2010: Marketing is not Marketing

In the age of transparency, marketing is not about crafting artificial or half-true brand stories for consumer audiences. Marketing is about uncovering, fostering, sharing, and engaging with employees and consumers around the true stories that make your brand unique. Let’s take a look at how a few of the departments in your organization are the real marketing departments.

Product design and development is marketing

If your marketing department and the agencies it’s hiring are not taking a deep and genuine interest in your product development team and their methodologies, you’re headed down the wrong road. Your messaging around a product cannot be spun on some “me too” approach to a product. Marketing needs to be genuinely rooted in the problem that your product development team set out to solve.

For a ton of ideas and examples on this topic go read Bogusky and Windsor’s Baked In – Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves.

The post-purchase experience is marketing

How are you communicating with your customers post purchase? Whose job is this anyway – customer support, marketing, sales? Define ownership of this space and seize the opportunity to engage with the most important people on the planet – your existing customers.

Don’t just email them one-way marketing spam featuring the next product you want them to purchase. You know what product they bought, so provide them with valuable content that will help them use your product better and more frequently. Share tips on use and care. Invite them to submit photos, text, or videos in a contest. Invite them into an invitation-only community of consumers or power-users. Solicit their feedback and then make sure they know that you listened when the next generation of your product hits the shelves.

Customer support is marketing

Don’t miss huge opportunities in strengthening your relationship with your existing customers when they need your help. Remember that when a consumer experiences a problem with your product, good brand experience is not about what went wrong and why, but how quickly and painlessly you can solve that customer’s problem. Are your telephone and online support experiences robust, efficient, and helpful? Good customer service equals good word-of-mouth and good word-of-mouth is the best marketing out there.

There’s lots of hype around big brands (like Best Buy or Comcast) using Twitter as a customer support channel. Is it? Really? It may be a first step in connecting with a customer who has a support issue or even one that loves your product, but Twitter is not the best place to resolve a complicated support issue. You need to build an entire support ecosystem that allows you to channel conversations to the right place. Maybe you identify an issue on Twitter, direct users to GetSatisfaction where you’re working on solving the issue, and when it’s resolved maybe you send them to your revised documentation online.

Twitter is not a customer support tool alone anymore than it’s a customer acquisition tool alone.

Reviews are marketing (and product development )

Since we’re thinking about word-of-mouth, let’s turn our attention to reviews. No eCommerce site is complete without them. There are a number of popular review and problem-solving sites (see Epinions, Reviews.CNET.com, Yelp, GetSatisfaction, or Fixya). How is your customer support team (or anyone for that matter) engaging in these online ratings and review spaces? Are they seizing opportunities to set the record straight when an unfair review is posted? Do they have great text, photo, and video content to share that refutes an inaccurate review?

Every employee is marketing

Every employee within your organization is a brand ambassador. They have the power to influence a huge network both on- and offline. Do they believe in your brand and its products and services? If not, you have a staff or brand problem that marketing is not going to fix.

They are already engaged through any number of social networks – have you provided them with guidelines for participation? The worst thing to do is to ban them (sorry Man U) – you want to empower them to participate and let them know that you trust them. If you believe in your brand, your workplace, and your employees, then you have nothing to hide. If you do have something to hide, fix it, because no amount of marketing will. Intel and Cisco are two companies that have gotten a lot of praise for their social media policies for employees (you can find them both here). Both companies clearly believe in their culture, as both policies essentially boil down to “Don’t be an idiot.”

Every employee … particularly your CEO or visionaries

You know you’ve got them – they may be C-level execs or someone on your human resources or sales teams. They are visionaries; they’re always the smartest people in the room, and they drop gorgeous nuggets of wisdom without even realizing it. Elevate them! They should be blogging and Tweeting daily. They should be speaking at conferences. Your PR agency should be serving them up as experts for any media that might take them.

But don’t make them just shill for the brand. Let the head of human resources talk about human resources in general. Let each visionary use examples of best practices from other companies as well as from your own. In the long run, everyone will know where that individual came from, and you’ll have the type of marketing that money can’t buy.

Now what?

Take a good look in the mirror and engage internally. Invite your entire company to do the same.

Distribute surveys and ask everyone: Who are we? What do we do best? What’s our elevator pitch? What’s our best product? What’s our worst product? What opportunities are out there for us? The insight that your own employees can provide will put just about any high agency to shame. This does not mean that an agency can’t help – this soul-searching may reveal the need for a overhaul of your brand, or at least a more articulate definition.

Deploy a company social network, using a platform like Ning. Invite discussion and debate – you’ll need to practice internal transparency if you expect to let the outside world in. Share ideas, YouTube videos, and insightful articles. Give the most junior member of the customer support team a vehicle to share his ideas with the product development team.

Through your surveys and community, particular employees from any department will float to the top – they’ll be engaged, insightful, and excited. These are your new marketers. This is your new marketing.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.