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I’m not a fan of the hard-sell, especially when it’s directed at me. As the marketing guy, I get all kinds of calls from would-be vendors, some more legitimate than others. My opinion is– give me the facts, send me some info, but then leave me alone. I’ll call you if I decide I want to buy whatever you’re selling. Every second of hard sell proportionately decreases the chance I will do business with you.

 A few weeks ago, I got a call from a guy who wanted to come in to meet with me about doing an article about our company in some publication. I should’ve smelled a rat, but I invited him in. Sure enough, he was selling ad space in some dubious publication allegedly sponsored by the chamber of commerce in our region, to promote the area as a good place to do business. And for just a few thousand dollars, we could have a page about us. Basically, no business value for us, assuming it was legitimate at all; and, he had misrepresented his intentions in order to get the meeting with me. I told him I’d check with the owner about it and let him know if I was interested, which was truthful enough. End of meeting.

2 weeks later he left a voice mail. And the next day, and the next day. At the time, I was swamped with a project, and didn’t have the time to deal with this guy. But he kept calling, and calling. Sometimes 2-3 times a day. I have caller ID, so every time I saw his name… bang, straight to voice mail.

After about 2 weeks (!) of this, he was still calling, and I still hadn’t responded. Partly because I guess I was being a little passive-aggressive, and partly because this was just getting damn weird. The Christmas break came, and I thought… great, at least that’s over with. But after New Year’s, a message. And another. And another.

I had somehow entered the set of Glengarry Glenn Ross, and I was on the wrong end of the phone. He was clearly going to keep calling, and I had decided there was no damn way I was going to talk to him.

I was out of the office for a week. I came back, and the message light was blinking. Guess who? More calls, and more calls.

At this point, this idiot has been calling for a month and a half, based on a 10 minute meeting arranged under false pretenses. I estimate he has made 30-40 phone calls, expecting… what? That I’m going to pull out a wad of cash as soon as I hear his voice and realize the brilliance of the opportunity?

I’ve got a better idea- how about starting with a product that adds value, and then focus the sales effort on explaining the value to your prospects. But don’t call me at dinner, and don’t leave me three messages a day. Because if it takes that type of effort, something is wrong with your product, or with your choice of target customer.

I spent this weekend devouring a really thought-provoking book called The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille. I highly recommend this title for any marketing or product development professional.

Rapaille is a cultural anthropologist who advises Fortune 500 companies on product and promotion design. His specialty is ‘archetypes’- he seeks to distill the essence of a particular people’s innermost feelings about a particular topic. Rapaille works to get beyond what people say, and to the heart of what they really think. If consulting for a beauty products company, for example, he will conduct thorough research into the target market’s feelings about Beauty. He distills his findings down to one- or two-word ‘Codes’ which represent the essence of the belief.

It’s fascinating stuff. Rapaille makes the case that most of us don’t know why we do what we do, because much of our life is driven by subconscious beliefs and feelings ‘imprinted’ upon us as children. If the Codes behind those feelings are cracked, it’s possible to create products which dramatically resonate with the market. He’s used his theories to drive the development of the PT Cruiser, among many other successful products.

Here’s a taste of one of his conclusions — in studying what the ‘Code’ for food is in America, he concludes the answer is ‘Fuel’. Food is something Americans use to keep themselves going, rather than something to spend time with and savor, as in other cultures such as France. With this insight in hand, food marketers might focus on messages of nutrition, fast preparation, and energy in order to stay on target with the market.

Rapaille spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting different national cultures around the world, particularly American vs European cultures. This is where I think there is a lot of insightful information. Maybe not the answer to every question you’ve ever had, but a lot of material to get you thinking about things in a different way.

In these days when doing business across borders is becoming the norm, even for smaller companies, it’s increasingly important for us to understand the cultural differences which can stand as barriers to success. Americans tend to be much less savvy with this understanding than other cultures, partly because of our geographic isolation, but also due to our somewhat US-centric attitude. I used to work in the travel business, and always found it remarkable that first-time American travelers to Europe would be amazed that people there did things differently that us at home.

