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The EU is cracking down on “very large tech platforms.” This means:
- Less personalized ad targeting
- Algorithm-free feed options
- Stricter content moderation
- More data transparency (to people like authorities and researchers)
The platforms are working on efforts to comply. But how will it work? And if it does, how long until the US copies it?
A winning ecomm email framework (that’s working right now):
- Company name in the “from” field
- Great headline (chatty is good) with subhead
- Product shot
- “Watch this video” or “Learn more”
- Product video gif
- CTA
45% Of U.S., U.K. Advertisers Have Used Same Ad Approach For Past 5 Years
71% of this group don’t plan to change their strategy in the next year.
Some Q4 offer planning tips from Foxwell Digital:
- Keep it simple
- People want % or $ off
- Don’t do “up to X% off” sales (consumers know what they want probably isn’t the full X% off)
- $ off only works if it’s a meaningful amount (in terms of total price)
Some email A/B tests to consider running:
- Subject lines
- Message text
- Framing of message (question vs. statement, etc)
- CTA text
- Best days for sending (look beyond open rate)
- Best time for sending
Click rates are overrated if you aren’t driving the action you actually want.
I agree.
Click rates (and all click metrics) are proxies for actual business goals. Don’t over optimize the proxy and lose sight of the real goal.
The OG Patagonia?
One last story from Morgan Housel to close out the week.
Sugar, milk, and eggs were all rationed during World War II. Many food companies adapted to use different, often lower-quality, ingredients to get by.
See’s Candy was so obsessed with quality that it refused to lower its standards. One holiday season it closed down and put signs in its store that read, “Sold out. Buy war bonds for Christmas.”
Was See's Candy the original Patagonia?
If you believe in the quality and purpose of your brand so much that you would rather consumers not buy it than budge on those principles, you have a strong brand vision.
If consumers cheer the move, you have a strong brand.
More on the Don't Buy This Jacket campaign.
These 5 Prelaunch Secrets can be generalized to 3 ongoing tasks that build strong brands.
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Learn about your customers: how they function, what their pain points are, what their aspirations are
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Build trust: brands a promise delivery engines. Break consumer trust, break your brand.
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Iterate: brands cannot be static
This question from the Growth Daily newsletter is in line with something I’ve been thinking about more and more for brands:
How would your product be branded and marketed if it was in a completely different industry?
A Story About JFK
Here's another short story that illustrates two recent posts:
- Sales is marketing (and everything is marketing)
- It doesn't matter what you mean, it matters what they think
Again via Morgan Housel.
Again, I'm not going to indent since it's long, so everything between the lines is the quote.
JFK and Jackie Kennedy didn’t have a great relationship. In 1955, two years after their marriage, Jack told his father, Joe Kennedy, he wanted a divorce.
Joe responded: “You’re out of your mind. You’re going to be president someday. This would ruin everything. Divorce is impossible.”
Jack reiterated that he and Jackie weren’t happy.
His father shot back: “Can’t you get it into your head that it’s not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people think you are!”
The marriage endured.
Everything is sales.
This is an extreme example for a specific scenario. But it could also be argued Bud Light didn't take this advice recently (that controversy is still stupid).
The true key is to craft, maintain, and co-create your brand in such a way that what you are and what they think you are is the same thing.
A new podcast ad spend report is out and some big brands are making big moves into the space.
HP leads the Movers category, increasing their $1,226 June spend to $802,531 in July. A modest 65,000% increase. The smallest increase in the top 15 was 480%.
Do these increases indicate early performance returns? Or only one day of ads in June? Or new budgets for a new fiscal year? Or just a dartboard budget number approach?
Is a ‘retail-cession’ slowly brewing as the holidays approach?
Consumers may just be shopped out. How many of us need new stuff after the pandemic years?
“Guests are out at concerts,” [Target CEO Brian Cornell] said. “They’re going to movies. They’ve seen Barbie. They’re enjoying those experiential moments, and they’re shopping very carefully for discretionary goods.”
Making up for lost time.
Actual value is commodification.
Perceived value is differentiation.
A great story on positioning, storytelling, and marketing via Morgan Housel.
Ford had no interest in race cars – his vision was to build a cheap, quality car for the masses.
But knowing that he needed to win over both investors and the public, he built the best race car in the world, and in 1902 it beat the reigning champion.
“That was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read,” Ford wrote. He became known nationwide.
Everything is sales.
