Heh, what a great day this turned out to be! Ok didn’t quite like the breakfast workshops as the title of the workshop did not match the content but it got much better as the day went on. Personal favourites were Robert Senior the CEO of SSF (Saatchi Saatchi and Fallon), who explained that with great ideas people come to you, rather than you needing to push your message to them. Examples of their work included Cadbury’s drummer chimp and the recent T Mobile dancing in the station campaigns. I found this a bit like SEO, where people come to you via search term, looking for a service. Another key statement was how people buy with emotion, so marketing should be just about that, the emotions your target audience are likely to feel to a marketing campaign, get it right, its a winner, get the emotion wrong then back to the drawing board. For the record, Robert stated that Social Marketing was shit! Oh ok??
Collette Dunkley of X and Y reminded me that selling to women is totally different to selling to men and the figures quoted were outstanding. They have had success in the telesales market, where by changing the way they talked to women, increased sales by 43% or so. There is a real argument, that search engine optimisation and websites should be segmented in to male and female segments. An example is how men and women buy cars differently, a sector that FOK marketing is closely associated with, but had never realised the conversion rates we could get by focussing on the female view rather than just the men’s.
But it was Tim Smit who stole the show, not talking much about marketing and more about team creation and having real values, before you die. He was very funny and even though he apologised for not talking about marketing, you pretty much understood if he was talking about people that you were learning about marketing.
The day was finished off nicely for me with a private chat with Peter Cobley of I Spy. He was not shy and explaining the link building principles of Littlewoods and how they managed to get deep level links to their site, increasing revenues and search engine rankings. Really good stuff!!
Days like this are fascinating, and the fact it happened in the North East is a credit to Business Link who arranged it.