Rapaille believes that for an American company to sell into France, for example, it needs to understand both the French view of Americans, as well as the French outlook on whatever the company happens to be selling. That shouldn’t be shocking to anyone, but Rapaille has a way of taking disparate concepts, each of which we may have encountered before separately, and coalescing them into a single statement which nails the bigger picture.

If you’re into marketing and cultural differences, and if you desire to better focus your product designs, it’s a thrilling book.

I came across a good post from Chris over at Email Marketing Best Practices, who discusses the confirmation email– the computer-generated email that most (and it should be all) web businesses shoot out to the customer upon conclusion of placing an order. 

He makes the point that this is a critical piece of communication for a web marketer. Why? Because it is the one piece which you can almost guarantee will be read by the customer. (Even if only to be sure you didn’t screw up the order). So for that reason, it seems like a great opportunity to do a little more than just send an invoice, confirm the order details, or provide a way to track the shipment.

For example, here’s a typical, just-the-facts confirmation email I got after purchasing some equipment for brewing beer at home:

They confirm the order, and that’s about it. What a missed opportunity. They could have invited me to join their discussion group or email newsletter. Something/anything to keep me involved so that the next time I’m ready to buy, I know where to go. And it wouldn’t cost them a penny. 

As an example, Chris uses a confirmation email which lists a few additional products for the customer’s purchasing consideration, describing this cross-sell attempt as a great example; ie. ‘you’ve just bought this from us, here are a few other things you should go back and buy right now.’ You see a lot of emails of this type.

This is where we differ in opinion. I disagree with the notion that 10 seconds after a customer places an order is the perfect time to hit him up again. My thinking goes like this: “Sheesh, I barely got my credit card back into the wallet, and these guys are hitting me up again? I’m starting to feel like you guys are only after my money.”

If you track the statistics on emails like that, how many do you think actually result in another immediate sale? Not very many, I imagine. The best time to close the deal is when someone is ready to buy, not immediately afterwards.

Here’s another approach- use the email to build the relationship. Your customer is feeling a little vulnerable- they’ve just given transmitted their credit card over the web after all, and there’s always the suspicion they’ve just been had by the Russian mob. So help assure them they’ve done the right thing. Establish your legitimacy, confirm the value of your brand, make them feel good about their purchase.

Make the relationship about more than just them giving you money. Do you have a user’s group? A blog? Invite them in. Offer a free download. Give some tips on how to use the product they just bought. Do something to keep them involved and extend their relationship with you beyond the sale, so that the next time they need to buy, they know exactly where to come.

I know the key performance stats for my websites, and since I run a few, I have some limited ability to compare stats between sites. But statistics need context, and something to compare them to. You know what I’d really like? The ability to benchmark my stats against some meaningful averages.

Understandably, this is somewhat proprietary information, so perhaps other sites would be unwilling to share. But maybe someone out there (if someone hasn’t already done so) could act as a kind of neutral party, strip the info of identifying informaiton, and present the macro results for the benefit of webkind.

A few bits of information I’d love to have access to:

• average conversion rate for web stores, with ability to drill down to conversion rates grouped by average price range of products sold,  also by product type
• average one-page exit rate, with ability to drill down to groupings by customer referral source - PPC vs organic search vs other
• how about customer acquisition costs, especially for PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.

Numbers are just so much more meaningful if you can put them in context by comparing with a larger data set. That’s what benchmarking is all about. Maybe I’m spending all my time trying to improve my conversion rate from 25% to 26%, when my industry average is 5%. There’s just no way to know without access to some macro data.

So if you know of such a resource, please chime in. Or if you’re motivated, please build one.

