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Marketers: Show Your Love

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Just for you...There is a disturbing trend in both consumer and B2B marketing: Marketers do not love the people they are marketing to. Behind closed doors, many marketers don’t like or even respect them.

In turn, consumers and B2B buyers have come to dislike marketing. They see email, direct mail, promoted Tweets, Facebook ads, banners and TV ads clamoring for their attention and cluttering their lives without adding any value.

When you look at what passes for marketing, it is no wonder. Many marketers are talking incessantly about themselves with claims so disconnected from reality they make fishing tales sound like true stories.

This trend will eventually destroy your business. Your potential customers will live on without you, but you cannot exist without them. [Read more…]

Three Reasons To Stop Calling Customers “Assets”

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Customers Drive Your Business, They Are Not Your Assets

Yesterday’s #IMCchat (Integrated Marketing Communications) on Twitter included a conversation about customers as assets. I don’t believe customers should be called assets, and I found myself in a very lonely minority. As always, conversation refines and clarifies perspective, and the following tweet from Anna Barcelos was key in refining this perspective.

Customers are incredibly valuable, and the things that are valuable in business are assets. Your marketing analytics or financial analysis group even tracks the exact value of your customer, and it is a metric you should cherish. That is reasonable, but I still will not start labeling customers “assets.” Here’s why. [Read more…]