Competition You Can't Ignore

Editor's Note:  The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post by Rajesh Setty, an entrepreneur, author, and speaker based in Silicon Valley, and a creator and seller of limited-edition prints at Sparktastic. This piece, which discusses the importance of identifying and monitoring indirect competitors, originally appeared in Amex OPEN Forum. Why is this critical? Because most companies only pay attention to direct competitors...the ones who pose the most obvious threats. However, competition can come from a variety of sources, and it's important to know exactly what those sources are so you can devise an appropriate marketing strategy that deals with them appropriately. You can follow Setty on Twitter at @rajsetty.

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First, there is no product or service that doesn't have competition. And if you tell someone that your product has no competition, what they hear is that there isn't a big market for your product...which isn't good.

Having clarified that, let’s look at the two big categories of competition.

On one hand, you have direct competition for your business — this is mainly other companies that are making the same promises that you are making. Lot of factors about the competitor (such as size of the company, pricing of their offerings, brand and image, etc.) will influence how much they will affect your business.

On the other hand, you have indirect competition. As the name indicates, this kind of competition is easy to miss.

Here are five of them to consider:

1. There is no “real” need now.

This is a mindshare competition. This happens when you create products that are “solutions waiting for problems.” There is a big “lean startup” movement going on (at least in Silicon Valley) where products are co-developed with customers. Most often, that’s not the case—someone develops a product because they see a need for it and assume everyone has that same need. If you have a solution that is looking for a problem, you need to go back to the drawing board.

2. There are mediocre, but less expensive, alternatives.

Whether you like it or not, if there are less expensive alternatives to what you are offering, there will be a large majority of people who will opt for it. Quality and standards are relative and varies based on taste. What one thinks as mediocre may be perfectly acceptable to someone else.

3. There are “minimal” alternatives.

Your gizmo may do everything from video chat to bringing your newspaper in the morning. You may also be adding new features every other month. The point is that not everybody wants all your features. 37Signals built a huge business building products with no-frills. Eighty percent of the people out there can get by using a product with minimal features and 80 percent is a large enough market to focus on.

4. People generally maintain “status quo.”

This is the hardest one to recognize and digest. Before your product or service came into the market, life was going on and life can go on without people having to use your product. In general, status quo will be maintained only because the alternate option is “to change,” which is not easy to come by.

As you design products, think of incentives that you can provide for people to embrace your product. It is harder than you think.

5. New ways of serving “needs” emerge.

You may remember products like Sony Walkman, floppy disks and VHS tapes. During their times, those products were popular and served the needs of people. Things changed and new products that changed the game emerged. With these new products, the way the needs were served changed—be it more capacity, more convenience, speed or new capabilities. Once that happened, the old products became obsolete and entered the end of their product life cycles.

© 2011 American Express Company. All Rights Reserved.

How To Make Your PR And Marketing Believable

Editor's Note:  The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post by Erica Swallow, an associate editor of partner content at Mashable, where this piece initially appeared. All marketing and communications relies on credibility, or in this case, being believable, to be truly effective. Read on for a more detailed look at this important issue.

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Public relations and marketing professionals have dug themselves into a hole. With the overwhelming amount of PR spin and marketing messages flying at consumers on a daily basis, individuals are constantly on guard, trying to spot the underlying motives behind each claim, motto, message or deal that brands introduce. Many times the assumption by consumers is that marketing messages are motivated by greedy or deceptive intentions. This phenomena is what Ogilvy’s senior vice president of global strategy and marketing, Rohit Bhargava, recently called a “believability crisis” during his presentation at Mashable Connect 2011.

“Affinity has become the new secret weapon — we believe in people and companies that we like,” said Bhargava. For those in the public relations and marketing industries, it is important to gain back the trust they’ve lost from consumers by understanding what makes people, ideas and organizations more believable.

Bhargava spoke about what he calls Likeonomics, which “explains the new affinity economy where the most likeable people, ideas and organizations are the ones we believe in, buy from and get inspired by.”

What makes a person or organization believable, then? Bhargava said that Likeonomics is based on being simple, human, brutally honest and emotional.

