hone your skills in one particular technology or another. There are some publications that will give you a task list (i.e. “write a blog”, then post it on Facebook, then Tweet about it). Others will give you a list of rules for online etiquette.

Stephen Covey talks quite a bit about “paradigms” in his writings, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A paradigm is a mental map, or the way in which we see the world. He uses the analogy of an iceberg to illustrate that the tip of the iceberg is our behaviors or our attitudes. If we want to make small changes in life, we work on the tip of the iceberg. However, if we want to make large, quantum changes, we work on the mass of the iceberg beneath the water, which is our character. It is as Blaine Lee states in his book, The Power Principle, “The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world.”

I believe organizations work the same way. For so many years, we have operated under a certain paradigm. The industry as a whole has been making small changes by simply changing their tactics or their attitude about the consumer revolution. We have merely added social media or viral marketing as arrows in our quiver. I want to do more than change your list of tactics, I want to change your paradigm. I want to change the way you think about marketing.

Secondly, you most likely hear a lot of “noise” in the marketplace about new marketing tactics and how the old ways are dead. The Internet bubble of the late 1990s taught us many lessons about hype versus substance. The biggest lesson of all was that core business principles don’t change, but remain constant. For example, you still need a business plan that will generate revenue at some point (being bought out for millions of dollars because you have a lot of users doesn’t count). Also, cash is still king, and the faster you burn through your venture capital money, the faster you will make it to the unemployment line. This is the reason Amazon.com is still growing, yet Pets.com is a mere sock puppet memory. The Internet bubble taught us that though the delivery mechanisms may change, the core principles stay the same.

While there is significant hype about new forms of marketing, whether it be new media, word-of-mouth, or simply new places to plaster ads (i.e. cell phones, urinals, bases in baseball stadiums), there is a risk in all the hype. People are again forgetting the basic principles of marketing that still apply and are more important than ever. Like core principles in the universe (i.e. do unto others as you would have them do unto you), there are core principles in marketing that never change – despite the tactics. Many of the technology tools available today, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn didn’t even exist 5 years ago. The tools may change, but if you understand the principles you can be successful no matter what the hot new technology is.

In the following pages, you will hear familiar terms, such as “positioning”, “customer segmentation”, and “customer experience”. Do not be alarmed! These are simply some of the core principles of marketing that, when applied correctly in the new paradigm, are just as powerful and more relevant than ever.

In this book, I introduce two separate models. The first model will help you develop a company worth talking about. This is the strategy component. Before you do anything online or off, you have to create something worthy of our attention, worthy of our passion, and worthy enough to pass along. Otherwise, you will merely create the “noise before defeat.” The second model takes the buzz-worthy organization you have now created, and shows you how to deputize your own customers to take your message out and spread the word. This is the tactical component that will help you achieve a quick “route to victory.”

There were many who were too comfy in the existing power structure and existing paradigm. Marketers controlled the message, the medium, and the content. Today, they are no longer in the conversation, and that elicits great fear in executive corridors and ad agency war rooms. However, those that embrace and implement the following models and principles will find that it is an amazing time in our profession. Never before have we been able to engage with each consumer on a one-to-one basis. Never before have we had the key influencers in our target market gathered together in a central location. Never before has a message been able to spread so quickly.

All you need are the tools… the tools of the revolution.

November 9, 2009 at 2:55 pm bcritchfield 3 comments

Are The 4 Ps Dead?

(The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of the upcoming book Marketing From the Navel: How to Become a Company Worth Talking About and Arm Customers to Spread the Word)

The 4 Ps

In 1960, a concept was introduced by E. Jerome McCarthy that identified the four basic tenants of marketing as Product, Price, Place, and Promotion or, as it is more commonly known, the 4 Ps. Anyone who has ever taken a marketing class from then until now is taught the 4 P’s as the basic overview of marketing. These simple questions are what make up the basics of marketing:

What kind of product are we going to produce?
What is the right price for this product?
How are we going to distribute this product?
How are we going to promote and sell this product?

The purpose of McCarthy’s model was to further the understanding that marketing is much more than selling and advertising. In actuality, Selling and advertising only make up the promotion component of McCarthy’s model. According to McCarthy in his book Basic Marketing: A Global-Managerial Approach, “The aim of marketing is to identify customers’ needs – and to meet those needs so well that the product almost sells itself.” Easy enough, right?

The truth is that today many marketers are declaring the 4 P’s dead, or at least no longer relevant. There are many marketers who have even added more P’s to the mix, such as people, process, physical presence, or (as the word-of-mouth/social media crowd like to say) participation. The big question is can any product almost sell itself, or are there other critical factors in the new reality of the consumer movement?

