Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

Amazing! I’ve just received an email today, 26 January, promoting Guitar Break gift vouchers for the perfect Christmas gift. That’s nearly a full 11 months before next Christmas.

Gift Vouchers

Guitar Break gift vouchers are now available to buy through the website or over the phone. They are perfect for Christmas or Birthdays and are redeemable against any Guitar Break event or related product…

Perhaps it was a couple of months late. Either way, I can’t help thinking this is not the best use of Guitar Break’s marketing effort.

Reading Rockets

Reading Rockets have set a fine example to sports clubs with their recent marketing activity. Via local schools they distributed flyers for a home match that gave the pupils free tickets. Accompanying adults got a £1 discount against the full £7 regular tariff.

Basketball is a bit of a minority sport and I expect their budgets are pretty tight. This campaign gave them a free distribution route for their message.

The really clever bit though is this: if there had been the same offer in the local paper it would have been ignored by us. This mechanic delivered pester power, tickets and information in our hand and all delivered by a trusted third party.

Now, as they had empty seats there, all the extra visitors were incremental revenue.

And from a personal point of view the best thing of all was it was really good family fun. Unlike football matches the language was clean throughout. It was fast paced with music and commentary. And Reading Rockets won their 20th consecutive match against Bristol Academy Flyers.

What’s going to happen to sport in 2009? It seems that a lot of businesses will not be renewing their sponsorship of tournaments, teams and individual sports and men and women. I also expect that paying audiences at events will decline in 2009. Therefore there will be major reductions in revenue.

Logic says that the affected sports businesses will have to reduce their costs and/or market their businesses to grow income.

Reducing costs could be painful. Premiership footballers earning less is a possibility; and it has to be said they could probably survive at slightly lower income levels. But many of the infrastructure costs will be difiicult to shave in the short term.

Therefore marketing to gain more income seems an attractive alternative. And I can’t help thinking that this might not be too difficult. I’ve just tried to find the fixture information for a couple of rugby teams and it has been very hard work. So it was a pleasure to discover a gem of a rugby team website, London Wasps, who have done a marvelous job of providing relevant information in an easy way to find.

Perhaps if more sports businesses could follow this example they could see better gates. As a minimum fixture information should be easy to find and tickets easy to buy.

So, Jack Wills use the great marketing strap line of ‘fabulously British’. Well, that is on the collar label of the shirt I bought.

Further down, on the care label, they explain the shirt is made in Turkey. Is that what makes it fabulously British? Or is it the design?

Anyway, and for the record, it is a very good shirt and well done to those Turkish factory workers.

So, can I lay claim to being the creator of the term B2A? I’ve started using this term to
describe the marketing of business to (marketing) agencies. There are also the standard extensions to this: B2A2C, B2A2B etc.

Also back in 1998 I retaliated on the financial community by developing ‘marketing for non-marketing managers‘ workshops. These were enormously successful and were a very successful collaboration with my colleague Andy Hedge from the HR team. Was I first to use the term ‘marketing for non-marketing managers’?

Historically finance people have been assisting the rest of their colleagues by running finance for non-financial mangers workshops. The educational value of these sessions often masks how finance set their agenda out to the listening audience.

Isn’t it time that marketing directors in all businesses introduced marketing training for all disciplines across their organisations?

MAD Academy

We all know that word of mouth (WOM) is very powerful marketing. Therefore it was very pleasing to see the comment below on Surrey Mums about one of my wife’s businesses.

“I’ve recently started taking my little girl to MAD (music and Dance) academy, and it’s brilliant!

“The first group we attended consisted of the children dancing like penguins and horses, playing drums and tambourines, singing songs about cars and frogs and my daughter shouting “more, more, more!” and now we’re nearly half way through the term and it hasn’t lost its magic.

“It’s a fantastic activity for the very energetic to the very shy as they’re not pressured into doing anything they don’t want to do. I would highly recommend a MAD session to anyone who wants to put a smile on their little ones face.

“To find a class near you please visit www.madacademy.com“

At a guess 40% of my marketing career has been B2B and 60% B2C.

Recently I’ve been casting the net to find new suppliers/partners for a broad range of activities that are absolutely in the B2B area. And I’m thrilled to say that I’ve been meeting some very interesting people. Some of these were on the Marketing Forum 2008.

I’ve been amazed at the difference in styles. The B2B folks have been very considered, narrow focused and tentative. By contrat the B2C people have taken more of a broad, we can do anything, full service approach.

These are of course sweeping generalisations, so apologies if I’ve offended anyone. The thing is I cannot really understand why the agency approaches are so different. From my perspective the steps that need to be followed are the same.

In fact my intention now is to work on delivering the B2B project that I am dealing with by utilising a healthy layer of B2C. I’m sure I’ll upset someone on the way but 1) sorry and 2) hey ho!

This post is not an invitation to suppliers/agencies to pitch their wares and services. Comments are more than welcome though.