Targeting the Hard-Headed Customer

For a few more minutes, push aside that stack of unsolicited mail. Turn off your pager and wireless telephone. Unplug your fax machine. Now, think about your future in marketing.

You may have wondered if the marketing-intensive world we live in will allow you much opportunity to make a difference. Marketing is getting more complicated. As good as we become at this craft, our competitors also get better. They quickly copy our successes. How do we win in a game where marketing breakthroughs are becoming more daunting to achieve?

There is an emerging paradigm in marketing communications. It embraces the certainty that marketing is proliferating, that new media channels spring into existence almost monthly, that media loyalty has gone the way of The Howdy Doody Show, and that consumers are becoming extremely well-informed shoppers.

This paradigm needs a name, so I have trademarked Hard-Target Marketing ™. Whatever you call it, the overriding issues remain the same. Hard-Target Marketing can help us get attention in a noisy, competitive marketplace by guiding our strategies with a few essential principles. Here's how:

1) To sell a parity product or service in today's business environment (and almost all products and services are at parity with their competitors), we must create powerful new ways to attract attention. This means integrating marketing messages through multiple media channels and contriving selling situations that break through clutter. Who is doing this successfully? Think back to the 1999 Superbowl when cataloger Victoria’s Secret invited football fans to their Internet site. A stampede followed.

2) We must be willing to take risks, to fire a barrage of ideas and selling messages that are unexpected, ironic, irreverent, bellicose, glorifying, frustrating, angering, energizing, or uplifting. In other words, we must create strong emotional responses. We must create messages that stand apart in the bellowing cacophony of competing media communications. Fast Company magazine launched its charter issue by sending direct mail packages to prospective subscribers with this arresting announcement: "THROW AWAY this envelope, and you’ll be canning your job, career, business and future." Some were turned off by presumptuousness. However, Fast Company became the most successful launch of a new business magazine in decades, suggesting that many appreciated the satire (and truth) embedded in the message.

3) We need a bulls-eye view of the marketplace; we can no longer speak to groups or markets. We must speak to individuals and take one-to-one communications to the individual buyer or organizational buying center. With powerful personalization technologies now available as a byproduct of the digital revolution, marketers are finally empowered to talk to prospective customers almost with the intimacy of neighbors catching up over the backyard fence. As Peter Estler, CEO for MatchLogic, has commented, now you can load a Web page in your browser and in 40 milliseconds, a mainframe computer decides which Web banner advertisement best correlates with your lifestyle interests and surfing habits.

4) An important attribute of today’s successful marketer is persistence, beginning with introduction of a new product or service and continuing for months, years, decades, and even lifetimes. As we begin to view established customers and clients as our most valuable assets, we also recognize the opportunity to create two-way, closed-loop communication systems. For example, try ordering just one gourmet delight from Omaha Steak’s enticing catalog. You will receive offers from this company for years to come. They won’t easily give up on you.

5) To succeed in a world dominated by digital communications, we must be precise in our targeting, bold in our techniques, and ardent in our willingness to exploit New Media. We cannot diminish the value of a single qualified prospect because the stakes are too high and the potential rewards too great. One of my clients fosters relationships with just 300 decision-makers employed by national supermarket chains. During the last two years, we have invested over $1000.00 per prospect just to stay in touch. This includes a password protected Web site, a CD-ROM membership overview, a multimedia sales presentation, and digitally personalized sales collateral. Why? Because each prospect is worth millions to this trade association’s manufacturing members.

6) Finally, we must keep an itchy trigger finger, which is another way of saying that we possess a lightening sense of opportunity. Because markets are more dynamic than ever, marketers today must cultivate laser-like intuition. Disparate products can suddenly become integrated into a co-promotion with a common, unifying theme. Unrelated industries can suddenly depend on each other for survival. A competitor today can become tomorrow's ally. Ten years ago, could Dell Computer and IBM have become marketing partners? Or Apple and Microsoft? Or AT&T and TCI?

Hard-Target Marketing codifies a sense of our mission: to find the needles in the haystack, to draw a dead-aim bead on the few out of the masses who can benefit from our products or services, and to reach them with relevant and motivating selling messages.

It's about recognizing the power of tailored communications in reaching people and influencing action. It's about being proactive instead of reactive, tenacious instead of lax, and precise rather than nebulous.