1. Simple

To be more believable, the first step is simple and based on personal relationships, said Bhargava. “Be genuine, be honest, be open.” He believes that this concept has powered the social media revolution and the brands that have embraced it.

Bhargava pointed to Ally Bank as an example of a brand that gets it. Using the slogan “Straightforward,” the bank sheds light on deceptive industry practices and aims for complete transparency on rates and terms. Says one Ally ad, “we make money with you, not off you.”

2. Human

If you’re trying to build relationships, it’s a good idea to be human. Simply said, but not easily done.

Bhargava pointed to Innocent, a UK beverage brand that puts a lot of initiative into showcasing the humanity behind its brand. Each winter, Innocent runs the Big Knit, in which Innocent fans knit and send in hats to place on top of its smoothie bottles that are placed in stores. For each hat knitted, the company pledges 25p to Age UK to help make winter warmer for older people across the UK.

This initiative not only illustrates that the company’s founders care about those around them, but it is also a genius marketing idea. Walk into any grocery store and take a look at the beverage aisle (or almost any aisle). Row after row, you’ll see similarly shaped and colored packages. Now place smoothie bottles with cute knitted hats into the picture — get the point?

3. Brutally Honest

After ranking last in a consumer preferences survey of national chains in 2009, Domino’s Pizza launched its humility-filled Domino’s Pizza Turnaround campaign, which featured consumers hating on the product. Consumers complained that Domino’s Pizza crust tasted like cardboard and its sauce tasted like ketchup, among other pitfalls. Domino’s listened and its chefs got to work, reinventing a “new pizza.”

Relationships of any type are based on trust — trust isn’t possible without honesty. Bhargava said that brands must practice “brutal honesty and extreme transparency” in order to “get people over that hump of ‘I don’t believe you. I don’t trust that what you’re doing is anything more than spin.’”

Bhargava noted that “disclosure is not the same thing as honesty.” Outing the naughty deeds that your company participates in on your annual report isn’t enough.

4. Emotional

Founded by eccentric millionaire Christian Ringnes, The Mini Bottle Gallery is billed as “the world’s first miniature bottle museum.” Having recently visited the museum in Oslo, Norway, Bhargava told the story of its founding and why its so unique.

Ringnes “treats the museum with a great sense of humor, because he realizes that he has built an entire museum around something that most people who might think of visiting consider silly or at least strange,” said Bhargava. As a result, he doesn’t take himself too seriously when he markets and promotes the gallery. “The museum itself features a built in slide, a monthly award for the “tackiest miniature bottle” and even a fake brothel with a collection of 40 custom bottles from the 40 legal brothels in Las Vegas,” explained Bhargava on his blog.

Because collecting the mini bottles is his personal passion, it’s Ringnes’ goal to get potential visitors emotionally invested in it, too.

© Copyright 2005-2011 Mashable, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How To Restore Confidence In Your Customers When You’ve Failed

Editor's Note: The following is another guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Mickie Kennedy, founder and president of eReleases, a cost-effective electronic press release distribution service, and a widely-regarded and well-respected PR professional who maintains the company's popular PR Fuel blog. How do you recover when you've made a mistake of some sort that has obviously angered your customers? It's a very important question that few businesses know how to address effectively. Find out here.

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But is there any coming back from a huge faux pas like the one you’ve committed? Your customers are likely cursing your name and are unlikely to forgive you anytime soon. How do you go about restoring confidence in your company and brand?Well, you goofed. Big time. The Twitterverse is ablaze with anger, your Facebook feed is filled with seething rage, and the national news has even given the story airtime. Your face is red and soon your profit margins will be, too! Unless you do something.

Time

For one, it’s best to remember that “anytime soon” mentioned above. Just because they may not be willing to give you a second (or third) chance right now, this may change in the future. So don’t lose your mind trying to bring them back over as soon as possible.

Right now, what you should be focusing on is getting your name back into good standing. This involves buckling down and getting to work figuring out ways to build goodwill. One way to get about this is to take into consideration what went wrong in the first place.

