B2B Researched Marketing Truths.

The Institute for the Study of Business Markets celebrated its 25th anniversary this summer, with a two-day conference probing the current and future state of business marketing practice.

How many of these “indelible truths” apply to your business?

Understand, quantify, demonstrate and document customer value. When both seller and buyer focus on creating value and sharing its benefits, everyone wins.

Look beyond what customers say. Finding customers’ real hot buttons, and understanding how different purchasing influencers work together on buying teams, are keys to successful selling to business.

Your customers can develop valuable new offerings for you if you let them. Customer co-development programs and studying how your most innovative and unusual customers use your product will spur innovation in market-oriented directions.

Take a long- as well as a short-term view of markets. Even in times of economic recession, marketing is a necessary investment.

Implement STP. Following the discipline and logic of “segmenting,” “targeting,” and “positioning” ensures marketing efficiency and focus.

Never doubt the power of brands in business markets. A brand name built and nurtured to connote value opens business customer doors and impresses buying decision makers.

Keep the right customers; lose the wrong customers.

Communications are no longer from “us” to “them.” The communications models of the 20th century don’t describe a digitally networked world.

Cost and price have never had a fundamental relationship. Effective segmentation goes beyond the obvious ways of categorizing customers, such as industry, size, or location.

In B2B, customers are a scarce resource. Many times you know all of them. “Go deeper” with customers you have, to create and capture additional value.

Email and Social Networking: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

We all know about Twitter and its phenomenal growth during the past year. Last night I read a post about Facebook’s share of social networking traffic jumping from 20% to 59%, leading the vast migration to social networking sites, or what I like to call the “Famous for 15 Minutes. . .Or Less” web sites.

Then, today, comes this article from the Wall Street Journal about the demise of email and a follow-up piece from OnlineMediaDaily suggesting that email might still have a role to play in the way that people communicate.

All this makes me wonder if the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are slowly killing off email as an effective marketing tool?

It’s important to put the email versus social networking contest into perspective. As the WSJ itself points out, email continues to grow, as does social networking, albeit at a faster rate:

In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

The problem with the Journal’s “death of email” article is the assumption that two methods of communication cannot coexist, each having a unique role to play. For decades now, television and radio have managed to survive — and even compliment each other — even though many media experts believed that TV would kill off the radio box. Likewise, the Internet was supposed to kill off everything — but it hasn’t (though I know some magazine and newspaper publishers who believe the Net gave them two shots in the hat).

Email and social media both have a specific utility. One does certain things better than the other — and that utility can and will change over time. Right now email works best for longer messages, communicating with more personalized, targeted audiences, and adding embedded content. Social networking offers greater immediacy, ease of use, a sense of personal empowerment, and potentially higher levels of frequency.

Email and social networking sites are used in different ways and communicate different kinds of information. One easily compliments the other. Like many of you, I tweet, participate on social networking sites, and send out and receive tons of email.  (I also blog, manage several web sites, and participate in various forums, but that’s another story!)  I don’t see the two as competing for my attention. I use them in the way that I need to and choose my tool according to the task I have in mind.

Given the increase in email use by 20% in the past year, I think we can safely say it is not going away. What does alarm me, however, is the attitude within some companies that social networking is somehow evil and should be ignored by employees and the marketing department.

Ignoring 300 million users on social networking sites? Unless you’re selling cruise missiles to the Pentagon and don’t care about consumers, that’s more than a little short-sighted.

Just for Bloggers: I Think, Therefore I Blog.

We decided to take a break from our marketing consulting work today and have some fun. TGIF!

Here’s a new design we created just for bloggers — a stylish, Rodin-inspired  t-shirt with a rendition of The Thinker and “I Think, Therefore I Blog” right there up front where everyone can see what you do.

The concept just swooped down on us while we were out walking a few days ago.  Along with a huge selection of different t-shirt designs, there are also sweatshirts, hoodies, tote bags and, of course, a mousepad. As soon as we have some time, we plan on adding a few other items.

Got ideas or comments, please leave them here or drop us a line at support@marketingtaxi.com.