The Missing Ingredient

While the 4 Ps offer a good basic framework for understanding the all encompassing nature of marketing, they are missing one key ingredient that has been made blatantly apparent by the consumer revolution – the consumer’s involvement in the process. The 4 Ps are segmented like an organizational chart, chopping up the functions of marketing in 4 bite-size chunks. But what about the fickle nature of the consumer? What if what meets their needs well one day doesn’t the next? What if your product is priced correctly, but so are the other 123 options on the market? What if the best person to design your product is the consumer? What if the consumer discovers your product is manufactured in sweat shops in India by 8 year-olds because someone walked in with a camera phone and then posted it on YouTube, their blog, and their Facebook page?

As I mentioned before, the world has changed since advertising’s glory days in E. Jerome McCarthy’s 1960s. However, many marketers have not. I have had the opportunity on many occasions to guest lecture in a university marketing class or judge a high school or college marketing class and am disappointed, to say the least, to see that our marketing education has not kept pace with the changing nature of marketing. Marketing educators still spend the majority of their time on the 4 Ps (with some attention paid to segmentation) and then dive into advertising. Some might say that this is indicative of the average age of the tenured professor, the fact that so few educators are practicing marketers within the wild west of the last 5 years, and some might even say it is a flaw in the system.

According to the existing system, educators lump this new reality of the consumer revolution into “interactive marketing”, because a significant portion of it occurs online. What they fail to see is that we need to re-address the underlying models upon which marketing is based. It goes beyond adding more “Ps”, but needs to address the new reality that we as marketers face today. We need a model that helps us understand the X factor that the consumer plays in the marketing process. We need a model that helps us connect with and engage the consumer in ways that they are most comfortable with. We need a model that helps cut through the clutter that exists in the commoditized markets in which we compete by tapping into the ability of human beings to influence each other.

November 2, 2009 at 12:14 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

How to Arm Customers to Spread the Word

Up to this point, I have emphasized the Navel Model for creating a company worth talking about. It is critical that you do this piece first. As the great military strategist, Sun Tzu, once said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Most literature in the marketing realm is about tactics. In social media, people go right to Twitter and Facebook. In advertising they go right to the 30 second spot or the full page print ad. However, in order to have successful tactics, the strategic pieces need to be in place first.

Once you have created an organization worth talking about, the next step is to arm your customers to spread the word. It doesn’t matter what the medium is, the process remains the same. The six steps below work especially well in social media, but also work in public relations, advertising, direct marketing, or any other medium. The six steps below are also not linear but are circular because they are not always done in order. By implementing the steps below, you can better find your target influencers, arm them with tools to spread the word, and amplify their efforts.

Publish – There is an argument in the social media space about whether content is king or conversation is king. The reality is that both are important for successful word-of-mouth. Content without conversation is advertising – it’s one way. Conversation with content is chatter. It is social media strictly for the social benefit. The first step is to publish great content. With all of the tools available today, there are many mediums you can use – it simply depends on your audience. If they have time to read and revisit often, then right a blog. If they are more inclined to download content and listen at a later date, then a podcast may be the best option. If they learn visually and your content is meant to be demonstrated, then produce a video series, or vidcast. For tools, check out WordPress, Libsyn, and YouTube. If you want to know what to write your content about, always think “educate and advocate.” Provide educational insights, how to’s, or insider information. When advocating, look to the cause you created in your Navel Model.
Syndicate – Now that you have produced great content, step 2 is to find all the places you can share that content. Obviously, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other online communities are a natural fit, however, also consider how you can share this content in your advertising, PR, and direct marketing efforts. Link to it within your social communities. Use snippets in advertising. Use it to pitch editors to cover important topics about your company or industry.
Integrate – The amazing thing about where technology has come from in the recent past is that today, everything talks to each other. That means you can spend less time and get better results from your efforts. By integrating your blog utility with your social communities, every time a new post is created on the blog, it can automatically be posted to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Every time you Tweet it can update your status in Facebook, both your personal profile and your business pages. The key with integration is to amplify your efforts.
Converse – Referring back to the argument under “Publish”, once you have great content, the next step is to talk about it. Talk about your content. Talk about others’ content. Talk about a recent lesson you learned in your business. The key is to talk. Dare to be human; to be more than just a brand. The more personal you can be, the more others will grow in affinity for your brand and share it with others.
Help - This is the concept upon which social media was built – people helping people. The Golden Rule is as applicable in social media as anywhere else. The more that you help others, the more benefit you receive in return. This is where you solidify your customer evangelists. It can be something as simple as re-Tweeting their Tweets or something more complex, like writing a blog post about them. You can answer questions on LinkedIn (and syndicate by linking to your content) or you can comment on another person’s blog. These are all forms of help.
Monitor – Lastly, one of the most powerful aspects of social media is that it is infinitely searchable. I can monitor conversations going on almost anywhere in the social web and (politely) engage in the conversation. I can measure how much chatter there is online about a particular brand. I can even automate monitoring so that I am instantly notified when a conversation is taking place. The ability to monitor online conversations is one of the most important aspects of the social web and the reason it is one of the fastest growing marketing mediums today.

