MKTG 555- Reflection & Thoughts

To be upfront, I was a social medial doubter before I enrolled to this course, which might be attributed to my scientific/engineering background. During this past winter quarter-2013-, I had the great opportunity to learn what real marketing is from one of most enthusiastic, savvy, and well-connected lectures from the UW-Foster Business School as well as the Seattle area.

It is extremely challenging to summarized everything that we discussed and learned during my time at MKTG555, but some of the key point that I, personally, take home are: know your customer, size your market, and most important have a strategy. Also, we covered in depth the enormous power of social media, which to my understanding now to me more than a channel of communication-it is a community. With this said, I realized with this course that social media can be successfully leverage to build and market any product (nowadays, having a company’s facebook page will not cut it). You need to create an ecosystem in where you engage your community a.k.a. future and current customers as well as your industry peers.  Moreover, it is essential to highlight that each social media setting is unique; customers will use twitter, pinterest, facebook, and many other to communicate, socialized, understand, and most important share your product-free marketing-.  Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of these channels, grand portion covered in this class, will help companies to develop a campaign that not only just reach people, but also connect with your target consumers.  Currently, to the best of my knowledge, the best social media campaigns had been directed to interpersonal interactions that are linked to social interaction of brands and expand beyond company’s products.

Throughout this class also we had the opportunity to put in practice a real marketing campaign, which is different from fancy strategies from the book, for our final class project. As well as we had the chance to meet some of the most recognized entrepreneurs in the Puget sound area- great experience!

Overall, this class was extremely informative and useful. I will definitely continue reading Geekwire, startup Seattle, marketing 555 blog as well as have better understanding of SEO now after looking into SEOMoz.  I additionally will keep follow Steve Blank’s blog, since the information there has been helpful.

OneBusAway uses maps to hit a perceptual map bullseye

Although the popular app OneBusAway (OBA) does not quite fit the “entrepreneurial venture” mold, it offers a dynamic,  widely-accessible, and functional solution to a pain point that affects thousands of King County residents. I use OBA on a near-daily basis- largely because its positioning delivers what it promises: straightforward and reliable transit information in real-time.

OBA was developed by two graduate engineering students at the University of Washington in 2008 because, in the words of co-founder Brain Ferris, “waiting for buses in Seattle isn’t pleasant.” Brian worked with fellow student Kari Watkins to develop an open-source information system that improves transit’s overall usability. It now services over 50,000 users per week.

Before adopting OBA, my transit experiences in Seattle were fraught with frustration. Whether on its app, website, or printed marketing collateral, OBA’s positioning addresses this sentiment head-on by sending the exact opposite message. Its content emphasizes transparency, its graphics are crisp and clear, and its interface is explicit and intuitive.

OBA’s positioning states: “Where is your bus? Let’s find out.” Fortunately for me and countless other transit riders, it maps it out for us, literally and figuratively.

Focusing on Retention and Referral through Buzz Marketing

Our most recent guest speaker panel focused on buzz marketing and how customer retention and referrals develop from successful buzz marketing campaigns. The guest speakers consisted of accomplished marketing professionals Jason Reid, Jen Nausin, and Adam Tratt. Jason is an Emmy-winning Seattle filmmaker and owner of 2R Productions, a Seattle-based production company with clients such as Microsoft, Google, and Nordstrom. Jen is the Director of Marketing at Cheezburger, Inc., a collection of websites with the goal of making each visitor happy for five minutes of the day. Adam Tratt is the CEO and Founder of Giant Thinkwell, providing an online video platform that is consistent across all platforms. This exceptional panel provided the audience real life examples from their varied marketing backgrounds