(and sales is marketing)
no one person has control of what the brand is
via Growth Daily
The company doesn’t even have full control over what the brand is.
Brands are acts of co-creation with the audience.
A Story About Henry Ford
A great story on positioning, storytelling, and marketing via Morgan Housel.
I'm not going to indent since it's long, so everything between the lines is the quote.
Henry Ford knew the automobile would change the world. The rest of the world wasn’t so sure. In the early 1900s, cars looked like noisy toys for rich people.
But toys are fun, so the one thing the public was crazy about was car racing.
Ford had no interest in race cars – his vision was to build a cheap, quality car for the masses.
But knowing that he needed to win over both investors and the public, he built the best race car in the world, and in 1902 it beat the reigning champion.
“That was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read,” Ford wrote. He became known nationwide.
The attention was enough to raise money from investors, and Ford Motor Company was formed eight months later.
Everything is sales.
And sales is marketing.
The salad days of streaming are over.
29% of US internet households are canceling streaming video services to save money
47% annualized subscriber churn rate for streaming platforms.
This was inevitable. Now we see which companies have the strongest content moats (I am betting on Disney).
Are we primed for the return of the bundle?
Cage Match: Sales vs. Marketing
Some rivalries have reached legendary status.
Lakers-Celtics. Tom & Jerry. The Hatfields & the McCoys. Sales & Marketing.
Everyone knows they don’t get along. But why is that? I have a guess.
It's because they’re the same thing.
I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking…blasphemy! But hear me out.
Marketing is sales. Sales is marketing.
Two words. Same goal. Different paths to get there.
They're not arguing about the big stuff. They're arguing about the details that identities get tied to.
Let's go back to Lakers-Celtics. When fans of those teams get to arguing, they’re not arguing about whether or not basketball is a good sport or the NBA is a version of the game worth watching. They’ve already agreed on that to the point that they’re willing to argue about a detail within that conversation. Which team is better? (Answer: Celtics. Duh.)
That is what the identities get tied to. That is where the details are.
The details may be different, but the goal is the same:
Grow customers, grow the business, grow the brand.
Like I said earlier, the two take different paths. Those paths diverge along scale and focus.
Marketing is a one-to-many channel. It's about scale. Reaching as many people as possible in your target market. By focusing on aspirations.
Sales, on the other hand, is one-on-one. It's very specific. The salesperson can know the specific problem and cater the pitch and the solution to that problem and that individual.
Small scale versus large scale. Nothing wrong with either, but it is one of the primary differences between the two.
To be reductive:
- Marketing is about opening the door.
- Sales is about closing the deal.
To do these, they use different messages.
Marketing is selling a vision. It’s what your life could become. It's what it would be like to be part of this group.
Sales is selling a solution. You have a problem. I have the fix for that problem.
At this point, what drives this fake dichotomy is the behaviors and attitudes institutionalized by corporations. Large corporations are dinosaurs. Holdovers from an era where marketing was fuzzy —as John Wanamaker (allegedly) said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."—and deals had to be done in person. Or at least person-to-person.
The modern internet changed that. To shop on Amazon, you don’t talk to an Amazon salesperson. You don’t sit through a pitch meeting before signing up for Uber. Or Instagram. Or Spotify.
For organizations with well-functioning sales teams, marketing can work to scale that expertise and approach across digital channels.
Because marketing is sales. And sales is marketing.
But in the end, it's all storytelling.
That’s it. It’s stories all the way down.
The story of marketing is a promise of belonging.
This is for people like you. This is Seth Godin stuff. You're selling something larger than the individual. Marketing is about creating a group that your target audience wants to be involved in.
The story of sales is a promise of a solution.
This isn't about group identity. This isn't about making someone feel like they're part of something. This is having a one-to-one relationship, knowing what the problem is, and saying “this will solve your problem”.
In both cases, you are making promises. In both cases, you have to deliver on those promises. Same same.
Promise creation, promise delivery. Expectation creation, expectation delivery.
Over-deliver and you’ve done it right. Under-deliver and you’ve failed.
There’s a lot of overlap between the two functions and distinctions get fuzzier the closer you get to the edges. Marketing is more a numbers game while sales is more focused on relationships. You can truly only sell 1 person at a time. You can market to far more than 1 person at a time.
At their core though, they are both about storytelling, positioning, and answering the audience’s unvoiced concerns.
As Morgan Housel says, Everything is sales. And as I say, sales is marketing. You do the math.