Selected articles of interest

We like to champion the great work of our colleagues, mentors and key influencers.

Within this section you will find articles that outline some of our ideas about building strategies around customers, and you will also find links to articles outside our site related to our ideas.

Sprint is Getting Radical / Business 2.0
Sprint is using a crazy new marketing strategy: customer retention. Oooh, crazy! How crazy is this: Instead of trying to lure new customers through costly TV ads that beat all of us over the head, Sprint is focusing on the less expensive route of keeping existing customers happy. Radical, dude. Now it seems that even the old-school of the old school -- telecommunications -- is getting this customer loyalty thing. Must be a sign of the apocalypse.

3 Ways to Find Out What Your Customers Want/ Marketingprofs.com
Nick Usborne describes how to improve your product or service by soliciting feedback from customers. Nick's suggestions don't cost a lot of money -- many are free, using the Internet. (Free subscription required.)

Why Your eMail Newsletter Annoys Your Readers / Frontend Usability Infocenter
An email newsletter is a great way to connect with customers, and if they like it, they will forward it to others. Just don't encourage negative buzz by doing what writer Anthony Quinn says are the ten biggest mistakes.

Return of Interaction / Information Week
An informative article about a common method used to develop customer evangelists: building community online. Forum managers and community staff already know that communities build loyalty, provide valuable feedback, and contribute to increased sales. But how do you convince senior management that community justifies its expense? The experts explain how.

E-Newsletter Gets Horse Racing Association on Track / Direct Marketing News
DMNEWS showcases why the National Thoroughbred Racing Association dumped direct mail in favor of email to converse with its loyal fans. Learn how the Association tripled its customer database in two months.

Top 5 Tips on Writing Great Email Newsletters / Marketing Profs
Excellent, practical tips. We adopted tip number one ourselves. Bonus: the tips are from the uber-knowledgable Anne Holland, editor and publisher of Marketingsherpa.com.

Buzz Marketing / Business Week
Hoping for insightful examples on employing grassroots buzz as an effective marketing tactic, we were instead led into the shady world of several big brands and their agencies' efforts at exploitative buzz. We learn that Lucky Strike and Vespa scooters pay ersatz actors to talk up their products in various locales, an amoral tactic at best. Despite the author's contention that this practice is the "hot new trend," you may want to consider the article a tutorial on how not to create a buzz campaign. (Even better, read Emanuel Rosen's book "The Anatomy of Buzz." It's better for you, and better for your customers.)

Publisher O'Reilly Rallies its 50 Most Influential Fans to Spread the Buzz Online / Marketing Sherpa
A new community program for the loyal supporters of book publisher O'Reilly is enjoying great success. More than 50 influential journalists, web site producers, book reviewers and discussion group moderators have joined its community. The program, called "The O'Reilly Evangelist Program," is one of the best examples of evangelism marketing we've seen in a while. Love it!

eBay University: Part School and Part Tent Meeting / New York Times
From coast to coast, in a different city every weekend, hundreds of people gather to attend this eBay-sponsored event, which has grown into a roving crusade for the eBay philosophy. The article explains that eBay is not simply a web site, but more like a lifestyle of freedom and independence from the daily grind. Now that's creating a cause. (Free registration required.)

I Heard It Through the Grapevine: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing / Marketing Profs
An insightful tutorial, this article outlines the three steps to word-of-mouth marketing: inspiring praise from customers, finding external and internal champions, and building relationships with those champions. Free registration required, but worth it.

The Truth About Viral Marketing / ClickZ
The truth, as author Chris Yeh found in his original research at Harvard, is that viral marketing is like sex. While the article is a breezy read, it makes a few good points and well, cracked us up. We include it here for your research purposes, of course.

12 Tips for Successful eMarketing / Digitrends
A solid set of best practices for creating a dialogue with your customers using email.

Expanding Your Customer Base / ClickZ
"zipRealty.com gains an average of 1,400 new members per month (using an email marketing campaign)... Messages have been filtered by zip code so that they go to members in the 13 major markets that zipRealty.com covers."

Unsterilizing the silicon: PC marketers have commoditized their business / Brandweek
"Creating more dialogue and, thus, hopefully, loyalty among consumers is seen as a must for computer marketers to wean themselves from holiday-centric revenue cycles."

Cult Brands / Forbes
"A cult brand seizes the imagination of a small group who spread the word, make converts, help turn a fringe product into a mainstream name. Krispy Kreme spends less than 1% of revenues on advertising. Still, sales more than doubled between 1997 and 2001."

Will manufacturing be Napsterized? / MSNBC
"Could the manufacturing industry someday be Napsterized? According to Marshall Burns, founder and president of Ennex, and James Howison, its Internet strategy adviser, that day is coming. The two recently described a future where digital files used for reproducing physical objects will be swapped over the Internet, just as music is today. "