Archive for May, 2010
Our company owns shares of a technology partner in Canada so we have interaction with Canadians just about every day. And I also seem to have a good number of Canadians in and around my life. Some are French-Canadian and other English speaking Canadians. Those two groups have difficulty agreeing on many things. But they sure were in agreement when both the Canadian women and Canadian vanquished the United States in the gold medal games in the Olympic games of this past February.
Canada has a little less than 34 million people. That places the entire population of Canada below the entire population of California. 90% of the Canadian population is located within 100 miles of the United States Border. The Vancouver Olympics were a pretty big success and during the Olympics the B.C. province as well as others ran a good number of television spots featuring well known Canadian people promoting tourism.
The perception of Canadians by Americans has evolved over the past 30 years (think of Doug and Bob McKenzie from SNL) and it is for the better. I’ve found Canadians to be fiercely proud and nearly universally not desirous of being affiliated as northern U.S people. There are Americans who feel Canada should just be annexed or could be easily absorbed into the U.S.A. for its natural resources. Oh and Canada is the world’s 4th largest country by landmass right behind the United States. It’s a large country with just a few people – lots of open space. Canada has the 10th largest economy in the world which came as a surprise to me.
With all the debate about health care in the United States, Canada has had a nationalized publicly funded health care system for quite some time (first advanced in 1946). The government plays about 70% of Canadian’s health care and Canadians have become accustomed to waiting sometimes months for various procedures. They seem to take it all in stride as part of the greater good since everyone is covered. I have talked with a number of Canadians who simply cannot understand why the United States has such difficulty with universal coverage.
I’ve had Canadians tell me that a primary difference between Americans and Canadians is the American notion of climbing up the ladder to get higher than your neighbor. A gross generalization to be sure but the idea being that Canadians are more interested in helping their own neighbors than climbing over them was an interesting concept to me.
Canadians are for the most part favorably inclined towards Americans and for good reason – the United States in general as the United States is its largest trading partner. There is much we Americans can learn from our neighbor to the north and it’s time for Americans to stop being so ignorant of this rising nation.
You’d expect the people of Canada (and Mexico for that matter) to know the President of the United States. But quick – can you name the Prime Minister of Canada without looking it up? How about the President of Mexico? We Americans might want to play closer attention to our neighbors. And not just by trying to keep them out.
According to the “State of Inbound Marketing Report” from Hubspot, as reported by Marketing Charts, inbound marketing is continuing to grow in importance at the expense of outbound marketing. This is good news and further validation that paid search, SEO, social media, blogging really resonate with consumer as well as marketers. For a copy of the pdf – http://bit.ly/aewfHr
With so many marketers looking to employ social media and other non-traditional outlets the report should serve notice that attracting interest in products and services will become the dominant method of marketing. And I could not be happier.
I posted last October that my hope was with the passing of pitchman Billy Mays http://bit.ly/anfWYD the shouting might finally stop. In an article by Stuart Elliott in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/9CQlR9 companies like Proactiv are also getting the message that fast and loud is no longer the way to promote products. When the giant infomercial and marketing firm Guthy-Renker tests a less ‘noisy’ approach, that’s big marketing news indeed.
Eliminating in your face direct marketing come-ons still will take time. And don’t think for a second that there aren’t consumers out there that don’t respond to FREE, and ACT NOW. There are many of them out there and the older you are the more accustomed (ok inured) to the blast and hope approach. They continue to be effective but if you look closely you can see the tide is changing.
Why do I think it’s better to attract? Mainly because it offers the prospect/consumer to choose to pay attention what interests them and to disregard messages that they individual feels are irrelevant. The result should be a deeper level of customer engagement since it’s THEIR choice to engage. It does present a major challenge and shift in thinking for marketing agencies. That shift has already begun and there is now a mad scramble in the agency world to show understanding, performance and measurement for social media campaigns in particular.
I’m both intrigued and excited at the direction things are heading with regard to attracting more interest as opposed to promoting it. To give you an example we have a client that wanted to send out text SMS messages to ‘opted-in’ teens promoting music in mall stores. While that can work (and we are planning to test) we suggested signage in the malls noting the number to text to in order to receive free music at the store. We are in development of the campaign right now.
Which do you think will work better?