A Sad Day
Peter Drucker died today – he was the real deal. A remarkable thinker, leader and brilliant educator. I was lucky enough to spend time with him several years ago at a corporate offsite and was simply astounded at his smarts and ability to set the room alight with anecdotes and thinking.
In a 1999 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Joan Magretta and Nan Stone wrote: “Before Peter Drucker, most people thought about their businesses with a manufacturing mindset, defining a business based on what it produced. Today, the marketing mindset prevails. It was Mr. Drucker’s critical insight that instead of buying a ‘product’ the customer buys the satisfaction of a need.” – WSJ
Stonyfield Farms
Great post on one of my blog heroes Stonyfield Farms. Here’s a quote:
Stonyfield’s sales have also increased 25 percent over the last year, and the company has just begun a major expansion that will double the size of its existing plant … All that with almost no traditional advertising." Gary (CEO) comments: "The proof, first of all, is that on our website, we have 750,000 subscribers to our four ‘Moos Letters.’ Dannon doesn’t have that, Yoplait doesn’t have that, Kraft doesn’t have that"
They get that its all about participation. And so, how does a company rationalize new marketing strategies and entering the blogosphere. Gary says it all here:
Underneath it all, Gary says, is the constant creation of new strategies. "We never knew what was really going to work because there were no models for us," he explains. "We led with the only things we really knew — our yogurt and our causes."
What’s your cause?
The Panel That Never Was
I was meant to be at Ad:Tech this week in New York. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be – but the panel I was meant to lead looks like it went really well. Look at some of the things leaders had to say about podcasting:
“Reach is pretty limited right now, but you’re reaching an enthusiast audience,” Ms. Papadopoulos said. She said the Volvo sponsorship on Autoblog.com reached about 120,000 people a month. Ms. Pitcher’s (Citrix) reach ranges from 10,000 to 100,000 monthly.
“People like ads, they don’t like interruptions,” said David Goodman, president-marketing at Infinity Broadcasting. (I really agree with this – the rise of the participatory era is the death of the age of interruption)
IBM Says Blogging Marketing’s Next Big Thing
From the folks at AdAge, blogging… "goes a long way in personalizing brands and creating one-to-one relationships with customers. While IBM says it does not want to use new media as traditional sales and marketing tools, it has succeeded in opening discussions in health care and video gaming with “outsiders,” which in turn could lead to new business relationships."
“This is a way to get our expertise out there, not by shoving it down people’s throats, but by just starting conversations,” Mr. Barger said. “It expands our reputation, perceptions and reach of IBM, at the same time expanding the number of people we can learn from.”
Where I am not on board with the AdAge story is that technology companies are more advantaged by social networking technologies. As GM and Stoneyfield Farms have demonstrated, the more you think about your customers as participants in your company’s success – and as part of a community – the more participatory communications works for you. It’s not about the technology, it is all about how you view marketing.
BW On The Best Of The New Web
BW has a great wrap-up of the best of the web, including one of my faves, Digg.com. And another, Basecamp.
