I was in Munich for a conference this week. The trip coincided with the last weekend of Oktoberfest. Our gracious German hosts took us to dinner at the oldest restaurant in Munich, a house of traditional Bavarian cuisine. I’d never seen so many ways to serve pork products or to fry fruit and vegetables. I found it difficult to understand how such a rich and diverse culture could produce a cuisine that was more than a little hard to swallow. Then I remembered it wasn’t created for my palate. And who was I to argue with the marketing strategy of a 550 year-old-restaurant?
It reinforced one of my points from last week: don’t talk to yourself. The converse of that is: listen to your customers, understand the context for your product or service in their worlds, and deliver on their expectations within that context.
As marketers we like to talk to ourselves. We spend a lot of energy thinking about messaging, media and market share. We forget that the people we’re marketing to are just like us. They have lives, they have more important things to think about than our brands, and (in the US) they’re receiving upwards of 3,000 messages in 9+ hours of media use each day.
We tend to think of brand ubiquity as a virtue, and we spend a lot of time and money to ensure that brand representation is consistent. Sometimes we prove the adage that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. This is painfully true when we move out of our own local markets to other countries. Here’s one example.
In September 2000, McDonald’s introduced the McFalafel in the Egyptian market to tepid reviews. Three years later, as anti-American sentiments began to crescendo in various Arab countries, local residents began boycotting American consumer packaged goods products like McDonald’s and Coca Cola. To the surprise of many US-based analysts, a substantial amount of the activity around these boycotts was stimulated using SMS, email and WWW postings. This despite relatively low PC/Internet penetration and literacy rates in many of these countries.
Last March I met with the leading Egyptian McDonald’s franchisee, a savvy businessman from Cairo. He told me that he responded to the boycotts with a promotion to donate a portion of his profits on every purchase to a local children’s cancer hospital. His sales quickly rose above pre-boycott levels. Not so for Coca-Cola and other American brands who continued to insist on marketing America and “American values” rather than American products. They talk too much and they don’t listen.
These days there are many ways to listen. You can use classic marketing techniques such as primary and secondary research. And you can glean a lot from online buzz and blogs. Whatever you do, be sure that you’re putting yourself in the contexts of your customers and prospects. Establish a system for testing, measuring and refining your messages and promotions. Take advantage of our diverse and fragmented marketing environment. Conduct small-scale, discretely structured programs which offer low-cost methods of actually observing consumer behavior and refining your offerings, media plans and creative accordingly.
Most importantly, take your ideas and insights from a diverse and qualified array of sources, and not just from your boardroom. After all, how else would you learn that one person’s McFelafel is another‘s Schweinshaxe?
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