I’m a big Netflix fan. Huge selection to accommodate my somewhat eclectic tastes in film, and a great recommendation tool which has exposed me to many films I would otherwise never have encountered. My local Blockbuster, on the other hand, has 800 copies of whatever Tom Hanks put out most recently.

Netflix’s weakness is that it doesn’t have a store in the neighborhood, and it sells a product that people don’t plan in advance for, but want right now. But it has surmounted that problem (to the satisfaction of millions of customers at least) by building a massive and brilliant distribution operation which gets dvds to me really, really fast, and turns around dvds I return just as quick even though it’s against the company’s financial interest to do so. I suspect the involvement of tribes of Santa’s elves.

And having built this remarkable operation, Netflix knows one thing - its days as a movie-mailer are numbered, because internet movie downloads are coming. Technically, I guess they’re already here, but it’s not prime time yet, unless you live in Japan or Korea where connections are very fast.

Convergence has been in the air for a few years now, and it’s scent was certainly getting stronger at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. You’ll be hooking your tv up to your computer up to the internet, maybe skipping the computer altogether, and pulling down movies from the ether in seconds flat. The entire history of film, to be available at your fingertips and playable at your whim. What wondrous days.

But kind of a bummer, if you’ve built this ingenious distribution and dvd-mailing operation. And you thought you had problems!

So how does Netflix plan to respond? By blowing the whole thing up! As covered in detail over at Hacking Netflix, Netflix is starting to lay the groundwork for a movie download service. CEO Rick Hastings in the company press release:

“We named our company Netflix in 1998 because we believed Internet-based movie rental represented the future, first as a means of improving service and selection, and then as a means of movie delivery,” said Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive officer. “While mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles, the time is right for Netflix to take the first step.”

What a great example of understanding the company’s larger purpose. Netflix isn’t in the business of movie mailing, but rather movie distribution. Lucky for Netflix, it is able to make this hard decision. Compare with Blockbuster, formerly the ultimate category killer… saddled with a much-harder-to-dispose-of nationwide network of brick and mortar outlets, once its greatest strength, but at some point, the albatross around its neck.

I remember reading about how there is an innate difference between Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks customers. It’s kind of a red state / blue state thing. Starbucks people think of DD people as cultureless heathens who don’t understand good coffee. DD people think of Starbucks people as pretentious snobs, paying ridiculous prices for coffee at a place where you can’t even order with english words.

Never the twain shall meet, pick a side. My wife won’t step foot in a Starbucks, my brother will drive 50 miles out of his way to find one. Full disclosure: I don’t drink coffee, so I don’t have an iron in this particular fight.

I was impressed by Dunkin Donuts’ ‘Fritalian’ commercial, since it really nails, in a fun way, the anti-Starbucks attitude it knows its customers have a tendency towards. I would say the first rule of marketing is ‘Know thy place in the customer’s mind’, since you have to know where you are in order to decide whether (and how) to defend or alter your position. Dunkin Donuts knows where it stands, and this commercial shows the company is fully intent on staying there…

This is the fourth in a series of posts pointing out a few interesting products I saw at the 2007 CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

If someone asked me to commit my personal laws of product design to paper, I think the golden rule would be: It won’t succeed if it makes the user look like a dweeb. Think of the segue – great idea, seemingly intuitive-to-use product, potential implications for human transport. And yet, years after launch, how many people do you know who own one? I know the Segue is expensive, but on a relative scale, so are the BMW, the Rolex, the Burberry coat, and the iPod, and I know people with each of those.

I would suggest that the Segue’s real problem is that you look like a dork while using it. It doesn’t make you look vibrant, or rich, or stylish, or hip like the other products do. (If you’ve never seen the South Park episode which simultaneously demolishes the Segue and the entire airline industry, you should look it up). We all have needs, and we need those needs filled, but we’d much rather not look like a dork while doing so. Remember President Bush’s adventure on a Segue? I bet he didn’t want to pick up an extra one for the ranch in Crawford after that.

