Marketing Category

Starbuck Advertising

I don’t if anybody else out there has noticed, but Starbucks has begun taking out full page ads in the Sunday New York Times. Admittedly, I’m not one to comb the different media channels looking for SBUX advertisements, but I have to say that I was a bit shocked to see such in-your-face advertising coming from a company who’s advertising budget has traditionally been spent in the store (or masked in barista training to help ensure that the ‘third place from home’ customer experience was always prevalent). Maybe this has been going on for awhile and I’m just now noticing. Either way, it’s interesting to see SBUX trying to regain the brand essence it once guarded so tightly.

In addition to the picture of a recyclabe Grande coffee cup, the following words appear on the ad:

“We believe that our baristas can hand-make any espresso beverage perfectly. With over 87,000 possible combinations, that’s a lot of perfection. This is why we promise that if your drink isn’t perfect, every time, let us know and we’ll make it right. This isn’t a promotion, this isn’t ‘for a limited time only,’ this isn’t ‘while supplies last.’ This is every coffee, every day, forever.

Looks like SBUX is trying to reposition themselves as incredibly customer-focused, with the ability to make a perfect coffee drink all the time. This positioning is much different than the ‘third place from home’ positioning and overall in-store experience that SBUX once built their brand on. Granted, getting the right cup of coffee, everytime, is certainly part of that experience, but the ad makes me wonder if they’ll ever be able to regain the essence of the ‘original’ brand. Seems to me that they should put the focus back on what they once were….warm, inviting, personal and friendly….versus spending a bunch of $$$ on trying to change perceptions through advertising.

John Lusk
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on March 10, 2008 – 1:52 pm in News, Marketing | 0 Comments

Searching for People Search

We were delighted to see how high “white pages” and “people search” rank among the top 25 non-branded/non-adult search terms , recently compiled by Compete, especially given that we bought PeopleSearch.com just a few months ago. And we even beat “britney spears” at #18! We typically ranks lower among all keywords if you include branded terms (e.g. myspace, yahoo, etc.) but I haven’t seen any third party cut the list like this before. Based on other data we have access to, e.g. Google Trends, we actually know of some inaccuracies in Compete’s top list, but the bigger point is that our services are clearly in high demand as measured by web search queries. As we continue to improve on our services and as more people find us, hopefully they can focus more on just people search, rather than searching for people search!

Top Search Terms - Jan 2008
1. dictionary
2. heath ledger
3. white pages
4. weather
5. lyrics
6. yellow pages
7. people search
8. irs
9. fafsa
10. cloverfield

Full top 25 list at Compete.

Posted by Alex on February 25, 2008 – 12:58 pm in News, Marketing | 0 Comments

Viral overkill…or not

The term ‘viral’ marketing has led to much debate at WP.com over the past few months. What does it mean, how do you make it happen, when is it successful, does it actually exist, etc., etc. Seems like every other marketing conversation includes a ‘viral’ marketing comment and I’m not so sure that any of us actually knows how to define it. So, in the spirit of ‘finding and connecting’ people, we decided to spend most of our marketing efforts actually finding someobdy who could help educate us all on viral marketing.

On Monday, February 11th, 9am, Konstantin Guericke will speak to WhitePages.com employees on his experiences with Viral marketing, what’s worked for him in the past, what hasn’t and how we can incorporate viral marketing components into our products. Call it an extension/crash course in alternative marketing by somebody in the know.

As for Konstantin, his successes speak for themselves. As co-founder of LinkedIn, he was able to cut his teeth on bleeding edge marketing tactics and is experiencing some of the same succeses as CEO of Jaxtr. The guy knows what he’s talking about.

Given that we’re holding this event in a ballroom of sorts in downtown Seattle, we felt it worthwhile to open up attendance to any of our friends in the area who might have an interest in hearing what Konstantin has to say. Just shoot me an email at jlusk@whitepages.com if you have an interest in attending and I’ll send you all the deets.

