Ever wondered what marketing is really all about? When I did my CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) Diploma, the first session was dedicated to defining the term. Officially, according to the CIM at the time, marketing was "the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs".

Fired up as I was with all the enthusiasm and rebelliousness of youth (I was 27, I think), I took issue with this. Come on. Let's be honest.

That's simply not true.

Marketing is about helping to sell more. It's doing what you need to do in order to make it easier for the sales guys to close the deals. It's greasing the wheels of commerce by creating desire for products, communicating in a certain way that makes more people like your company and your brand.

Isn't it?

Marketing Automation and DIY marketing tools are great.  Powerful tools for the marketer that directly enable you to communicate in a more frequent, relevant and timely manner with customers and prospects.  No need to rely on an agency to send out every email (still smiling!).  I am an absolute advocate of these tools - if used correctly. 

Yet when in untrained hands these tools can quietly erode your brand right in front of your customer's eyes in a way that almost goes unrealised if your antennae is pointed elsewhere. 

I write following recent experience as a recipient of a series of emails as a customer of the sending business (I'm not going to name names).

The basic fact is that you send most emails to people you already have your best relationships with: customers.  Don't underestimate this.  These are the most important people in the world to your business.  Yet email is often delegated as focus put on other 'higher impact' comms.

Why?   Because we 'now have a template',  and with that QA seems to go out of the window.  Yet systems and users have a habit of managing to break templates pretty quickly.  'Those 1000 words will fit.'  'That 1200 pixel wide image will CAN be a thumbnail.'  'Over-compression - they love it!'

Templates are incredibly useful as they let you send out frequent comms without the need to re-invent the wheel each time.  But how thought-through and tested are they?  How understood is their use? Does your sender understand good communication design principles?  Are these being tested across all email clients using tools such as Litmus? Just whose hands are you putting them into?!

So here's the recipe:  a lack of understanding of the brand or good design, consequent template abuse, and the desertion of QA.  Put these in a pot and stir.
Let's see what you get:

So I get an email...  here's what happens in about 5 seconds.

I recognise the sender so I open it.
First impressions: it looks like spam. 
There's an heavily over-compressed logo.  Why has someone turned that into a JPEG?
I can't believe that image has come from an approved library.

Poor text formatting: can hardly read it.  Margins and spacing are everywhere.
Too much content.  Too many links - unstyled.  
Nothing stand-out. 
And didn't I get this before last week?
Delete.
My opinion of the brand has just gone down a few notches.
I will probably just hit delete if it arrives again.

Maybe the primary concern of the sender is about 'just getting it out'. 
That's a phrase I hate. 

So what's the point of this rant?   I suppose I'm trying to point out that even activity deemed 'routine' should be crafted with as much care and attention as the sexy stuff. 
When you consider the audience who receive it, you could easily argue its impression and effect matter far more.

This piece first appeared as the European Perspective column in the print version of B2B Marketing Magazine October 2011.

Ever wondered why the British and the French use social media differently? It's all a question of context, apparently...

Anthropologists will tell you that Europe can be broadly divided into high- and low-context cultures. France and Italy, for example, are high context cultures, where routine communications are often based on experiences and expectations understood by all members of that culture.

This reduces the need for detail, and increases the tendency for verbal story-telling over factual description. Low-context cultures, such as the UK, Germany and the US make fewer such assumptions, preferring fuller communications and more detailed descriptions.

These two dimensions have a very direct influence on how people share and communicate their knowledge. High-context cultures may use stories and metaphors in explaining a learning situation whereas low context cultures may uses tables and figures for underlining arguments. Tables and figures are much more easy to share via online media, whereas stories and metaphors are more suited to face-to-face conversation.

Which may explain why business meetings over a long lunch might happen more in Paris than Berlin. And this may in turn contribute to the slower adoption of social media sharing in such cultures. Whilst LinkedIn is great for sharing infographics, it doesn't serve very good coffee...

