“Marketing is a Tax You Pay for being Unremarkable”

This statement was made by Robert Stephens, Founder of Geek Squad at the Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit in 2008. What is your opinion? True or False? Depending on where you find yourself on the marketing food chain you could argue both opinions, but after alot of thought we can only agree.

If your product(s), service(s) or customer service is below standard and therefore your business is unremarkable no amount of good marketing will help to get you out of trouble and save your business.

The very statement itself,  so controversial at it’s core is a basic marketing strategy. Grabbing your attention, stirring your emotions and the “fear factor” towards tax would make any business owner sit up and listen in an instant. Therefore he is, in one sentence, achieving the desired results any marketer would be aiming for. Marketing in it’s purest form is effective communication. The buzz created by this statement which still has people talking and blogging about it, is more valuable than most small business marketing budgets can buy. So therefore we would call this a remarkable statement.

In the video below, Michael Murphy, Head of Customer Service at The Virgin Group echos Robert’s ethos – To be remarkable and to become a consumer champion it all starts with your employees. In both companies there is a strong focus for employees to take ownership and to communicate with fellow employees to create a close bond, open communication and innovation. This directly fulfills the basic social needs of any human being. Social needs are those related to interaction with other people and may include:

• Need for friends
• Need for belonging
• Need to give and receive love

- further validating Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In the case of Virgin, the group’s main management’s, only restiction they inforce on a new Virgin group company and their employees is to keep within the framework of the main values. These are

• Fun
• Value for money
• Quality
• Innovation
• Competitive challenge
• Brilliant Customer Service

Other than that they are free to create their own sub values, according to the industry, country & culture in wich they operate in. This is further echoed by Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin

“Convention dictates that a company looks after it’s shareholders first, it’s customers next and last of all worry about it’s employees. Virgin does the opposite. For us, our employees matter most. It just seems common sense to me that, if you start off with a happy, well-motivated workforces, you are much more likely to have happy customers. And in due course the resulting profits will make your shareholders happy.”

So. How does this all tie in and relate to digital marketing? The way we would like to look at it and describe it would be with the following two principles in mind. You can have all the best tools, but without the human touch it means nothing. Secondly without strong relationships with your staff and customers you don’t have a sustainable business. Consider the following. Word of mouth was all the magic that any business could hope for. The reason we are saying hope are tied in with the knowledge that in the past it was not easy to engage your staff or customers due to high cost associated with things like focus groups & logistics.

The average small business would not have been able to regular engage their customers, to really truly find out what the customer wants. Processes of the past fell short in gathering data from a really broad spectrum of customers or staff. Add on top of that these staff & customers didn’t really own the voices that technology makes available to them today at very low cost and in most cases free. Upgrade to “Word of Mouth 2.0″ aka Viral Marketing in the online world. Since the advent of technologies like blogs, niche social networks, online video, forums etc, people now really have the power to make or brake your business.

The only way you can be sure to survive in this new digital economy is a mix of the old & the new. Firstly from the “old”. Develop a culture of self improvment in your compamy and let your staff always remember to ask themselves. “Would I be happy receiving the service I just delivered”. Secondly. Again through self development learn to communicate effectively and be sure that with effective communication the emphasis are on truly listening. Nothing can make us as humans feel that someone don’t care like not feeling truly listened to. Now for the “new”. Look at what technology are available to engage your staff & customers to give them a voice & remember to then listen.

This brings us to taking a big look in the mirror here at eVENALICIUM as we are constantly striving for improvment. So to enable our commitment to effective communication with you our reader, customer, Facebook fan, Twitter follower, Subscriber etc, we would like to invite you into our conversation and community. Through the technology brought to you by Get Satisfaction, we will like to invite you to give us feedback, suggestions etc. We respect your opinion and would love to hear how we could serve you better and bring more value to you and your business.