The Challenge of Trust in Marketing

“If Trump becomes president of this country, the S&P will go to 1,000. People are brushing it off, but there is absolutely no way that this market — and this economy — does not get pounded.” -Wedbush, trader predicted

Marketing Mix

When it comes to marketing (and sales) I feel more like Warren Buffet than CZ (founder of crypto exchange Binance). I recall the dot-com fad. After a SuperBowl half-time filled with dot-com commercials at the height of the dot-com bubble in January 2000, nineteen online startups bought very expensive SuperBowl advertisements.

It seemed certain that a new technology-led world was displacing the dinosaurs of the Fortune 100. Afterwards, Warren Buffet was famously quoted as saying he didn’t understand dot-com companies. He traded on company fundamentals and he said it was hard to tell which dot-com companies would ever make a profit.

He was vilified online and on TV. ‘Move over old guy, let us young-uns take over,’ was the main message online. I fell for it and invested money in a number of online startups.

Since then, Buffets stock has made new high after new high over the intervening decades and yet only one of the advertisers at that SuperBowl remains. That is E-trade although even that company has been bought out (Morgan Stanley). Prior to the SuperBowl fiasco, I cockily turned $5000 into $250,000 while day-trading in my spare time. On Black Tuesday, it returned to less than the initial investment while I was on a four hour flight and unaware of what was happening in the market.

Lesson learned? Er… then came cryptos…

Of course, Buffet admits he got Amazon wrong, but we can all miss the occasional shooting star. In marketing it is okay to miss the latest social media platform. If you’re lucky enough to get on it first, you’ll get the benefit. After all the big brands pile on, the benefit of being there is lost. What counts is sticking to the fundamentals.

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.“ The more things change the more they stay the same.

It is one of my favorite quotes. I wish I stuck by the axiom. The only time I have been disciplined in not following the latest fad is when it comes to marketing. Marketing never changes. The messaging vehicles change, but the principles remain.

Marketing is getting the right message the right number of times to the right people.

That’s all folks!

That, however, does not stop an army of management consultants coming out to tell you that it has finally changed. MBA classes become evangelical about the latest marketing ‘mix.’

Don’t fall for it.

What do we mean by a mix? When you consider commercializing your product or service you need to create a blend of tactics to communicate with customers in the same way that a chef blends ingredients in a recipe to create a great dish. In commerce, this recipe is called the marketing mix.

For decades, economists and marketers spoke about this mix in terms of the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place (distribution). In the marketing of a service rather than a product, however, the four Ps have been expanded to include: physical evidence (store/web design), people (employees who interact with customers), and process (systems that impact marketing). So we now have seven Ps

In 1990, Lauterborn proposed a four Cs classification instead: consumer needs, cost, communication, and convenience.

For me, all the Ps and Cs P-me-off. Do you notice what is missing from the concepts? Customers!

No one mentions the customer. Surely they have a say in this?

According to recent research published in the Harvard Business Review, a five-year study involving more than 500 managers in multiple countries found that the 4 Ps model undercuts entrepreneurs and marketers in the B2B space in three important ways.

It leads marketing and sales teams to focus too much effort on product technology and quality. Even though these factors are important, researchers stressed that they are not significant differentiators; they are just the cost of entry.

The four Ps under-emphasizes the importance of building a convincing case to explain the superior value of the solution being sold

It distracts businesses from leveraging their advantage as a trusted source of problem solving

Excuse me? 500 in multiple countries? More than 500,000 people start a new company every year just in the USA which has 4%v of the world’s population. Of what value are the divided opinions of .001%?

Marketing has been and always will be about getting the right message the right number of times to the right people.

That means:

1. Make sure you know who your customer is… the right people. To do that you have to get into the business to understand the business you are in. That takes time. Don’t try to figure it all out ahead of time. You’ll f*** it up. Give yourself a year before you even attempt to brand or write even half decent copy.

2. Figure out what the message is. What need are you fixing?

3. What media can transmit that message with the most hits for that customer?

Just because P&G spends millions advertising on X-tok-gram doesn’t mean you need to be there too. Figure out where your customer goes for information and solutions and go there. Hey, guess what? It could still be a magazine or fax machine.