With the six steps above, you create great content, share it in as many places as you can, make your technologies talk to each other, engage with others, be helpful, and monitor conversations in order to start the cycle all over again. If you have done your previous work, such as creating a position, cause, culture, and message, you’ll know what to share and converse about. While you may go through the Navel Model only once in a while, the above steps will be a daily to do list.

With the six steps above, you can adequately arm your customers to quickly spread your message for you. Which do you do already and which could you improve upon?

September 24, 2009 at 7:19 pm bcritchfield 3 comments

A Word About Tolerance on the Social Web

Tolerance may be one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. There are many using this term who simply manipulate it to fit their own purposes. True tolerance is something quite different than what is portrayed in the mainstream media. While this may have implications far beyond the social web, I wanted to discuss the importance of tolerance in building a brand online that is worth talking about.

Let’s start with the definition of tolerance. According to Dictionary.com, tolerance is, “interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one’s own.” This means not only being open to opposing points of view, but actively seeking them out and showing interest for opinions that are different from our own. This is where it starts to come off the track. There are many, especially those with extreme points of view on either side, who believe that others should be tolerant of their viewpoint, but they are not will to listen to the other side. Tolerance is a two way street and it involves empathy, not sympathy. Empathy is your willingness to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – to see it from their point of view. Sympathy means that you share their same views.

What does this have to do with building an online brand? Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how the web has become a collection of coffee shops where groups of people sit around chatting about anything and everything. However, while what happens in the coffee shop typically stays in the coffee shop (except for the gossipers in the group), what happens online is out there for everyone to see. Your political views, your religious practices, and even your favorite sports team can all be sticking points for a potential brand ambassador. While it would be wonderful if everyone were tolerant, this is simply not the case. Therefore, you have to be proactive about seeking out opposing views and being open to the discussion. a) You might learn something and b) You meet some very interesting people that way. If there is a topic you feel particularly strong about, maybe avoiding the topic is the best way to build relationships.

Social media has brought the world together more than any other technology to date. However, just because you hand someone a microphone does not mean they have something worthwhile to say. One of my favorite quotes is from Uncle Ben on Spiderman who said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” How do we make the most of our new found amplification of our freedom of speech? Seek out new opinions. Engage in meaningful and respectful dialogue online. Build on common ground. While it is our views and beliefs that make us who we are, it our tolerance that binds us together. There is enough of ignorance and hate in the social web. Whether you are building a corporate or personal brand online, engage everyone. If used correctly, not only will social media help you build a brand like never before, but it can become the greatest source for good in human history.

June 25, 2009 at 12:56 pm bcritchfield 4 comments

What They Don’t Teach You In School… About Marketing

Over the last couple of weeks, I have lectured in 3 different college marketing classes (I have 2 more scheduled) and judged a high school marketing competition. Based on these encounters with mushy young minds, I was able to make a few general observations about the status of our educational system as it relates to marketing. Some of the observations were good, and some not so good. However, I walked away with a general frustration at a lack of the solid marketing principles upon which brands are built today in our educational system.

Don’t get me wrong, while there are some great teachers out there who pour their heart and soul into helping students learn and apply the right knowledge, I think some are a little farther removed from the real world of marketing. In fact, I think it is changing so quickly, it may have passed them by entirely.

Based on my experiences over the last few weeks, here are a few key principles that I don’t feel like teachers spend enough time on in school:

