If you follow the social media trends of the zeptosecond, you’ve probably noticed there’s at least one consistent factor. No matter what this week’s hip new social media fad might be, General Electric (GE) will be the first mega-sized business-to-business marketer to try it out.
Hammock CEO Rex Hammock spoke today on the topic of “How to Go to Market with a Marketing Services Business” at an American Business Media’s Marketing Services Council meeting in New York. Earlier this week, ABM’s Scott Fried interviewed Rex with some questions about being a provider of marketing services and what trends he’s seen in the industry during his career.
ABM: What does it mean to you to be a marketing services provider? How does that differ from being a traditional media company?
Rex Hammock: Here is a simplistic way I describe the difference: a traditional media company creates and manages media and content that support a traditional media business model (advertising, circulations, events, data, etc.). We create the same types of media and content but they support our clients’ various business models: the association business model, the healthcare business model or retailing business models.
“Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch” was a classic advertising slogan of the Don Draper era. Featuring a smiling model with a black eye, the grammatically incorrect Tareyton print ads ran from 1963 until the early 1980s (cigarette advertising on TV ended in 1971). On its surface, the slogan was a cute way to encourage loyalty to the Tareyton brand. Yet beneath the surface, it was an insidious and not-so-subtle rallying cry for smokers to ignore the evidence linking smoking to cancer that started mounting in earnest with the 1964 Surgeon General’s report.
When developing a strategy for using customer media and content to build long-term relationships with customers or members, always remember “Chekov’s gun.”
Google the word “branding” and you’ll find lots of explanations focusing on the front-end development of a product: the creation of a name, logo, slogan and a set of “values” that differentiates a product from its competitors.
Ask several “content marketing experts” to answer the question, “What is content marketing?” and you’ll be reminded of the ancient fable from India about six blind men who describe an elephant after touching different parts of the animal. “It’s a snake,” says the blind man who touched the tail. “It’s a large leaf,” says the man who touched the ear. “It’s a tree,” says the man who touched the leg. And so on.
Recently, we read an observation by Seth Godin about how restaurant buffets can cause a kitchen staff to slide into mediocrity. The staff start thinking, “Oh, I won’t worry about how fresh the mashed potatoes are; after all, they’re free,” Seth observes. He warns that this kind of mindset ignores something very important: Many customers may have chosen the restaurant based solely on the quality of its mashed potatoes.
In the Januaru-February issue of Semper Fi, the magazine of the Marine Corps League, we are proud to present an exclusive, in-depth interview with Bonnie Amos, wife of the 35th USMC Commandant, General James F. Amos.
Over more than 40 years of marriage, Mrs. Amos has seen virtually every aspect of Marine life. This gracious and soft-spoken woman often dons a helmet and body armor to accompany her husband to the war zones to bring a touch of home to Marines at the point of the spear.
Her work with injured Marines helped bring about the standing up of the Wounded Warrior Regiment. Together, she and General Amos care about, watch over and work for the betterment of Marines and their families. Her story will inspire and move you.
Also in the January-February issue, we travel back to the Corps’ early days as recorded in the diary of Continental Marine John Trevett. Serving under our first Commandant, Capt. Samuel Nicholas, Trevett took part in the Corps’ very first amphibious operations.
Some reading this can remember the early days of desktop publishing when people who had never before heard the term “font” were suddenly given the ability to fill up a document with a dozen different typefaces in all sizes and styles. So they did. And the results were awful.
It took years for many people to discover (and some still haven’t) that it’s how you use design- and editorial-related technology that determines the quality and effectiveness of your creation.
Last week, we shared the first half of our 10 customer media and content predictions for 2014. Here are the remaining five.