Was your big mistake lying to your customers? Then you need to find ways to show the world that you’re actually honest. Make sure to take the full blame for the lie first of all then go about orchestrating a campaign around “keeping promises.”

Did your product cause harm to some of your customers? Go out of your way to fix the situation, and then find some nonprofits to align yourself with to show you’re concerned with human interests.

Next Steps

When you feel the world has calmed down enough about your big goof (and it may not take long…the world moves fast these days), it’s time to start winning your old customers back. Assuming you’ve done everything in the previous step, your company’s name should be losing its tarnish.

Those old customers will remember when they were wronged, though. This won’t just go away with time. This is especially true if a rival company has already snatched them up. You’ll need something special to win those folks back.

One way to do this, depending on the age of your company, is to instill a feeling of “nostalgia” in those former customers. Remind them all the good things about your business and what you can do for them. Also, tell them what the plan is for your business in the future if they switch over.

The main thing, though, is to let everyone know that your big error will never happen again! Above all else they want to feel like you have their best interests in mind. At all times keep in mind they may be looking for ways you’re messing up again – don’t give them that reason. Mind everything you do and every word you say and you may just be able to win most of your formerly offended customers back into your confidence.

How would you go about restoring your customers’ confidence during a crisis?

© 1998-2011 eReleases® (MEK Enterprises LLC) All Rights Reserved.

Social Media Rehab: Are You Addicted?

This is not necessarily new territory to cover, but with just about everyone these days using feature-rich smartphones on the go to manage their social media profiles, and more importantly, their lives ― anywhere, anytime, anyplace ― a steady stream of research has been published about users' social media habits.

While some of this research has been treated with a sense of humor (e.g. how many users update their Facebook profiles when using the restroom?), other statistics, quite frankly, border on the absurd, and even worse and more shockingly, may be regarded as addictive or compulsive behavior.

Need proof? Check out some of these stats below:

Click here for a larger version of this summary. If you're updating your Twitter stream before you get out of bed, you're definitely addicted. Just sayin'.

How To Create Websites That Reporters Will Absolutely Love

Editor's Note:  The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post by Russell Working, a staff writer for Ragan.com, where a version of this story first appeared. Even though Websites have been around now for over 15 years, journalists still regularly complain about their poor layout, navigation, and design, and a general lack of comprehensive information and resources that can assist them with properly reporting on a company and its products or services. Not any longer with these tips!

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Reporters — it is true — can sometimes be snappish and arrogant, and we often fail to take time to appreciate the beauty of that great pitch you wrote.

We come tromping into your turf, by phone or in person, and presume to tell your story to the world.

But as long as communicators are stuck with us dandruffy hacks in our ketchup-stained neckties, why create websites that seem designed to thwart us? Don’t you want the ink?

At least that’s what some reporters I polled are wondering. They are vexed at having to squander precious minutes on deadline fruitlessly Googling or prowling through company websites to find out where your world headquarters is located. They are irked when they can’t turn up a meaningful description of your organization on the “about” page.

And there have been times when businesses and nonprofits have missed out on a mention in some of America’s most-read newspapers, magazines, blogs and Web-based trade publications because it was too cumbersome for journalists to find a human to talk to on deadline.

I asked several reporters for their beefs about organizational Websites — corporate, government, nonprofit — and promised them anonymity. They signaled their interest by planting red flags in flowerpots on their balconies, and we met after midnight in D.C.-area parking garages, where they slipped me manila envelopes full of coded complaints.

All right: Actually, I just emailed them. But here are some of their peeves:

1. No Obvious “Media” Button Or Link

Every company should have a clearly visible “press” or “media” button on their home page, a reporter for a major Midwestern daily offers. This should take people to a page that includes a spokesperson's cell phone number, not just office numbers.

“What we really want is a way to contact PR people directly, including after hours when necessary,” adds a reporter for a New York daily. “I don't like having to hunt down the media contacts on any Website. I shouldn't have to sort through old press releases to find a contact person. All of these names, phone numbers and emails should be easily accessible three clicks in.”

2. No Addresses

Unless you are in a line of work in which suicide truck bombers are a risk, or you are located in one of those secret Soviet factory cities whose existence was denied during the Cold War, your address is pretty much public information, isn’t it? List it prominently.

