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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Can you create a fan club for your organisation? Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. This week, I have been doing some research for a client's direct mail campaign. One of the subjects involved is weeds and weed control (don't ask!) and I have found a number of books and other resources on the subject. The most interesting one from a marketing point of view is called 'Geigy Weed Tables' and it was produced by the Agrochemicals division of Ciba-Geigy Limited in the late 1960's. It's an impressive item. It comes in a box and comprises 40 A4 booklets of between four and 20 pages each, all with beautiful watercolour paintings of some 300 weed species. The booklets explain what the weeds look like, how they germinate, where they grow, which climates they prefer and so on. Let me quote from the introduction to the material: 'What can induce a chemical company to produce a scientific work of this sort and distribute it to schools, advisory bureaux and research institutes? We believe that it is no longer enough for a responsible chemical company to develop, manufacture and distribute high-quality products; rather that the chemical industry must bear the share of the responsibility for the application of its products . . .' So Ciba-Geigy made and sold chemicals to kill weeds. But the boxed set makes no mention of those products. Instead, it's a mine of highly valuable background information. Now here's the thing. I doubt very much whether many people have kept a brochure from Ciba-Geigy dating back to the 1960s. But my brother (who used to sell agrochemicals in the 1990s) was passed the boxed set by a colleague, who had probably obtained it the same way. The boxed set lived on because it was of genuine use and interest to people in the crop protection industry. So what are you as a marketer producing that is of genuine use and interest to your customers and potential customers? How are you adding more value to their lives or their business? Think about it. You send a brochure out. It might be kept. It will probably be binned. But send some kind of useful resource and it will probably be used, valued, kept, referred to and maybe even passed on to other people. You will in the process raise your visibility and your credibility. You could look at it as giving something for nothing. Or you could see it as one of the best marketing investments you'll ever make. If you only do one thing as a result of reading Marketing Booster for a year, let me suggest it's this: Get together with some colleagues and think about how you could add value to people's lives EVEN IF THEY DON'T BUY FROM YOU JUST NOW. Can you add value-adding information into your marketing communications strategy? (Or if you already do some of this, can you do even more?) Do that, and you could well build a fan club of people who are much more likely to buy from you in the future. Copyright 2003 Richard Groom |