The customer always wins in the end….

TimA — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:56:20 +0000

I like a pint. Mind you I mean a proper pint. None of your same tasting over advertised heavliy branded yet ersatz lagers. I mean a real ale -conditioned in the cask no less.It has just been announced that sales of cask conditioned ales sales have risen year on year for the first time for many a year. This growth has been fuelled by a growth in micro breweries ( there are now over 700 of them ) serving their local area and beyond, encouraged all the while by a die hard group of customers organised through CAMRA. Of course there are some national/ regional brands like Fullers London Pride, Courage Best , Timothy Taylor Landlord and Sharps Doombar. Only a couple of which have received a modicum of media support, both of which are on the take… ‘pride’ or ‘courage’!

The big 4 breweries, driven by the simplified demands of the highly geared national pub groups, with the notable exception of Witherspoons, have marketed to the hilt their lager ranges. Yet it is real ale that is growing even whilst many pubs are closing. Is this a triumph of PRODUCT over BRAND?

Yes is the answer but it is also, and more so, the triumph of the CUSTOMER.

For at the heart and the start of MARKETING is recognising what the customer wants and giving it to them.

So customer satisfaction should always drive the brand not distribution savings and reductive retailer demands.

Look more closely and you will find that the local breweries themselves are almost playing around with branding through strange and ever strange names ( dogbolter springs to mind) as well as quirky font bages. Fulfilling some of the needs of brands RECOGNITION and DIFFERENTIATION. Whilst not being able to afford other mainstream marketing activity other methods are being used remarkably well.

Take for instance my local brewer Rebellion in Marlow… they operate a club which allows members to bring 3 guests 4 times a year to drink free.

SAMPLING, RECOMMENDATION and WORD OF MOUTH to satisfy the most stringent marketer as well as they use the events to drive home quality by giving tours and presentations too.

So top quality marketing and a great night out for many increasingly LOYAL CUSTOMERS. I am sure that all the words in capital letters would have appeared in the planning for any of the national brands yet by combining great prodcuts with local marketing and the basic elements of branding it is the micro breweries that are winning.

But the big breweries could so easly raise their game with the power of the internet. For instance to drive sampling and sessions. Just ask Pizza Hut and Zizzis! Full restaurants thanks to ever changing on line vouchers.

We all need reminding that marketing starts and ends with the customer.

So let’s be happy to celebate a victory for customers all round. Oh your round? I’d like a pint!

Branding at the weekend It is a marketer’s lot that we are never really...

Google wants to give me £30

TimA — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:10:17 +0000

I recently received a mail shot from Google. It was highly targeted, the offer was very sepcific and opportunties to mal-redeeem were zero. All very professional to warm the cockles of any DM specialist. Yet it troubled me in a number of ways which lead me to question the actulal effectiveness of it and then in turn the marketing thinking behind it.
The targeting was good but I am already an active user of Adwords. So the message was almost trite and certainly patronising to me as a marketing consultant ( and presumably to all others in marketng too ) and the offer was unsuable as the t+c’s stipulated that it could only be used by accounts of less than 14 days old. What’s more ( or less ) is that the offer of £30 free* advertising was reduced by £5 in set up costs. Free is a 4 letter word FREE not 5 as in FREE*!
But so much for the actual offer obviously targeted to a NEW user not me. The actual sales pitch for this new media to me is not how effective it is but focussed solely on how easy it is to set up and operate.
And that’s a pattern that you see with all Google output they in effect tell you nothing about how effectively their media works they leave up to you to sepnd and work it out for yourself . Experimenting at their rates with your budget to learn what works. Even the most spohisticated PPC agencies do just that. Imagine any newspaper, magazine or TV station NOT giving information about effectievenes and case histories. And if you want to contact Google for more advice they will of course let you email them but there are no other contact deatils avavailble. In fact the return address on the envelope was the handling house in as much to say don’t bother us just get on with it.
And of course we do but increasingly we are seeing PPC in a new light and it’s a theme I shall return to

Marketing Superior » Uncategorized

The customer always wins in the end….

Google wants to give me £30