Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing stuff’

This is a little bit of a stretch but there is what I hope an interesting thread here.

Anyone that has seen me play golf knows that I have to be a much better marketer than I am a golfer. Lately I have been playing better and more consistently so than ever before. Practice always helps but focused practice has made a difference. I thought about the fact that there are some similarities in honing my golf skills that are akin to honing my skills as a marketer. For both I am in a ‘continual improvement’ campaign. Fortunately for my family do not need to depend on my golf skills to help support us. That’s a very good thing.

I love working on marketing projects for clients new and old. New client initiatives and challenges keep me fresh and interested. I also love playing golf as well as a place to clear my head and focus on the task immediately at hand.

There are a number of tools in my personal marketing toolbox that I employ when working on various projects. If I am doing it right I am using the right tools for the right engagements. I like to think that most of the time I get it right. Approaches for both marketing and golf at times have to be tweaked after learning a better method. That’s how we improve such that we can create an even better program or play a winning game. (Yes both marketing and golf are very competitive if you have not noticed).

I carry 14 clubs in my golf bag and there are choices to be made on which club to hit, whether to play a high or low ball flight and how to negotiate getting around the inevitable trees that always seem to get between my ball and the target.

Marketing at times can have obstacles that remind me of trees, bunkers, and water hazards on the golf course. There are times to be bold and take chances and times to be conservative and play it safe. The right partners can be invaluable in marketing as well as on the golf course. In golf a good partnership is often called ‘ham and eggs’. The same should be said for marketing partnerships as well.

I will never be anything like Tiger Woods on the golf course but I do think I and our agency has the chops to be a Tiger Woods to our clients. But on both counts I won’t ever stop trying to achieve that kind of greatness. It inspires me and keeps me thinking that my next marketing project or golf game has the potential to be my best ever. Until I go out and play again.

I remember the first time I went to Tokyo in 2000.  The area in which my friends were living was very chic and filled with westerners.  Where my friends live now (they have moved around several times) is also a very nice area but more typically Japanese with few westerners (that’s means you!).   But the thing all these areas seem to share is that there are (except for major thoroughfares) no street signs and no street addresses posted.   How does the mailman know where to go?  They do it by neighborhood and somehow it works.  But it does not work if you want to send any kind of offer to the household aside from a generic message on behalf of a neighborhood business.

Japan does not have lists of people to buy and sell as is the case in the U.S. and many other places.   Since the population is so homogenous there is no need for demographic and psychographic profiling.   People are not all that different – at least city people are city people and country people are country people.  In Japan mail is delivered 7 days a week and you pretty much have to check your mailbox every time you return home.  I did not get to see any offers from companies that may have provided services to my friend but I imagine that there may be some mailing to customer files but then again maybe not.   I was told how efficient the Japanese postal service is, and that would be consistent with just about everything in Japan.  The Japanese postal service is being privatized over the next 9+ years.  This is something that is often discussed about the USPS but never really seems to gain any real traction.   

The cultural reasons would seem to be many for why there is no customer list industry in Japan but I am sure that there are many Americans that would prefer if there were little advertising mail in the United States.   There are however no shortages of direct response television ads and some of the same characters that hawk products on American television can be seen doing the same complete with dubbing, subtitles etc. for selling those products in Japan.    I wonder if the Japanese will use the mail any differently as the amount of advertising messages continue to increase there as much as in the U.S…   I for one think it is a channel that could be leveraged but it would not be easy (what is easy these days?). 

And don’t ever just throw your unwanted mail in the garbage.  In Tokyo your neighbors make up what I call the ‘garbage police’.  The recycling standards are quite high in Tokyo and as gai-jin (foreign people) are not fully familiar with garbage protocols you can spend fifteen minutes being admonished by your neighbor due to your errors in separating your garbage.   These people take this stuff seriously!  Good thing though – 36 million people have big time garbage potential.  And even with the strict standards there are mutant super crows that prowl the streets of Tokyo.   These birds are scary big and appear to have hit the steroid stash.   They make noise 24 hours a day and frequently made me feel as if I were in an Edgar Allen Poe story or Alfred Hitchcock movie.   I have heard that the crows have actually gone after people and they take small animals regularly.  One final observation about garbage in Tokyo (and Europe for that matter) – re: public garbage cans.  There aren’t many.  Having been to Europe twice in the past 9 months as well as Tokyo I have never carried my trash around more in my life.  However the streets of Europe and Tokyo were infinitely cleaner than in New York (not saying much) or most other places in the U.S.   Yes there is a correlation.   But it would take an American quite some time to get used to that!