People buy people first, not products, and not companies… people.

When I first started a sales career my trainers drummed into me “people buy people first.” They were instructing that no matter how good your product, if customers don’t like you, they won’t buy. So one has to ‘show up’ in the way they want and expect.

The challenge for entrepreneurs is that people make their minds up about someone they meet in just a few seconds. They are not as impressed by brands or ideas, but by people’s energy. Companies have an energy signature. Brands have an energy signature. Messages have an energy signature. Leaders have an energy signature. Customers have an energy signature. It all needs to match. When we get the mix right what do we create? Killer logos? Great tag lines? No, we create trust. We create trust between what was once a customer but is now our guest and ourselves.

Trust is the key. Get the right message to the right guests the right number of times and we create trust. When guests trust us they refer and referrals are what makes any startup successful.

I think of trustworthiness as the result of getting a marketing mix right. When we trust a company we are more likely to buy their offering. More importantly, we are more likely to recommend the company and offering to someone else.

The ingredients of trustworthiness:

1. Satisfy a real need:

What product or service do you provide that brings a smile of satisfaction to a guest’s face? It shouldn’t just make them feel good. It should delight them so dramatically that they can’t wait to tell everyone else.

The old mix focused on the features of a product or service looking at it from the maker’s perspective and selling them to a customer. It is shiny. It is automated. It is fast. It is safe. We don’t love you, but we love your money.

The evolved mix, which as of writing this is still called the ‘new’ mix focuses on benefits. It saves time. It is cleaner. It is less stressful. We don’t love you but we like you enough to be bothered to do this for you. Oh, yes and also, thanks for your money.

The new mix I propose, and you’ll not find this in any MBA class, is that we focus on trust. The new mix is establishing trust. I don’t care about your money, I care about you. Let me fix this.

As I like to remind my entrepreneur groups. The old way was, ‘what is in it for me?’ The new way is, ‘how do I contribute?’ When we look at the old, what is in it for me, (e.g sales and profit) we create linear energy. Ah-ha, now the first modules make sense. Working with the new mix, I care about you, we work with spiralling energy.

When we focus on contribution we raise the energy of the customer we are speaking to. When we request that the customer provide feedback in the form of a review we create resonant energy that lifts us up as well as them. Everyone wins. Energy spins. It fits. It matches. It creates a relationship based on trust. Trust is the secret sauce today.

Customers are indeed a very needy group and they have a right to be. They don’t just want a fix to their problem, but also they want it fixed now, and once fixed they expect it to stay fixed. Too often, businesses get caught up in the features and benefits of their product. Today customers don’t give a damn. There are so many options. Previously they may have made a decision over price (easy monthly payments), or options (even though it cost me twice as much it has two cup-holders for my soda). Today people buy from people and companies they trust and in doing so they are no longer customers, they are GUESTS.

How do they show trust?

‘An influencer I follow (and trust) on X-tok-gram ‘liked’ you.’ ‘The Youzoomsky video I watched intuitively felt authentic.’

To engender trust you have to provide a product or service that does what it says. That means avoiding the temptation to oversell its features. Too often customers are disappointed with the comparison between the product advertised and the actual experience of it in their hands. The old mix encouraged the selling of features and specifications to impress. Today, it is better to under-promise and over-deliver because pleasantly surprised and pleased customers have the means to tell everyone else through social media. So do dissatisfied customers.

As we discussed earlier, experts enjoy debate whether customers actually know their needs and whether, when asked, they can articulate them. For instance, how did anyone know they needed a television when they were quite content with radio? Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until we show it to them.” But they do. We all wanted TV but didn’t know how to get it. We all wanted the Internet but didn’t know how to get it.

Inventions don’t create needs. Needs create inventions. Even icons like Steve Jobs can get it arrogantly wrong.

Trying to anticipate customer needs has led to both incredible successes like Apple and incredible failures like, well, Apple.

