MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

I know, I know. Your product is super fantastic. The best in the industry. Perhaps the best ever. In a word – infallible.

Except, well, I don’t know how to break this to you, it’s not. No product is perfect. And not every product is right for every person (while we’re at it, you’re really not that special and there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny).

The only challenge is, when you make your offer sound like it’s too good to be true, no one believes you and you’re only shooting yourself in the foot. Let’s look at an extreme example …

Overhyped marketing from the North

According to The Wall Street Journal – Pyongyang Myth-Builders Step It Up – here is some of the official line from the other side of the Northern Limit Line …

About Kim Il Sung, founder of North Korea: He once made a hand grenade from a pine cone to blow up an American tank.

About his son and successor, Kim Jong Il: When he was born, the sky was filled with lightning and thunder, and a rainbow.

About the new leader, Kim Jong Eun: He is ‘an excellent general who displays the extraordinary talent of hitting the center of the target no matter how many times he fires.’

Your product should not have a cult of personality

OK, that’s obviously ridiculous. So your product might not be mythmaking for the Dear Leader, but, I ask you, are some of these lines really any more believable?

Huge Savings! Exclusive Deals! Limited Time Offer!

70% Off! 80% Off! 90% Off! (this will eventually hit 100% off, right?)

Decision Management Solutions research identifies the ultimate real-time predictive marketing solution requirements (and exhale)

Don’t believe the hype

Your own, that is. Because, frankly, nobody else does.

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, has said in Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer, “While this writer has no desire to demean the work of another professional, the Postmodern Consumer couldn’t care less. He actually despises hype and anything else that insults his intelligence.

“He is armed and dangerous. With a single click, he can terminate a company’s opportunity.”

However …

• If your marketing campaigns (and especially your content marketing) elucidate and don’t obfuscate …
• If in a hype-filled world, you actually live up to Dr. Philip Kotler’s value-focused definition of marketing – “A social and managerial process by which individual groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and exchanging products of value with others” …
• If you help your customers find true value instead of grabbing a quick hit sale before they figure you out …
• And if you focus on serving the customer instead of your own dictatorial ego …

… then I was wrong about you after all.

You really are special.

Related Resources:

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

Transparent Marketing: A slice of honesty from Domino’s Pizza

Transparent Marketing and Social Media: Twitter and Facebook are the new Woodward and Bernstein

In 2011, this blog produced 140 blog posts. Hopefully, you found some of those blog posts helpful in your day-to-day marketing work. If you did not, let us know in the comments and we’ll write 140 better ones next year.

Of course, as a marketer, you’re probably one of the busiest people alive and you probably missed a few, if not the majority of, posts this year.

So to catch you up, we sorted our posts by how valuable they were to you (as you and your peers communicated to us via the Twitter button) and created a roundup of the 11 most-tweeted posts in 2011.

Here they are in order of least popular to THE most popular MarketingExperiments blog post of 2011 (and potentially all time).

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As I prepare to wade through hundreds of submissions for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report, (sponsored by HubSpot) I was compelled to take a final glance at the 2011 edition.

While combing through the pages, many of last year’s submissions evoked some forward-thinking thoughts for 2012. Here are just a few of the standouts…

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In today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top 2011 discoveries.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of the top “Aha” moments from your peers …

Phone calls from Adwords

That 96.5% of our Adwords conversions in a three-month test were phone calls – which were not tracked in our analytics. We’re now testing KeyMetric.net capabilities on a couple campaigns so we can track phone keyword conversions.

– Michael Cordova, Managing Partner, Mercury Leads

  Read more…

It seems like 2011 just started, and just like that, in a flash, it’s almost over.

Guess what?

You’ll be saying the same thing about 2012 soon enough. But before you do that, take a few moments to stop and think about what you learned in 2011 that can help you optimize marketing performance in 2012.

To spur your thinking, MECLABS a/v Specialist Luke Thorpe and I grabbed a camera and mic, went around to attendees and speakers at B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco (hosted by MarketingExperiments’ sister company, MarketingSherpa), and asked for their top “Aha moments” of 2011 …

Read more…

What marketing errors are easiest to avoid? And how do we avoid making them?

My answer would be…those related to overconfidence. And, as to the second question, I’ll take the rest of this blog post to attempt to answer that.

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Are you too confident?

In the business world, as in marketing, we usually look at confidence as a good thing. But the “overconfidence bias” can seriously harm your performance.

Here’s how Jonah Lehrer, an American journalist who writes on the topics of psychology and neuroscience, describes this overconfidence bias in The Science of Irrationality: A Nobelist explains our fondness for not thinking…

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Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. As Mr. [Nobel Laureate, and professor of psychology at Princeton] Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The stock market is a case study in randomness, a system so complex that it’s impossible to predict. Nevertheless, professional investors routinely believe that they can see what others can’t. The end result is that they make far too many trades, with costly consequences.

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Sound familiar? Is marketing a product any less complex than trading on the stock market?

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How to bank on talent, not luck

I disagree with one aspect of Lehrer’s article. Not to put words into his mouth, but he seems to imply that there is no way to overcome the overconfidence bias. In marketing, I believe there is a way to do so (of course, perhaps that’s just me being …ahem … overconfident).

Let me explain what I mean, and let you be the judge… Read more…