Sometimes that reporter who interviewed you just wants to mention “the Barstow-based ice cream giant” (or whatever) without having to call you back to ask where in the 760 area code you’re located.

3. Vague “About” Pages

Your organization exists not in the spirit realm of archangels and seraphim, but in the material universe governed by the laws of physics and the properties of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Your organization does concrete things. Your company perhaps manufactures and sells diaper cakes or offers lucky felines a cat massage. State this on your “about” page.

Naturally, everyone you work with understands the company jargon. But isn’t the point of external communications to reach those who aren’t conversant with gobbledygook like the following paragraph? (Just for the fun of it, let’s highlight the clichés.)

Audit360 provides the industry’s most cutting-edge mobile device management solutions developed and implemented by the most innovative team. Our company’s deeply-rooted entrepreneurial attitude and forward-thinking spirit challenges us to push the limits of existing technology to provide solutions that are quick to deploy, easy to use and highly scalable.

(And “highly scalable”? You mean like carp and iguanas?)

“If they’re not straightforward about what they do,” a reporter writes, “it makes me wonder what they’re trying to hide.”

Forgive him. We reporters are conspiracy theorists. But why risk arousing suspicions over nothing?

Besides, even if a journalist has spent a half-hour interviewing you for a fluff piece on your United Way drive, she might appreciate a one- or two-sentence description of your company online. If she wings it, she fears, you’re going to phone in the morning, thank her in honeyed tones for the awesome story, and demand a clarification for describing, say, Taco Bell as a “taco company.” (We also sell burritos! And quesadillas!)

4. No Phone Numbers Or Press Releases

An editor emails a reporter a press release and says, “Can you crank out something short for the Web this morning?” The reporter picks up the phone even while scrolling to the bottom. And she finds no phone number.

An oversight, surely. She goes to the website, digs up your archive — and none of the press releases have contact numbers. No communicator could possibly be that negligent, right? Actually, it happens all the time.

One reporter for a big-time paper asks, “Do companies or government agencies think news organizations will just print a press release without asking any follow-up questions?”

5. A Contacts Page That's Just An Email Form

A genial Pulitzer prize-winner’s hair begins to smoke whenever he goes to a business or government Website on a tight deadline, hits “contact us,” and finds an online form or email link. No phone numbers. No names to call.

“Generally,” he writes, “if I leave an email stating my urgency, I hear back four days or so later from some apologetic flack, hoping that the response is not too late.”

6. Outdated Information

Yes, it’s not your fault that the Web guys never bothered the update the profile of the former janitor who’s now chief of sustainability. But at least the basic information about your organization should be reliable. If you can’t manage that, why even have a website?

And government communicators, listen up: “If they're a municipality,” writes another reporter, “they should also list their agendas and minutes of public meetings and detailed budget information.”

So who's doing it right? McDonald's, for one. Check out my analysis here.

© 2011 Ragan Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Twitter...But Were Afraid To Ask

As useful and as popular as Twitter is (and incidentally, we LOVE it!), it's also sort of the like the Wild West still in many ways:  lots of gunslingers kept in check by marshalls, with many citizens (i.e., users) simply trying to survive. But that doesn't take away at all from its power and influence, let alone its use as a cost-effective marketing tool for brands, entertainers, and professional athletes. It's a wonderful mechanism for getting up-to-the-minute news and information from just about any source or personality on the planet, but it's also highly useful for engaging and interacting with a wide range of consumers and businesses from around the globe.

For these reasons, and particularly because of Twitter's ever-growing popularity and increasing user base, much time, effort, and money has been invested in determining what drives Twitter traffic, and how its demographics, psychographics, and usage patterns are constantly evolving. It's almost a science in and of itself, and the regularly-updated results are fascinating.

Case in point:  this outstanding summary of recent Twitter (and some Facebook as well) statistics compiled by TechKing, an IT, Web design, and technology firm. So, test your knowledge:  how many of these facts did you know?

One stat that is quite intriguing: If Twitter were a country, it would be the twelfth largest nation in the world with over 105 million people!