There were many common threads throughout the night, primarily; a great product is necessary to long-term success in marketing, the concept of maintaining a “scrappy” mentality, specialization builds efficiencies and expertise, and a passionate consumer base cultivates effective buzz marketing. First and foremost, each panel member agreed that the product is the driving factor to any marketing campaign. A great product generates word-of-mouth, giving weight to the marketing side of the equation. While a concrete definition of scrappiness was never stated, Jen may have said it best that flexing your creative muscle while on a strict budget fosters a sense of scrappiness. From my perspective, scrappiness is an ideal combination of efficiency and effectiveness. As a marketer, specialization allows you to become an expert in a given study. Expertise leads to the appearance that you (or your firm) are large in stature, regardless of the size of your portfolio. Finally, a passionate consumer base will provide useful feedback and cultivate any marketing efforts. Jason referenced the fact that it is significantly easier to tap into an existing passionate fan base than to create new fans. Buzz marketing is the process of cultivating the passion in your consumer base. As Jason puts it, a good marketing campaign evolves the consumer’s passion into a movement.

Maintaining a customer-centric focus is key to customer retention and referral. Adam provided a great example of Pagliacci Pizza surprising and delighting customers through such strategies as offering 1984 pricing on Leap Day and seemingly random free pizzas presented to loyal customers. Furthermore, Adam advocates that many tactics can be used in optimizing a marketing strategy but the strategy itself has a singular objective: get people to love you. You, as a marketer, must promote a core belief that resonates with your target market. Adam’s core believes may boil down to: 1) Make a great, consistent product; 2) Surprise and delight customers (don’t be afraid to give it away); 3) Amplify this effect through social media. Each of these objectives is reliant upon customer relations.

The notion of putting the customer at the center of product development was brought up throughout the night. This product development feedback loop builds a relationship with the customer that not only improves the product but provides invaluable data points for future buzz marketing campaigns. Maintaining customer relationships is a long-term process, not a chore that you accomplish on an annual basis.

Another hot topic on the night was that of relevancy. In order to retain your customer base, you must remain relevant to the customers. For the Cheezburger Network, this means constantly scouring the internet for the next meme and staying on top of what the internet as a whole is discussing. For Jason at 2R Productions, relevancy is releasing follow-up films to Sonicsgate at opportune times, such as releasing a video of Shawn Kemp discussing Blake Griffin’s dunking during the NBA’s dunk contest. Relevancy keeps your customers from switching to the newest and brightest competitor.

Finally, the panel discussed how the measure success in their marketing campaigns. Adam feels too many marketing professionals view marketing as an art and fail to practice the science of marketing. Being systematic about measuring results and taking on only ROI positive projects are disciplines that too few marketers adhere to (a phenomenon that is especially true in larger companies). Jen takes an opposite view and believes there is definitely an art to having a goal in mind for your marketing efforts while focusing on maintaining relevancy. When viewed objectively, this is an argument between analytic marketing and fundamental marketing – a tangent that could quickly derail a discussion about buzz marketing. In short, as long as you spend less on marketing than the revenues derived from your marketing efforts (time value of money aside); your marketing efforts could be viewed as successful.

Ubermind Goes to Deloitte

Ubermind is a Fremont-based mobile development firm that has built mobile applications for companies such as Target, REI, Amtrak, TrueTV and others. In addition to mobile development, Ubermind also offers strategy, creative, ecommerce, and content management services. As a result of their solid work and their quickly expanding client base, Ubermind was recently purchased by Deloitte to become Deloitte | Ubermind, with offices located in Seattle and Denver. Still providing many of the same services as before, Ubermind now has the additional resources of a major consulting firm to help scale its efforts.

According to a January 5, 2012 post on Ubermind’s blog:

“Why Deloitte? Answer: The mobile revolution is here—it’s time to ready your organization. Deloitte Consulting has well-established technology services across capabilities such as systems integration, enterprise solutions, information management, and emerging technologies. As part of their tech practice, we will lead in strategy, creative, mobile apps, and web.”