While everyone can enjoy the success stories of iMac, iPod, iPad etc. most people have forgotten the dozen or so catastrophic failures like Apple Lisa (Steve Jobs first ‘baby,’ that cost $10,000) and Mackintosh Portable which weighed 16 pounds. Steve Jobs happily had a selective memory. people dismissed many of their inventions when they didn’t match a need. Apple didn’t get it right every time and neither will you. I certainly don’t. But because we care only about our customers needs we’ll get it right sometimes and our customers will stop being customers and become a trusting family, a guest.

2. Establish a company image that engenders trust:

Create an image of a company that the customer is proud to be associated with. It is not enough to have fancy logos and business cards. You must appeal to your customer’s emotions, likes and dislikes. You want the customer to trust you enough to want to associate with you.

What does a good company image look like?

Like I say, the more things change the more they stay the same. So for a great company image engendering trust let’s go back in time.

Harland Sanders was born on a small farm in Henryville, Indiana, in 1890. Following the death of his father in 1896, his mother worked two jobs and taught Harland to cook for his siblings in her place. Forced out by an abusive stepfather, Sanders left home and school when he was 12 years old to work as a farm hand for $4 a month. ($95 a month today). Over the next two decades, he did a variety of jobs, including painter, railroad fireman, plowman, streetcar conductor, ferryboat operator, insurance salesman, justice of the peace, and service station operator.

Proving the adage that it is never too late to reinvent oneself, in 1929 Sanders opened a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He cooked for his family and an occasional customer in the back room and his reputation traveled by word of mouth. He enjoyed cooking the food his mother had taught him to make when he was a small child: pan-fried chicken, country ham, fresh vegetables, and homemade biscuits. Demand for Sanders’ cooking rose, and it became his more lucrative business. Eventually, he moved across the street to a facility with a 142-seat restaurant, a motel, and a gas station.

According to Kentucky Fried Chicken’s own description of its evolution, during the 1930s, the world-renowned image of an avuncular colonel developed. First, the state’s governor named Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel; then Sanders developed a unique method of spicing and pressure-frying chicken. Due to his regional popularity, the Harland Sanders Court and Café received an endorsement by Duncan Hines’ Adventures in Good Eating in 1939.

In 1952, the Colonel, now 62 years of age, signed on his first franchise to Pete Harman, who owned a hamburger restaurant in Salt Lake City. For the next four years, he persuaded several other restaurant owners to add his Kentucky Fried Chicken to their menus.

In 1955, Sanders incorporated and the following year took his chicken recipe to the road, doing demonstrations onsite to sell his method. Clad in a white suit, white shirt, and black string tie, sporting a white mustache and goatee, and carrying a cane, Sanders dressed in a way that expressed his energy and enthusiasm, and created a company image that lived long in customer’s memories. By 1963 Sanders’ recipe was franchised to more than 600 outlets in the United States and Canada.

Refusing to accept aging or retirement, in 1964 Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million and a per-year salary of $40,000 for public appearances; that salary later rose to $200,000. The offer came from an investor group headed by John Y. Brown, Jr., a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Kentucky law school, and Nashville financier John Massey. A notable member of the investor group was Pete Harman, who had been the first to purchase Sanders’ recipe 12 years earlier, and believed he could market the image.

Meanwhile, Harland Sanders enjoyed his less hectic role as roving ambassador. In Business Week, Massey remarked: “He’s the greatest PR image I have ever known.”

Just imagine if you could create an image as iconic as that. It has endured. It is as relevant today as it was decades ago. No matter what changes in the world around… it endures. It is also a business that delights customers.

Their product is… apparently… finger-licking good.

For me the Colonel Sanders image hits all the right notes to engender trust and create guests over customers.

3. Communicate:

Communication needs have changed dramatically. They always do. Wrigley was one of the first entrepreneurs to advertise in a newspaper. Before long newspapers were little more than advert compendiums.

Under the old mix, great effort was made by the company to push information toward the potential customer using various forms of advertising of features and later benefits. The evolved mix switches from push to pull. My suggestion is that both the old and the evolved are company led when what you need right now is a kind of dinner-table conversation. Your customer has come to your home as a guest now and you need to listen as much as you used to talk. Asking for feedback is probably the smartest way to advertise today.

Because you are asking the opinion of a guest. Disney does not call the people who pay fortunes to walk through the turnstiles customers. They are guests. Workers are not employees they are cast members. That was sheer brilliance and way ahead of its time.

