What’s the difference between a consumer and a customer?

by Gary Bloomer · 1 comment

Ever wondered what the difference is between a consumer and a customer? Here’s my take on things:

Consumers use things—they consume goods, products, and services in a money-for-value-obtained exchange. Think gasoline, milk, insurance, movie tickets, groceries, cars, batteries, clothing, and so on. Whenever you buy one of these things, you’re a consumer. You’re in hunter gatherer mode.

Customers buy from you, or from your competitors, because they know you, like you, and trust you (or because they know, like, and trust your competitors MORE than they do you). Customers buy from you based on their familiarity, on their emotional responses to you and your goods, and because they like what you stand for, or because they aspire to be like other people that have bought from you.

So it’s the job of your marketing to ensure that needs are met, that expectations are exceeded, and that minds are read so that your goods, services, and products meet unmet needs, thereby placing you and the solutions you offer first in a given category and front and centre in people’s minds.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™

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Is Internet Marketing Doomed?

by Gary Bloomer · 1 comment

Well, it could be if Matt Trainer is right.

Click on that little link there guys and watch Matt’s videos, then READ the comments. This is scary, scary stuff and the time to act is NOW.

Here’s my take on Matt’s position and yes, y’all can violently disagree with me.

But I see a cloud on the horizon and it’s going to cast a huge, huge shadow.

Here’s why:

People, it’s not going to happen. Matt’s prediction? The end of Internet marketing? No. Really. Trust me on this. Know why? Because it’s ALREADY happening. Make no mistake about it. The world of marketing and media IS changing. So is the way people interact with messages and how those people perceive those messages and how they pass those messages on.

And how they IGNORE those messages.

The democratization of distribution and the massive drops in prices of content creation and dissemination have seen to this. Think broadband. Think iPhone. Think Flipcam. Think RSS.

Think WordPress. Think social media. Cheap production affordability; easy production ability; massive distribution opportunity.

In just three years, the ABILITY to create content and get it online and out into the marketplace has become faster and cheaper, thereby making it more widely available. This is chaos theory in marketing at work guys: sensitive dependence on initial conditions; rapid divergence of nearby trajectories, and strange attractors.

It’s not what people do that’s so vital here but WHY they do it.

Matt, if you read this, I think the “happening”—the event, “the beginning of the end”, whatever name we give it—I think it all started in the early 2000s … AFTER the dot com bubble burst.

I think that crash did two things. First, it thinned the herd. Second, it taught the savviest of minds (the budding IM clan) to learn from the mistakes of other people. These two things might not appear to that significant. But let’s look a little deeper.

Four short years ago (October, 2006) Google bought YouTube for $1.65 BILLION … and at that point, YouTube, founded in February 2005, was only 20 months old.

Read that again.

True, not everyone will create a Facebook ($700 million in ad revenue this year, up from nearly ZERO two years ago) or a YouTube. But regardless, to thrive over the next 5 years, the IM community must relearn, must regroup, must refocus, and must retool.

People, it might well be time to re-niche that niche. I think Matt’s right. LISTEN TO HIM!

Three to five oh-so-short-years from now, content-rich, highly popular companies that aren’t even founded yet and that make and sell nothing of any great worth or importance will be bringing in an average of $150 million per year in ad revenues EACH, AND within 24 to 48 months of having been founded, those companies will be bought and sold by bigger corporations for multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. They will pull off everything that the dot comers promised but couldn’t deliver.

And I see many of those deep pocketed corporations being involved in … drumroll please: advertising creation and content distribution. For which read: media.

Along with companies like Time Warner and Disney you’ll find other, I see larger conglomerates snapping up these “smaller” outfits. Companies with the kind of buying power that it’s hard to fathom, and with names you may not be familiar with: Publicis, Omnicom, and WPP.

Never heard of any of these companies? That’s because they’re media companies run by corporate accountants. But between them they own strings of major ad agencies … agencies with annual billings into the hundreds of billions.

Ad agencies such as DDB, Digitas, Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, Chiat/Day, TBWA, BBDO, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Grey Global Group, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, JWT, GSD&M. And others.

