In the local news today, an analysis of Vermont Governor James Douglas’ plan to develop and market a Vermont-branded standard for evaluating carbon offsets. Among the wealth of political opinions and posturing, a comment by “free-market advocate” John McLaughry caught my eye.

After expressing his strong skepticism on the carbon credit program — “I can’t get very excited about it. I think the whole thing is a giant scam” — he then advocates promoting the program based on Vermont’s reputation for environmental responsibility.

“It is trading on Vermont’s green reputation. Any way you can market that to a customer who will pay a premium for it, so much the better.”

Ouch. Regardless of your political stance, that’s a dangerous take on marketing.

Brands and products that fail to deliver real value to their customers are doomed in any market. It’s enough of a challenge to create success with a product that you’re completely behind, one that offers value and innovation. Driving success from a product you believe to be inadequate is a fool’s mission in any market.

And if you’re fortunate enough to have a successful brand, you’ve inherited a responsibility to maintain its integrity. This responsibility extends to your stakeholders, vendors, employees and your customers.

The State of Vermont has been fairly consistent over the years in its understanding of the value a positive brand image can have on the regional economy, although the resulting creative efforts have been less reliable. As the state’s Department of Tourism explains in How to Use the Vermont Brand,

The brand exists solely in the minds of consumers and it encompasses their overall perceptions and attitudes of Vermont.

I’m not going to offer an opinion on the validity of the Governor’s carbon credit proposal. But let’s be clear: there’s no room for disingenuous marketing strategies that seek to tarnish the authenticity and reliability that add to the Vermont brand.

Alan Rimm-Kaufmann was generous enough to post a recap of his clients’ year-over-year Pay Per Click performance for 2007 vs 2006. Some useful online-retail benchmarks here, including click-throughs [dropping], CPCs [on the rise], conversion rates and ACS [Ad Cost of Sales] ratios. Fun to compare your own results against these soft numbers.

more »

With all the news and research going into the development of marketing techniques for web 2.0, it’s kinda scary to find experts who are still having trouble figuring out what to do with the social web. In a recent article, eMarketer.com points out the influence that apparel sites have on social users, but bemoans the apparent lack of influence that social sites have on apparel purchasers.

The article, Marketing Apparel on Social Networks, cites research from comScore that “heavy U.S. visitors to social networking sites are significantly more likely than average to visit leisure-oriented retail site categories, such as music, jewelry/luxury goods/accessories, consumer electronics and apparel.”

more »

The social bookmark explosion continues. Not just for storing and organizing your favorite sites: bloggers, marketers and SEOs have take to social bookmarking as a way to build backlinks, PageRank and SERP standing.

Ajaxflakes just published a new list of over 300 social bookmarking sites, “all tested and live”. Although the categorization is a tad murky [should I look in "niche". "special", or "misc."], there’s a lot of good content to sift through. Each listing includes the site’s PR and a brief overview. A few of the niche bookmark sites I use are missing here, but there’s a whole lot more to explore.

Finding the sites is one thing, using them effectively is another. more »

The way you define success also defines your strategy and your actions. Case in point: I’m just coming off of a month-long experiment in internet marketing web 2.0 style. Mike Mindell ran a brief article in a WordTracker email about his involvement in the 30 Day Challenge, an online course in web marketing given by Ed Dale and friends. The object of the game was to learn a slew of new marketing techniques; the “challenge” was to earn ten dollars online in a month. more »

Quick post on an article by Alan Rimm-Kaufman on paid search optimization via keyword segmentation, “Should Stronger Keywords Subsidize Weaker Keywords?”

A holistic strategy for maximizing sales within a set performance criteria. Flagged here for ready reference.

In a recent Omniture presentation entitled Integrated Marketing: Making Data Work For Your Customers, Forrester Research VP and Research Director Elena Anderson provides some eye opening numbers that help to clarify the state of marketing on- and off-line.

First, a recap of way consumers today view the role of advertising

• Consumers who agree with the statement “I buy products because of their ads”: 13% [down from 29% in 2002]
• Number of online consumers think email is a good way to find out about products and services: Just 10%
• Believe “Companies generally tell the truth in ads”: Only 6%

The influence of standard advertising models is not only limited, but also diminishing further over time. Meanwhile, the emerging social internet is solidly in growth mode: Web 2.0 users {of blogs, social networking, RSS, podcasts] jumped from 3% to 10.5% of all internet users in the past two years.

How to transition from the legacy marketing strategies toward something more relevant [and effective] in this emerging marketplace? Elena puts forward Peter Kim’s definition of the customer-centric marketing organization, whose primary role is customer alignment — understanding the customers’ goals and strategies, and developing the marketing tools to maximize their abilities to fulfill those goals. Short term strategies here start with basic behavioral marketing [the "initiation of a marketing activity in response to a meaningful change in customer behavior"] focused around cart abandonment contact strategies, and extend to inbound traffic and the use of real-time analytics to drive interactions.

In today’s market, consumers can easily develop and share their own perceptions about a brand. The end goal for marketers is to build mutually satisfying relationships, delivering the appropriate information and support to each customer, regardless of their individual perspective or needs. The data required to effectively manage these scenarios is wide and deep, but certainly becoming more and more accessible to marketing organizations of all sizes. However, as Elena aptly puts it in her blog,

There is no technology silver bullet. Eager to capitalize on market hotspots, technology vendors are messaging heavily about their integrated marketing “solutions” and “suites”. But, as we learned with the CRM craze, technology is not the answer. At best, it is an enabler. At worst, it can be a very costly diversion.

The headline “SEO is Dead” has a history of generating links since long before the term “linkbait” was invented. Mike Grehan’s recent proclamation “SEO Is Dead, Long Live, er, the Other SEO” takes this controversial statement and begins the process of placing it in the broader space of marketing. Mike provides sample result pages from Google’s Universal Search, primarily from the mass-market entertainment industry, showing search results that feature images, music, video and websites all on one page.

While his examples aren’t necessarily universally relevant to all marketers, the point is well taken: the web experience is again on the verge of a sea change. more »

From Sunday’s NY Times article by Randall Stross, and the resulting spin, a couple of notable takeaways:

Profit margins in the search business are mind-boggling, and cannot be obtained in other segments of the technology world. Google’s net profit margin last year was 29 percent. Amazon’s was 1.8 percent — yes, that is a “1” followed by a decimal point. Which business would you rather be in?

Wow. What a great way to make a strong comparison and highlight the strengths of the current online market. I guess it pays to read the annual reports. Though it confirmed my lingering suspicions, it’s pretty wild to see the bottom-line contrast between these two leaders of the Long Tail market.

more »

Forrester Research and Shop.org released their new state of the industry report this week. The big news in The State of Retailing Online 2007: last year’s online sales leader was the apparel category. Sales of clothing, accessories and footwear totaled $18.3 billion, up 61% over 2005 — a strong contributor to the 29% overall growth in overall online retail sales last year.

more »