The Essential Marketing Secrets that Amazon Forgot

Amazon has made a SERIOUS mistake in the way they conduct business and may be the mother of all Branding Boo Boos!
First, you need to understand a term to understand the gravity of the situation for Amazon.

POD stands for Print On Demand. Instead of printing thousands of copies of a book and hoping they sell, these publishers can print only the number of books that actually are sold. That’s a great business model, however Amazon has decided that the only POD books they want to sell on their site are the ones printed by their own POD service: Book Surge.

Angela Hoy is the publisher of the Writer’s Weekly which she uses to promote her POD publishing business, Booklocker.com. Last Friday, Angela launched a firestorm when she reported that Amazon is putting the squeeze on POD publishers.

FIRST MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: Customers are the life blood of any business.

Angela Hoy reports spending over $1500 with Amazon last year. Sure, that’s just a tiny drop of income in the Olympic sized pool of profits generated by Amazon… but she’s a customer none the less and their bullying tactics really rubbed her the wrong way. They’ve lost her as a customer… but wait … that brings us to Marketing Secret Number 2.

SECOND MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: A satisfied customer will tell 3 friends… a dissatisfied customer will tell 16.

In Angela’s case, she’s the editor of the largest ezine publication for freelance writers in the world, so instead of telling 16 friends she’s using her newsletter to tell over a hundred thousand. She’s ignited quite a firestorm.

THIRD MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: People hate doing business with a bully.

Apple’s agency recognized this secret when they created those memorable Mac vs PC spots. The Ladders.com also capitalized upon this marketing secret as well. Not only are these strong arm tactics not going to play well with POD authors… they’re not going to play well for MANY “regular” book buyers as well.

The firestorm ignited by this illustrates an important truth about the power of Web 2.0. While we are all seeking a way to ignite a firestorm like this to build POSITIVE buzz about a business… it seems that human nature tends to reserve such passionate “pass along” power to injustice that incites rage and indignation. It’s unfortunate, but the positive afterglow of a positive customer experience rarely inspires such a viral campaign.

Less than 48 hours after the newsletter went out, there were more than 60 online references to this story. Slashdot picked it up, so that number will increase.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I’ve included a list of sites reporting this story. Feel free to grab the list below and add it to your own blog. If you want to add your post to the “cause”… the post a comment to this post. The more links to these posts… the more “traction” this cause will get.

Amazon began by providing a superior book buying experience to their customers.  Buying a book from Amazon is BETTER than buying a book in a physical book store because a reader can access other reader reviews and read excerpts online.  Amazon is about to discover that hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

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Stop Marketing, Stop Selling and Start Connecting

Over at License to Roam, Rachel Clarke reports in her post Self-replicating Awesomeness at SXSW the following exchange:

Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, David Parmet

  • DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together - he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing? What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media?
  • DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers. Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they afraid of the opps. This is not telling or selling, this is being in the trenches.
  • CH: what is really bugging me right now is the number of people who are saying to me ‘build me a community’ but this does make a community, it is the interpersonal connections that make it. Social media is not new media, it changes how we relate to each other. You have to shift the way you think about participation. have to change mindset from stop trying to sell me to help make me buy.

stop trying to sell me to help make me buy

I’d rework that final phrase to…

stop trying to sell me and instead help me solve my problem/fill my want/ meet my need

Fifty years ago selling was push, push, push. Over the past half century the tide has turned and now selling is more of a pull, pull, pull.

Stop Marketing, Stop Selling and Start Connecting

The ENTIRE focus of my first book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results is to help the reader get out of his/her own head and into the head of his/her customers!!! To use the language above…jumping INTO THE TRENCHES and getting down and dirty connecting with your target customers.

When your focus is upon solving your customers problems…. when your focus is upon providing something they want…. when your product or service meets their need… you discover that marketing is merely presenting your solution… your answer to the people who not only want to hear it, but are EAGER to learn more.

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Holy Grail of Marketing: Creating Viral Marketing Campaigns

Social Networking is all the buzz these days.  Big corporations and small business owners are wading in and trying to leverage social networking sites to create viral marketing campaigns.  Many mistakenly view “viral marketing” as merely another form of word of mouth advertising.

Seth Godin writes in “Is Viral Marketing the Same as Word of Mouth“:

Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth. Here’s why:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)

So it’s easy to see why a viral marketing campaign would be the holy grail for most marketing professionals or business owners.  Imagine… creating an ad campaign that you don’t have to pay to have delivered…instead it’s carried by your customers to their friends… and their friends carry the message to their friends.  All this is done without any promise of renumeration.

Viral Marketing is indeed the pinnacle of marketing success…the problem is that most attempts at launching “viral marketing campaigns” land FLAT!  For every successful one launched, there are hundreds that fail to engage and deliver.

In 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing Thomas Baekdal writes for tip #3:

Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)

One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share - it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage - and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you!

Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen - yet everyone remembers it.

So, in true paradoxical fashion… setting out to create a “viral” marketing campaign is the wrong approach.  Instead, seek to engage and interact with your customer.  CONNECT!!!!

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