Changing Rules for Naming

Recently, Seth Godin commented on the changing rules of naming products and companies. There are two great takeaways from what he's got to say.

The first: for a while getting the perfect domain name was the most important factor in a name. Godin believes this is now secondary to having a name that works well in Google or Yahoo. I don't know that Google has replaced the importance of the domain, but I think it's pretty close, and Godin's point is worth considering.

The second: placeholder names are dangerous. I've had placeholder names take over and become de facto official names more often that I care to remember. Get the name right first. Once everyone in the organization is using the placeholder - which may have all kinds of branding and legal problems - it's a hard beast to kill.

Data Check, Anyone?

Does no one clean up their lists anymore?

I paid off my last student loan years ago. Yet I still receive mail about once a week with a Sallie Mae logo on it from some financial institution that wants to help me consolidate my student loan debt.

Obviously, direct marketers at these banks are spending good money on lists for these campaigns. Equally as obviously, they're getting ripped off. I can understand my name remaining on the lists for a while, but it's been far too long.

When you buy data ask about how often it's cleaned and refreshed. Otherwise you'll create a great campaign, only to fail because you're sending it to the wrong people.

Trade Show Follies

This week I attended a trade show for the first time in a while. It was a exhibition held along with a technical conference, and I was just there checking out the exhibits to learn more about the industry and see if there were any potential clients.

One interesting aspect of the show: I hadn't seen so much horrible booth behavior in a long, long time.

When I was a corporate marketing guy, it would make me nuts that we spent all this money to have space at a show, designed an exhibit, shipped it there, and sent a bunch of people to work in it, and then they'd do things that drive potential customers away.

By the end of this show, I thought I should have printed up a brochure on training people to work shows, taken some snapshots of booths, and then sent them to the people back home who had decided to spend the money on the show.

There was the booth with one guy in it, busy chatting on his cell phone. (Sorry, I wanted to find out about your $100,000 software package, but I didn't want to interrupt your phone conversation.) Eating in the booth. (Because everyone wants to chat with somebody with garlic breath.) All the people in the booth sitting in their matching company logo shirts talking, creating a wall of intimidation to drive the customers away.

I actually missed the very best one, though; a colleague told me about it. He walked into a booth which appeared to be empty (big no-no!). As he was reading the signs hanging in the booth, suddenly a head popped up from behind a podium and a woman said, "Hi, may I help you?"

Turns out the lone booth staffer was sitting on the floor out of sight with her laptop, hiding from customers. Now that's how to sell!

The big lesson to corporate marketing types: go to your shows and see what the staff is doing. Or send spies. You may have some problems you don't know about it if you're back at the office.

Not Such a New Era

Chris Baggott, on his email blog, recently predicted the end of mass marketing.

While I like Chris's blog a lot, I don't agree with him on this one. Yes, the traditional approaches of advertising to mass audiences through mass media are changing dramatically, as the mass media splinter into all kinds of new things. But, for a couple of reasons, I think this is much less dramatic of a change than he does.

First of all, there's a human tendency to want to be tuned in to what other people are tuned into. That may not mean you all saw the same ad during the same TV show, but it may just mean you saw the same ads on 100 different cable channels, or posted over 100 different urinals, or on 100 different buses.

Second, marketers have failed to take advantage of most of the potential of one to one marketing. It's a great idea that turned out to be pretty hard to implement, so mostly you see the vehicles that were supposed to deliver personalized marketing (email being the main one) used to deliver the same messages to poorly targeted audiences.

Finally, there's a social cost to it all. When I read the comment on getting "all the news I care about" delivered via a web portal, I thought of the the role alternative news delivery plays in the fragmentation (political and social) of the country. Now that we can all choose specific news sources, we can shut out information we don't like. So we still have vast numbers of people in the US who think Iraq has something to do with 9/11, or that we give a lot of money out in foreign aid, and so on.

A while back someone asked me, "Hey, have you seen that commercial with..." The answer was, no. I haven't seen any commercials in several years - ever since the day I got my Tivo. Strangely enough, that made me a little sad. I felt like I was missing something.

Mass marketing will continue because the mass audience still exists, even if it's not paying attention to the same things. That sounds contradictory, but it's true; there's a mass culture of personalization of our media consumption, but there's still a strong desire to find out about the hot new thing everybody else has heard of. Consumers are people, and people are nothing if not contradictory.

When Marketing Kills Functionality

I understand that the way we get nifty free things online - like maps, for example - is advertising. That pays the bill. But, when advertising starts screwing with functionality, you've got a problem.

I'm talking about Google Maps here. Just had a truly frustrating experience; I was trying to get a map to find the place I'm having lunch with a colleague later today. I put in the address, clicked search, and got a map covered with little red pointers for every location of the restaurant in the Houston area. I didn't type the name of the restaurant; I assume that the address is cross-referenced to the restaurant in some database so it can "helpfully" show you all the places you can go eat their food (even though your behavior clearly means you're looking for just one of them).

It gets better. Click on the pin that appears to be the right location, and you wind up zooming in on a map of a different location. In fact, after about five minutes of clicking and zooming, I was unable to come up with any map showing the actual place I wanted to go, because Google was so busy telling me about somewhere else I could go to a branch of the same restaurant.

Solutions? Easy. Mapquest. Oh, Google, you're usually so good at this, I hate to see you blow it.