Dear Foxtel

updated 31/12/09 following call received from Rihanna at Foxtel on 29/12

It was a pleasant experience to get the call and we had a good conversation. It was nice to get something positive out of this experience, however, Foxtel still need to go a way to, in my opinion, introduce value back into their offerings. Stopping discriminating between customers and focusing on the Customer Experience rather than Marketing would be a start.

See my understanding of their responses to my specific questions below. I hope what they appear to have committed to actually comes through

To: Shona Bishop
"Executive Director, Customer Service and Installations
Foxtel"

Dear Shona,

A couple of weeks back you sent me a letter to tell me you were completely incapable of doing simple calculations and forgot I had a 'loyalty bonus' already before telling me the price cut I thought I had actually was an Increase in Price.

Actually I'm going to just quote what you wrote here, because I'm assuming what I wrote above is what you meant to get across. But as with Barnaby Joyce's recent effort at Blogging, it doesn't appear to be written in any kind of English I understand;

Balancing Need and Want in the Product Development Process

I just read Matt Moore's most recent post over at Engineers without Fears.
I was inspired enough to comment as I felt his argument covered a key challenge of the Customer/Product Relationship.

As organisations which develop and Sell Products and Services, we need to sell to make ourselves relevant. In order to ensure we get and keep our customers we sometimes have to perhaps emphasise parts of the service which we know are going to appeal more to specific customer segments. That's called Marketing and PR, I think. The question is though, is that a form of prostitution, or just fulfilling a real need which actually exists?
As with most things, the challenge is to find the balance between creating a need, filling a need which exists. That's probably more sustainable than creating 'wants' in order to fulfill over zealous forecasts to keep the Shareholder happy.
(note: Image sourced from http://www.zazzle.com.au/)

The Pillars of Retail

Sometime ago, I wrote about the segmentation of markets and the inherent gaps there are in that Segmentation when people don't 'fit' the model. In my day job recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about Retail, which is not really a subject I know much about. And recently I've had the experience of some hideous customer service (which I'll write about at length in a follow up article). So I've been thinking about how all those thought processes overlap.

I conceptualised some time ago in an earlier draft of this article what I thought where the definitions of a successful retail offering. While this article is semi-educated OPINION, developed by being a customer for well, a few years now, I think it is important to defer to experts in the field. So I have been canvassing directly or indirectly input about Retail (i.e. Bricks and Mortar) sales outlets. Especially when it comes to the Key Pillar of that channel - Customer Experience.

As part 1 of this piece, let me share my opinions on what I believe a retail business should, at the very least, offer a customer.

Are we Marketing to Ghosts?

How do you get sold to? What matters to you? What is VALUE?

These are really, from my shallow knowledge, some of the most important things a marketing group and organisation should consider when developing a marketing strategy. Now multiply that by your target market size. But what if that market size is 1 Million?

As most people, despite being sheep, are somewhat individual, thats the number of 'Segments' and 'Categories' you will need to target in your marketing campaign. Scary, huh? SO no wonder organisations choose to simplify that by pushing people, siloing them indeed, into core groups or segments. Just like a mandarin.

Solved then...or is it?

That was the question I had over coffee today with a social media colleague. Can we easily segment EVERYBODY? Is it OK to tailor ALL of our Marcoms to someone on the basis our modelling has pushed them into one segment or another? What if the modelling, the Analysis, the computer algorithms have CORRECTLY identified your market segment, but your ambitions, your DESIRES are focused in a different direction.

The computer program knows what you need, but YOU know what you WANT (to kind of paraphrase Bob Dylan).

Does Online Marketing, with it's easily adaptable marketing in the various pages allow all of your potential segments to be exposed to you or is there another way. Not everyone is 'into' Social Media, and even if they were, I imagine that still isn't the silver bullet. But what is the Digital Strategy, or even old school strategy which resolves that problem?

Is there a resolution? Or is it an acceptable gap in the Marketing world to corral everyone as the Marketing Algorithm says, focus on those who DO fit within that corral and hope for the best with the rest.

Do those who fall through the gaps or live in the grey places in between multiple segments MISS all the Marketing supposedly targetted at them or do they see the mish-mash of messages?

Are there strategies for dealing with this?

Marketing, what is it?

Dear Marketers, please don't take this as an insult, I appreciate everyone has a job to do. However, as an avid, and perhaps noisy user of various 'social media' tools - notably twitter, I really take exception to the view which seems prevalent by 'Marketers' and Agency types that those tools are in fact there to serve Marketing, Advertising and other Brand awareness strategies.

I think it is time for these people to focus on the first word in the descriptive term:

• 'Social'

And here are a series of definitions for the term: http://bit.ly/zUOnM

So here is how I see it, Social Media tools have a place in all facets of industry, enterprise & other social environments. Including Advertising and Marketing. But just like other tools, they will have their benefits for a time and perhaps will change their angle over time. So when I read articles like this one I get quite irate as it seems to indicate that Twitter only exists to serve Marketing. It even starts off with the concept that everything has its time (it does), but then, just like far too many books, it veers off path and narrows in on Twitter as a Marketing tool which will die because its time has come.

Perhaps he is right, perhaps he is wrong, but I - and sure hundreds of thousands of others - use Facebook, twitter, tumblr, friendfeed etc. etc. for many other objectives than marketing. And gain so much out of these services from information which is not just specifically marketing and Advertising.

I also attended Social Media Club Sydney at the Supper Club last night, and it was a wonderfully social occasion, despite some niggles from one of them marketers ;) But the same line as the article I refer to above was spewed out one too many times during the interesting question and answer session and I had some opinions on that. Rather than rehashing those tweets, here are the key salient points I got

• Social Media is a conversation
• Social Media CAN include Branding and Marketing
• Social Media is about what is happening now
• Social Media as a Marketing Tool still requires real Business Modelling
• Social Media is about building relationships - personal and business

And therefore I revisit a tweet I made many, many months ago (and therefore probably no longer still searchable), where I felt that Twitter is like going down the pub, but staying in your lounge room or your phone or wherever!

But each to their own, just don't hard sell me online!

Oh and @leighsales should definitely do the hard questioning at the next Social Media Gathering. Are you listening Tip?