“How would you like your steak cooked?”
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You’ve heard this question, right? Whether it’s at Django or at your friend’s back yard cook out. Your answer is unique. There are many choices on how you have your steak prepared. Raw, bloody as hell, seared, rare, medium rare, medium, medium well done, well done and overcooked.
Consumers
How you receive marketing messages as a consumer involves the same process. Sure, a waiter with a towel over his arm doesn’t ask you how you want your marketing, actually, you get to decide. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you decide how and when you will be marketed to. You choose rare steak just as you choose to turn the channel when a commercial comes on. You choose to open or not open the envelope full of coupons from Valassis. As a consumer of marketing – YOU are in control.
Marketers
Let’s say you’re a marketer. If you are going to overcook your steak and serve it to the masses your recipients will get a bland taste in their mouth that has them looking for A1 Sauce and thinking, “I could have made this myself.” What you also get is a 1-2% ROI on direct mail and other tactics. Send the steak back to the cook, right? Sorry, too late, the printer wants to get paid.
Marketers must realize that their customers want their marketing served just like their steak – on their terms. Does your marketing department have a cook who knows the difference between raw, bloody as hell, seared, rare, medium rare, medium, medium well done, well done or overcooked? Does your marketing department have people who know the difference between Twitter, Facebook, RSS, email, direct mail, broadcast, interactive and outdoor? Just as you have to cook steak the way your customers want it, you need to deliver marketing messages where and when your customers want it.
It’s All About Me
Call me selfish, but if you want to reach me, you need to play to my selfish tendencies and habits. You better use some of these: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, online advertising, a blog, outdoor (I-235), local sports talk radio (KXNO), smart phones and you need to rock at search engine optimization. I spend more time on Google than Claire Celsi spends ripping Dell. I won’t see your message on television because I DVR everything. My wife gets the mail and she edits it for me based on her preferences. So I might read your direct mail – if she wants me to.
So, instead of asking “How would you like your steak?” – ask, “How would THEY like THEIR steak?”
Author: Josh Fleming
www.lessingflynn.com
Apologies to Vegans, vegetarians and animal lovers. PETA and HSUS save your breath, it’s just an analogy.
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Well-done steaks are treated with the same indignation as direct mail in my house – straight to the trash heap with ya, fella.
And this is actually a rather accurate correlation you draw, Josh, for steak truly is one of the few dishes where subjective preferences dictate how it’ll be consumed – if at all.
Too raw. Too cooked. Too bad – you ain’t getting eaten.
Marketing is the same way: Too vague. Too annoying. Too bad – not buying your products.
And yet some peeps enjoy raw ambiguity or overcooked doggedness. Knowing the preferences of your dining patrons (or customers) ultimately determines how successful your dish or campaign will be.
Nice stuff.
The steak analogy works well, in this rare occasion, providing a medium of communication. (OK, enough of the “done” puns.)
Another way to approach the question is not to ask how the customer wants their steak done, since in many cases we can’t get an answer, but to have all levels of doneness available and let them choose their own. So, rather than trying to proactively ask each customer how to communicate with them, we have to be ready to offer all choices; be it print, Twitter, broadcast or sky writing. That takes a good integrated approach that includes all channels, not just the hot new ones. It is a matter of semantics, but one that may prove helpful in the next point. (Those of you who are anti-semantic, can leave now.)
You, as the chef (the marketing guru) have to have a restaurant owner (boss, company executive or client) who can see the benefit in this broad strategy. Without their buy-in, you can’t get the steak to cook in the first place. And you can’t go any further back in this chain to get approval. If you ask the cow how they want to be cooked, you either get a quizzical, bewildered look or trampled.
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