Many companies at CES were hawking goggles allowing you to view iPod or computer movies and videos without the use of a screen. Some were 3D as well, which made for some really nice effects. See pic at right for an example of what I’m talking about.

But you know what I think of whenever I see someone wearing these glasses? See picture at right– Geordi from Star Trek. I doubt I’m the only one who makes that connection.

So in my opinion at least, the goggle vision people have a problem. How do you work around it?

Since I’ve been posting lately about various cool gadgets, and since I cited Minority Report the other day, I wanted to put up a link to this video I came across. This is one of those cases where tech can change the way you think about things. Wow. Be sure to stick with the video, it gets crazier as it goes along. And pay attention to the crowd reaction in the background. This is the reaction every marketer dreams of… it’s the sound of “I’d pay anything to have what you just showed me”.

This is the third in a series of posts pointing out a few interesting products I saw at the 2007 CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

Seth Godin has written online and in print on the value of being remarkable,  recently posting 10 thought-provoking suggestions on ‘How to be remarkable’. As I was reading through that, I started thinking about the flipside of Remarkable, which would be Non-remarkable, or Ordinary. I think it should be somewhat logical to observe how hard it is to succeed by being Ordinary. But that certainly doesn’t stop legions of companies from storming the ramparts with products ‘10% superior to the competition’.

These are the Me-Too Guys. The Knock-Off Artists, the Incrementalists. On the other side of the spectrum from this crowd stand the Free Thinkers. These are the people who make waves, who make interesting things happen.

Sometimes their efforts fizzle (see: Apple Newton), sometimes the value is questionable (see: Pet Rocks), but sometimes they redefine the rules, and they change the paradigm (see: Mr. Bell’s telephone).

CES had plenty of representatives from all of the ‘types’ cited above. Lots of news was made by Panasonic for its new 103” HD plasma screen. And it sure is cool, but let’s face it, it’s an incremental improvement by definition, and it will be noteworthy only until someone else’s incremental improvement surpasses it.

It’s fun to look for free thinkers among the little guys, since that’s where they most often emerge. Here’s one – it’s not going to change the world, but it’s a rethink of a common product. We all know what a power strip looks like, right? It’s long and rectangular, with a power shutoff button on one side. If you plug in one or two wall-wart plugs, you quickly block most of the empty plugs, at which point you go off to find an extra power strip.

This is the second in a series of posts pointing out a few interesting products I saw at the 2007 CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

I’ve previously posted about some interesting non-products I encountered at CES. On a related tangent, I also saw an interesting product which allows you to touch something that isn’t there.

I’ve previously heard of ‘haptics’ which I believe has to do with the sense of touch (similar to optics being related to the sense of sight). I’ve heard of very expensive, very high-end haptic devices which allow CAD engineers to manipulate and essentially ‘feel’ virtual objects they are developing. Well, since this is the US, where hi-tech advancement seems to continually be driven by keeping computer gamers happy, a company called Novint was offering a haptic control device for gaming.

You know you’ve got an interesting product if you have a tiny display in one of the worst possible locations, and yet a crowd of people continually mill around your display to try out your item. (Actually, this also points to one of my trade show success rules of giving people something to play with in order to encourage their involvement).

Novint’s Falcon allows you to feel the object on the screen. I tried it out myself, and I don’t understand how, but it works. Touch a smooth ball and you can feel the cursor sliding around the curve. If it has a grainy surface you can feel the grain. They had an app where the cursor was a catcher’s mitt, and you were catching incoming pitches—you could feel the glove recoil when the ball hit the glove.

There were also plenty of companies selling gaming and home theater chairs which would rumble or recoil, but the level of sophistication here seem to go well beyond that. Sure, there are potential implications for gaming controllers and the gaming experience, but I wonder about impact for other fields – Doctors being able to feel the organs seen on a CAT scan? Astronauts feeling the objects picked up by the ship’s boom arm? Who knows where this can go.