Saturday, June 13, 2009

Tales from the (marketing) Darkside (is there any other kind?)

Looking back to my marketing experience over the past decade, I've sold many things to many people both on- and off-line.

Here is Part I of a personal journey of high- (and low-) lights of my online marketing career so far....

There are some marketing I've done that I am very proud of --- like my entrepreneurial student business I ran as an undergrad selling and delivering the New York Times to students and faculty. In 1997, I created a crude but effective columbia.edu hosted website that students could order subscriptions and sent their orders through inter-campus mail (a few brave souls sent me their CC info via email by "securely" breaking the numbers up in several messages --- this was of their own volition!). This was a business I devoted my soul into. I even sent email confirmations of orders via my personal student email address. It was a great way to get my hands dirty and learn using multi-channel strategies to connect with customers (Inter-campus mail, Campus email, Columbia website, Sign-up table on steps of Low Library etc.)

Others, not so proud... Yes, I had my hand at marketing some fairly cringe-worthy products, such as this collector plate featuring none other than the Pillsbury Dough boy.

My first job out of college and I found that my Ivy League education prepared me little for the challenge of marketing collectible "gems" like this. The business model was 99.9% offline and at the time, the online channel was simply not a priority. My company used sophisticated database mining and all types of offline marketing to push these very niche products to tight, product-defined offline mailing segments. But beyond the Herculean direct mail campaigns, publication ads and inserts, the company website was essentially an after-thought.

I (and to a much larger degree, my ex-company) made a lot of money doing this but it was not my dream to apply my marketing skills and passion towards these disposable trifles in a fairly crude and inefficient channel. I would order trailer trucks full of marketing mailers with the tacit knowledge that 1-2% response would be called resounding success (while 98% of the mailing was simply junk-mail). This was mailings by the millions. The direct mail and catalog industry was one that I did not see long-term growth (I liken it the current newspaper industries' struggles to remain relevant with its customers).

So once I paid off my Ivy-League sized tuition loans in just 2 years, it was time to move on.

Now with the rise of targeted SEM and other long-tail mining strategies, I can see enormous potential in these "outlier" products in the Internet space. While I am not privvy to my ex- company's current strategies, I hope that SEO and SEM are core to tapping the niche audience out there that would love to get their hands on that Doughboy plate.

(to be cont'd)

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