John

Posted by John Lusk on February 4, 2008 – 6:22 pm in News, Marketing | 3 Comments

Throwing in the towel

Last week I spoke to a group of students who were taking an entrepreneurship course at Middlebury College. Most of the discussion was centered around my book and all of the different boneheaded moves that my business partner and I made during our first start-up experience. I’m usually pretty good at rifling through questions, providing detailed answers and gleaming over the fact that I typically come off as some entrepreneurial guru, when in fact, my experience is really no different than any other entrepreneur out there.

However, one student asked a question that’s been bothering me for the past week, especially given some of the strategic decisions that we’re making here at WhitePages.com.

The question: “Before starting, did you and Kyle (the biz partner) agree on a bailing out point? That is, did you define when you might choose not to keep running the business.”

The answer: “I don’t think Kyle and I ever even considered when, or if, we’d ever bail. We were so confident that our product would sell that the thought of failure never crossed our minds. I guess we probably should have asked that question.”

In that past couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the future direction of WhitePages.com, how we’re going to continue growing the company and what we believe our users truly want to see out of our product. For the most part, we’re talking about entering some pretty cool new areas and markets and that means driving incredible innovation. The student’s question has been playing on my mind since he asked it last week, primarily because it’s a question that we need to ask ourselves at WhitePages.com.

When you embark on new initiatives or new businesses, how do you make sure that you’re not afraid to walk away if things aren’t going so well? I’m a big believer that you’ve got to manage the costs of a new initiative vs. managing for failure. If you try to manage failure, you’ll over analyze and never actually pull the trigger…or worse, you’ll walk away way too early. If you manage the costs, then you won’t be afraid of walking away even if costs are sunk and you’ve already spent countless dollars and resources. Easier said than done though. Lots of emotion, personal attachment, persistence and pride goes into starting new companies and launching new products. But you honestly have to ask yourself when enough may be enough.

My quandary is that had Kyle and I actually managed the costs, we would have probably walked away too soon and never experienced the successes that we did. Failure just wasn’t an option for us. So, do we take the same approach with our innovation efforts at WhitePages.com?

Thoughts, concerns, questions? Feel free to comment.

John
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 28, 2008 – 5:23 pm in New Products, Marketing | 0 Comments

Building loyal customers

I found an interesting post on the Church of the Customer Blog this morning that provides an example of how playing ‘nice’ is the best form of customer relationship management (CRM). In the post, Ben McConnell references a friend of his who received a personalized thank-you email after making a purchase at a pseudo-pizza restaurant. An ensuing positive email conversation occurred between the customer and executives at the company, thus leading us to believe that this level of personalization is warranted

When we were manufacturing our MouseDriver product, we took the same approach to CRM. Our feeling was that any positive experience that we could provide to an actual or potential customer would lead to customer evangelism, and ultimately, increased sales of our product. For the most part, our efforts paid off in droves. Customers subscribed to our Insider newsletter (you actually had to send me an email to my personal account claiming that you were ‘In’), the media started picking up on the company and ultimately our story made headlines in numerous major publications. Could we measure what our efforts actually drove? No. But we were pretty sure that the time spent personally responding to each and every customer was well worth it as our sales increased dramatically without spending a dime on marketing.

At WhitePages.com, we have roughly 40MM unique users who utilize our product and services. I don’t know the exact number, but I’m guessing we receive at least 1000 comments a week from customers addressing all sorts of things….what they don’t like about the site, what they love about our company, anecdotes on how WhitePages.com helped to find a long lost friend, comments around privacy, etc., etc. So, with that kind of volume, is it worthwhile, or even feasible, to respond to every customer personally? Is there a measurable benefit that we can track to ensure that our efforts are rewarded? My personal belief is that it’s worth it, but at what cost?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

John
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 14, 2008 – 12:26 pm in Customer Service, Marketing | 0 Comments