Overview
Over the past year, I have written extensively about two marketing ideas: Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM) to provide differentiated experiences to Best Customers and Microns to engage and reactivate Rest Customers. I have also done over a hundred presentations to marketers in India and South-East Asia on these ideas. During this period, my own thinking has evolved, and I have realised that there is a need to provide a simplified view of this new marketing framework. This is what we will discuss in this long series.
The topics I will cover are:
- How marketers have erred by focusing excessively on acquisition of future customers and not enough on attention from their present customers and thus created past customers
- The disruption coming because of Google’s decision on third-party cookies and Apple’s new privacy features, and their compounding impact on marketing
- The 90:10 adtech:martech skew, as shown in a survey of India’s adtech and martech spends
- The broken state of marketing today: how marketers ignore existing customers…
- …and how customers have been trained to ignore marketing messages
- …thus creating a chasm, and sending marketers into the “doom loop” of a perpetual acquisition arms race
- Marketing’s Power Law: 20% of customers generate 60% of revenues and 200% of profits
- How marketers are leaving money on the table by not understanding the fact that “all customers (and attention) are not equal”
- How marketers can win back their customers’ attention – by making it the new acquisition
- Building the attention stack, starting with CDP, CLV and BCG
- How marketers can imagine the ideal business endgame: a profipoly
- Rethinking the marketing core with teams for Best, Rest and Next customers
- The big idea: to get customers to pay attention, pay for attention; think Microns and Mu
- How to make it happen: why the modern marketer needs a quartet of ‘robots’: ABC, C2E2, M3 and AMB
- Why it will take a constellation of companies to bring this new world to life
- The choice CEOs and marketers face: growing profits for Google-Facebook or their own
This is a journey with many deteours. Not all of them may be initially obvious, but look at is taking the scenic route! There’s a lot to learn and understand. And at the end, I will provide a summary of the key points to show the path to simplifying marketing and starting the journey to higher profits. Off we go!