Image courtesy of sh0dan, via Flickr and Creative Commons

Download Buyersphere Report 2011 here

Search for the term "information overload" on Google and you get over 6 million results. It's a pretty common problem and nowhere, you might have guessed, would this problem manifest itself more readily than in the world of business.

The web is awash with articles, webinars, blogs and guides all designed to offer information to buyers who are wondering what product to buy. But, incredibly, it seems that buyers are hungry for more.

The recently released Buyersphere Report 2011 surveyed over 1,000 business buyers about the information sources they used when researching purchases. Not their opinions, mind - the survey was specifically designed to find out what buyers actually did, rather than what they thought - and the results show that the hunger for information shows no sign of being satisfied as yet.

Taken from here under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

If somebody steals what is rightfully yours, what should you do? Sue them? Chase them and get it back? Phone the police? Hunt them down?

There is a growing school of thought to say you should be thanking them…

Having worked with some of the largest entertainment names in the world (including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) and flirted with the music industry, I’ve seen how companies protect their intellectual property with all their might.

It’s understandable to see why. IP = identity. It’s the DNA of any organisation, and to steal it would be detrimental, right? Perhaps not!

Like anything in life, in order to evolve, businesses need to adapt to their changing environment. It’s a common argument that businesses are not progressing with their audience quickly enough. Just look at the mass influx of businesses now getting onboard the Social Media wagon to keep with the times, but yet they don’t know how to use it. As people, we have taken social media into our lives naturally, so why do many businesses struggle?

According to the story, the cobbler's children went around with no shoes. This frequently happens in business. If you have ever worked on building a new system for an IT company or an ad campaign for an ad agency, you will know what I mean.

And so it was that, when B2B Marketing, the leading publisher in the UK business marketing sector, decided to rebrand itself, it wanted to do it right. With an expert audience to impress, it wanted to follow best-practice and relaunch itself with a new brand and a new website that would win the respect of thousands of customers who do B2B branding and website builds for a living.

Having worked with B2B Marketing since they began in 2004, Base One was offered the job of managing the rebranding project - a challenge we were delighted to accept. That was last year. Now, two weeks after the launch of the new brand, we can breathe a sigh of relief, look back on a job well done and share some of the learnings in our case study whitepaper: New Brand, New Website: The B2B Marketing Case Study.

If you are embarking on digital branding exercises, or building a new website - or if you would simply like the inside story on the industry's favourite publisher - download it here now.

There's no denying the rise of YouTube. The site experiences in excess of two billion views a day, 24 hours of content is uploaded every minute and the average person uses it for 15 minutes of their day. And all this just five years after its conception.

So it's baffling to consider that many organisations overlook YouTube as a powerful marketing tool. Not just as a platform to upload what you consider to be the next big viral, but more importantly as an extension of your brand, helping to establish or reinforce your identity with your audience.

Today's FT carries an interesting spread on the difficulties large brands face when their reputation is somehow besmirched by public perceptions of accidents (BP's oil spill and safety record), financial impropriety (Goldman Sachs paying huge bonuses after being bailed out) or just getting too big for your boots (Starbucks global expansion). An article by Morgen Witzel and Ravi Mattu looks at perceptions of leading brands and the difficulties of Asian brands like Tata to transcend local boundaries.

There are a lot of people talking about content marketing these days - and so they should be. But amongst all the talk about how content marketing is perfect in principle for the modern business world, it's nice to see some concrete examples.

That was one of the ideas behind the Great Content Marketing Experiment, conducted on 19th May this year in London. To put the principles of content marketing to the test by doing a campaign in a day. To create and distribute useful content and to measure its effect within a targeted audience.

The whole experiment has now been summarised in the document below. If you are considering using content marketing, it is a fascinating insight into how it can work in practice - albeit in a 24-hour period! Please feel free to download and distribute - if you find it useful content, that's what it's all about after all.

Download the full story here >> content_marketing_experiment.pdf

I'm lucky to be surrounded by a lot of smart people in my work, be they clients or colleagues. So it makes it all the more amazing when I see examples of complete lack of vision when it comes to marketing - in this case, nurturing customer loyalty.