Your aim is to have each guest trust you so much that he or she can’t wait to tell others about you. That means you have to make it easy for your guest to provide and publish feedback and reviews. Only then does social media get mentioned. Communication tools are important but how and why you use them are far more so. When you have a guest, you want to impress them, you want to make them feel welcome at ease. You have to provide all means of access to reviews and all means of payment. Everything needs to be convenient (payments, returns, samples, feedback, referrals.)

It used to be said that a satisfied customer told five to ten other people about their experience and perhaps one in a ten would also try the product. It also used to be said that a dissatisfied customer would tell more then twenty people, and it was a certainty that none would sample the same product. Today, we live in a world in which one person can communicate with thousands or even millions with the click of a mouse. Less than one in a hundred takes action. They are no longer customers. They are guests. Trusting guests make a company.

In some ways we have returned to the days of KFC, Walmart, and Nike which had established loyal regional guest bases long before they thought about pushing a company image. The key to image is not the company brand, but the quality of the product or service. I encourage all entrepreneurs and CEOs of small businesses to put their cash and energy into building a loyal guest base before they fritter it away on eye catching logos, gimmicks, tag lines or social media advertising campaigns aimed at ‘customers.’ There are no customers anymore.

As much as human resource managers have scratched me off their Christmas card list because I believe unnecessary hiring is a corporate disease, so marketing leaders will be pinning ‘wanted dead or alive’ posters of me on their storyboards because I think they are dinosaurs and needless. I have never hired a marketing person in any of my seven companies.

So many of them believe they can push their products and services on a guest by investing cash in branding and boasting a list of features. It is possible to attract interest and raise awareness that way, but it only returns on the investment if the guest experience is one of delight. When a guest feels like a guest then everyone wins. But the thing about hosting a happy guest is that it has to be authentic. It can no longer be faked. It is a new world in a new energy.

A further challenge for virtual, non-employer, and small businesses is that branding is expensive. The adage that one does not know what business one is in until one is in the business has always proven true for me. For that reason I delay investing in branding until I have that figured out. Typically, I will work a year with quite basic branding tools because I know I will only get one chance to get the branding right. For that to happen I have to know my guest well and that takes time.

Various experts have tried to define how many times a potential guest has to see or hear a brand name, and in how many different venues, before their curiosity is peaked enough to sample it. Estimates range from seven to fifty “hits.” That is an expensive endeavor to get right before starting a business and probably beyond the cash reserves of many start-ups. better to spend time hosting guests and let them refer new business for you.

Word of mouth sold Colonel Sander’s recipe, and it is as true today as back then. These days word of mouth travels faster due to all the communication tools of media and social networking. If you have a quality product or service your business can survive. If you have trusting guests your business will soar.

Homework Time:

Time to have some fun. Design an email signature and a cool social media signature.

Begin with a pad and pen. Consider what are your five favorite brands in the word and then explain why they appeal to you.

What you write determines the features and benefits you stand for. No go find other brands that have the same ‘quality feel.’

When rebranding Trevorgblake.com, we chose Ritz Carlton, Bentley, Silversea ultra luxury cruise-line etc. These brands appealed to us because of the ultimate guest service of the highest quality. Customers are treated like family. Every employee at RC has access to $2000 to solve a guest’s problem. Most famously it encourages every employee to use up to $2000 to solve a guest issue.  (Not “allows,” but “encourages.”) In their instructions they never use the word customer. Everyone is a guest.

They make everyone feel like a VIP.

Silversea provides butlers to every cabin and works with the tag line ‘everyone pampered equally.’  

We also chose Disney because of the effort they go to when a guest is in the line for an attraction. Oftentimes the queuing up experience is better than the ride. They vtreat customers as guests.Other theme parks have you line up and wait. You are a customer. Disney sees you as a guest and guests should be entertained even while they are lining up.

At Trevorgblake.com our branding, done one year after figuring out what our guests want and need, reflects perfectly the trust of an authentic entrepreneur wanting to offer a helping hand to every new guest.

It is remarkably simply, just as Warren Buffet finds trading a very simplistic pastime.

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