Tara continues to explore new marketing, and the principles that underpin it.

1. Stop all outgoing messages. Concentrate on ways to listen better. Open up the channels to incoming. You can’t listen if you are yelling.
2. Be a community evangelist. It’s not about ‘creating customer evangelists’, it’s about advocating for your community. This is why it is important to have at least one person in-house that is focused on listening to the community. Even better is if everyone in-house is doing this. When developers and CEO’s get busy, it is increasingly more important to listen to the community advocate.
3. Drop the crap. Don’t think you are being clever in ‘fooling’ anyone to do your bidding. This is where ‘crowdsourcing’ really irks me. Anything less than 100% authenticity and ethics will be sniffed out. Trust is your greatest currency. You spend it and it is gone. It is a non-renewable resource.
4. Think small. Think niche. Forget the ‘we’re something for everyone’ thing. Nobody is something for everyone. Even those who have grown to be something for a large number of people didn’t start at mass level. [how to pick your niche: go through points on post ‘Target Practice’]
5. Employ open source principles like transparency, open sourcing your tools and getting your community involved in the actual development of your product early on.

Source: ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon: BayCHI Presentation: Notes

The first one is more and more intriguing today, and more obviously correct. The big banks have corporate communications machines, that kick into gear whenever a situation develops. That can a result of complaints, newspaper articles, or lobby group issues. In those situations, the stakeholders are quite a closed loop, and the average mass consumer doesn’t even register.

Then there are the marketing campaigns, that I was railed against ad nauseam here. In those campaigns, the messaging is all about “positioning”. The positioning is all about profitability. Rarely is there clearly focussed customer positioning as the going in position. Unique in that approach is ING. They have designed their products around the customer experience. They are focussed on keeping it simple, eliminating red tape, and listening to their customers. In fact not a bad start on Tara’s principles.

tags: marketing, pinkomarketing, customer+advocacy