If this happens, guess what will happen to the cost of media? Might it drop like a stone? No. Think diamonds and you’ll be closer to the mark: whoever controls the supply controls the demand. And with control of demand comes control of price. Time and money are inversely connected: to save one you must spend a lot of the other. Or, you must pay whatever the going rate is to the people that can do what you cannot do or don’t want to do.

So, yes, I see Fortune 500 companies spreading out, but I also see them spending money to outsource their media, the channels that’ve just been snapped up by the likes of Publicis et al. Are ya seeing a pattern here?

Will this happen for sure? Only time will tell. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll look like a twonk and you can all tell me how wrong I was. But if it does happen, you read it here first.

But in the meanwhile, and as Matt advises, I’ll be taking action and kicking ass.

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The Power of Promotion

by Gary Bloomer · 0 comments

For the last few days, the Internet has been abuzz with the story of a girl that quit her job via a stream of photographs. The story broke on a site called The Chive and you can see the pictures here.

Before the story broke, TheChive’s traffic was about 100,000 hits per month. In the 36 hours after the story broke, their traffic went up to 2.3 million hits per month. Here’s the proof from Quantcast.

But here’s the point. The story was a fake. The Chive revealed the fake the following day. But meanwhile, JetBlue’s Steven Slater has become a folk hero.

Longer term, it will be interesting to see if The Chive’s visitation goes up because of their extra traffic. It’ll also be interesting to see how Steven Slater makes out, job wise (that is, if he doesn’t go to jail).

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Marketing Tips from Eben Pagan (video 1 of 3)

by Gary Bloomer · 0 comments

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How to Talk to Picasso

by Gary Bloomer · 0 comments

We are in the auditorium of a crowded concert hall in Manchester, northern England in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The exact date is not important.

In the audience are hundreds of people. They’ve all paid their money to hear the great American baritone singer Paul Robeson, perform his greatest work.

In the audience sits a precocious 11-year-old boy. His name is Brian Blessed.

He’s saved his pocket money for months to afford his ticket and now the hour approaches when he’ll see and hear his hero sing live for the first time.

Sitting next to the young master Blessed is a man in his late 60s or early 70s. He has white hair. His skin is tanned, and he is well dressed.

In his broad Yorkshire accent and in one long, breathless sentence our young concert-goer turns to the man sitting next to him and says “’Ello my name’s Brian I’m 11 years old I go to Bolton-on-Dean Secondary Modern and I’m here to see Paul Robeson you’re not from around here are you what do you do mister?”

The white haired man with the tanned skin smiles, extends his hand, and in heavily accented English says “Hello Brian. I am pleased to meet you. I am also here to see Paul Robeson. I am from Spain. My name is Pablo. I am an artist.”

“Crickey!” says young master Blessed, “If you’re an artist you must be famous. Here—” and into the hands of the man called Pablo our young charge pushes his concert program and a nubbin of pencil. “Here, if you’re an artist, draw something!”

The man called Pablo smiles again, takes the program and pencil, and in one fluid line draws something, neatly signs his sketch, and passes the program and the nubbin of pencil back to the lad’s eager hands.

Young master Blessed looks at the drawing. He turns the program this way and that. Finally he says “What’s that then? What’s that supposed to be?”

The man called Pablo says “It is a dove”.

“A dove!” blurts the lad. “That’s not a dove! That’s rubbish that is! If you were a proper artist it’d be obvious what it was and it’d be brilliant! That’s not a dove that’s rubbish that is!”

Soon after, the houselights dim and the performance began.

Brian Blessed went on to become an actor with a larger-than-life personality that still booms across theatre stages and movie sets. As a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in the mid 1990s, Blessed recounted the rest of that evening.

He said that after the show, he pushed his way back stage and managed to get through the crowd and get into Paul Robeson’s dressing room—a space that was full or reporters busily interviewing Mr. Robeson.

Pushing through the ranks of reporters the boy asked Robeson for his autograph. “Whereupon”, said Blessed “and, much to the delight of the assembled reporters, Paul Robeson hauled me into his lap sang to me!”

Of his encounter with the man called Pablo, Blessed went on to say “If only I’d known then what I know now! You know, to this day I kick myself that I didn’t keep that bloody program!” The man called Pablo was Pablo Picasso.

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