Based on this primary source, it looks like Deloitte was looking to quickly build its presence in the mobile enterprise space and saw Ubermind as a turnkey solution to market entry. Having worked with Ubermind on the original iteration of Flash Volunteer’s iPhone app, I can say that their attention to detail and tech know-how are both second to none. It seems like Deloitte saw a great opportunity and pursued an acquisition-based strategy to catapult themselves into a stronger market position via Ubermind’s existing expertise.

Over the course of the next year, I imagine that Ubermind will go on a hiring spree to keep pace with the large amount of new work that will certainly be coming their way. As for their working relationship with Deloitte, I could see Deloitte definitely benefiting from Ubermind’s tech savvy, while Ubermind, which began as a small start-up, learning a lot about the operational side of running a large, international business. In fact, the tag line on Ubermind’s website states “Left brain meets right.” This direct reference to the nature of their future working relationship says a lot about how the next twelve months might unfold. Often, to achieve scale, it seems that scrappy start-ups must forge strategic partnerships with unlikely allies (some of the comments on Ubermind’s blog speak directly to the this point) in order to achieve the sort of impact they would like to see. While this alliance offers many positive outcomes, Ubermind must also be careful to maintain its own identity within the larger ecosystem of Deloitte so it does not become just another cog in a giant wheel.

Children and Carpets

The two just don’t mix. We moved in to a new home a little over a year ago. Since then, our off-white walls and carpets have been “TKO’d” by our two boys on a daily basis. Milk, juice, diapers, potty training accidents, food, spit-up…basically everything we vowed to keep off the carpet of our new home.

Recently, we finally had a milk spill bad enough that we had to look for some outside help. Traditional cleaning products were not cutting it, soap and water was not enough, and the industrial strength carpet cleaner that I had used in our condo had been off-loaded as another casualty in the great war against organization.

So I took to the internet, navigated to everyone’s favorite search engine (Bing of course – love the pictures, animations now too for those of you still stuck Googling or whatever people were doing ten years ago). My search results got me on the phone with Pure Clean Carpet Cleaning, located in Seattle and covering the Eastside.

What struck me at first with them on the phone was that they seemed authentic in their messaging and service. They are not your standard run of the mill carpet cleaning company. They focus on technology, are green certified, use baby and pet safe products, use their own water and promise to have your carpets dry in one hour. Their site is full of happy customers and you can add us to the list.

This enthralling story doesn’t really end here. See – we didn’t even need a service as thorough as the one they provided, in fact, we really only had one small area that really needed some help. I explained this to him and instead of overselling me on their products and service, the representative informed me that just one small bottle of their cleaning agent would easily get the job done. Not only that, they delivered it to me at work the next day, all for less than $20. The stain(s) never stood a chance. I might just be a repeat customer for life with that combination of product and service.

I covered most of the positioning here already, Pure Clean Carpet Cleaning offers a product and service that is positioned at a premium to most store-bought carpet cleaning products, but is absolutely price competitive with any major carpet cleaning services. Not only that, but they stress the importance of caring for the environment, caring for your property and time, focusing on technology as a differentiator, and quality service. The cleaning of the carpet and the focus on using greener products that are safe for babies and children would be considered safety needs on Maslow’s chart. Without meeting these fundamental needs, the product would have been worthless to us. Some components of their product and service may be seen as more social needs, such as items stressing environmental safety, but one’s distinction between safety and social needs would be dependent on each unique situation.

In terms of pricing, we paid around $15. I can’t even find the pricing for the cleaner on their site any longer as they are a service company first and foremost and really only offer the product directly to customers who communicate that specific need. Professional cleaners such as Resolve, are currently priced in the $10 to $20 range based on some quick searches. These require a professional carpet vacuum though. Woolite spray takes care of stains at a reasonable $5 to $10, but do so without any promise of meeting your specific health standards or any regard for the environment. All of these alternatives required my time to find, research and review and would have required a trip to the store if I would have went with one of them. For the Pure Clean pricing product itself, the price is set a premium for the value it delivers. It’s a better product than the competition has to offer and the service and delivery straight to my work really put this product a head above the rest.