Positioning - It seems common sense that a class on marketing would start with “what makes you different than everyone else?” I believe that teachers spend WAY too much time on the 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). While these are the basic building blocks of marketing, you first have to understand where to build. I believe that any beginning class on marketing should be 80/20: 80% positioning and 20% 4 P’s. Most of the high school marketers built their plans around the 4 P’s but with no thought to differentiation. In my opinion (or IMO for you short hand freaks), positioning is the blood that runs through the veins of marketing. Thank you to the Godfathers of positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, for blessing us with this morsel of wisdom almost 40 years ago.
Focused Segmentation - Again, this is another component that receives cursory attention in school, but is critical to the success of any marketing effort. The more focused your target market, the easier your job becomes as a marketer. Start with demographics, narrow your focus with psychographics, then pinpoint with buying emotions. As the ole’ cliche goes in marketing, “the more you narrow your focus, the more you broaden your appeal.” In my view, marketing is a very simple concept. Identify what truly makes you unique (positioning), find out who cares about it (segmentation), and figure out how they get their information. That leads me to the next point.
Marketing is About Conversations - This was one of my greatest frustrations, with both high school and college students. Whenever they developed their marketing mix, they went right to TV, Radio, Billboard, Print, oh.. and some Internet stuff. Why? Because that is the way their parents and their parents’ parents did it. This is where the previous 2 pieces come into play. If you do any sort of of research, people are skipping TV commercials or watching it online, buying satellite radio or iPods so they don’t have to listen to radio commercials, and getting their news and information online rather than from the printed newspaper or magazine. Not that these can’t still be effective, but stop and think about where the target gets its information from first. Second, think about how you can talk WITH them, not AT them. The reason social media has exploded is because consumers want transparency, not carefully crafted marketing spin.
The Cause - This is a theme I talk quite a bit about in my interactions with clients as well as students. In order for any brand to become outrageously successful, it has to create customer evangelists. However, most marketing efforts are focused on “speeds and feeds”, if you will. Customers buy products, and will buy your competitors’ products whenever they are cheaper or more convenient, but evangelists buy causes, or buy into causes. Evangelists have to be passionate about something in order to be evangelists. Who get’s passionate about a “good quality product” or “good customer service”? What is the higher, holier calling to what you do? What is the altruistic meaning behind why you are in business? And don’t start into your “mission statement” because that ain’t it either. What is the real reason people buy your product? That is your cause.
Social Media - To the credit of the college professors, this is the topic they wanted me to come and talk to their classes about. However, most of them were clueless about how to integrate it into marketing efforts. They knew it was a powerful medium, they just didn’t know how to use it. I remember giving seminars 5 years ago about what a blog or a podcast was and now people come to me hungry for information on how to use social media tools. It is a nice change, but those who educate our nation’s youth need to be up to speed on what social media means to 21st century brands. They need to integrate case studies into their classes and, most importantly, need to be users of social media themselves. (As a side note, I was shocked with how few students knew about Twitter, but were avid Facebook users)
The Simple, Repeatable Message - Unfortunately, most would insert the word “tagline” here but a simple, repeatable message is not a tagline. It is a one line answer to the question, “what is it that you do?”. Too much of marketing today is what Bill Bernbach called “irrelevant brilliance”. It is all about snarky quips and provacative phrases. They miss the simple answer to “why should I buy from you?” Creatives often step over (or on) the simple, repeatable message in favor of some mythical creature called “the big idea”. Don’t get me wrong, your marketing efforts should be wrapped around a consistent, compelling theme but you don’t need to create complex out of simple.

These are just a few of the things that I wish they taught more of, or better, in school. It would sure make what our youth are paying for their educations worth the price.

As a side note, I somewhat broke the rules in the high school marketing competition, but I did it consistently. I took the time with each team to enlighten them as to the principles above. Hopefully they walked away from our interaction with a little more clarity as to what marketing is all about. I thought that was much more important than how many points they received.

What about you? What nugget of marketing wisdom have you learned that you wish they taught you in school?

March 31, 2009 at 3:18 pm bcritchfield 6 comments

The Death of Spin

I talk a lot about transparency on this blog, especially when it comes to marketing and PR activities. With the unprecedented access we have to information today, the truth will come out (just ask Dan Rather).

That’s why I was impressed to read a story about the PR person for the Metrolink train system in California. If you have been watching the news lately, you have probably heard about the collision of a commuter train and a freight train which killed 25 people, at current count. In a horrific accident like this, the first thing most companies would do would be to hide the truth, skirt the issues, and “spin” the story. It all comes back to controlling the message.

However, in this case, the PR representative came right out and said after preliminary investigation that it appeared that the accident was the fault of the Metrolink engineer. This obviously didn’t make her bosses happy and they came out 2 days later and said the announcement was “premature”. The very next day, the PR representative, Denise Tyrell, resigned.

Now, the first rule in PR is to make sure you have a coordinated message and Ms. Tyrell may have acted without consensus, which simply makes you look bad. However, I have to give her major credit for not hiding the truth, but coming right out and stating the facts. The families of the victims deserved it, the people of California deserved it.

There is a verse of scripture that is often quoted that says, “and the truth shall set you free.” I never understood the philosophy behind politicians, athletes, and CEOs lying to the public and thinking that it will all just go away and they won’t be discovered. John Edwards and Roger Clemens are only the latest two victims of this practice.

The reality is that we all make mistakes. In out day and age, honesty is refreshing. I can tell you for a fact that the public is much quicker to forgive those who are honest up front than those who are forced to be honest. Though Bill Clinton may have been a pretty good president, he will always be remembered for his lesson on what the “definition of “is” is”. What?

The lesson: be honest up front, even if it hurts. Tell the public that your sorry and outline how you plan to resolve the issue. Forgiveness comes much quicker to those who reveal the truth themselves because, eventually, the truth will come out. We have too many citizen journalists today who will scoop it.

Any examples of honest “spin” that you have seen?

September 16, 2008 at 4:42 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

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