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Alternatives to advertising

by Andrew on 08/02/08 at 4:03 pm
3 comments

Earlier Fred wrote about whether small businesses should be advertising (read his pearls here). Here’s a story of a big business that did something similar:

In February 2003, Amazon.com canceled all their advertising and put that money towards free shipping as a word of mouth strategy. Many thought Jeff Bezos was crazy and that Amazon.com would never turn a profit. In 2007 they were solidly profitable with over $15 billion in revenues. Bezos knew that marketers used to get paid to make promises the business had no intention of keeping.

He understood that, in an increasingly transparent environment, being truly customer focused would matter more than telling customers about how great your service was.

Read the full article about being customer-focused here, and the original story in the NY Times from 2003 about Amazon’s free shipping policy here.

We often cringe when we see advertisements that were clearly crafted by an advertising agency, approved by the marketing manager, and stopped there. For example, Nedbank’s "Ask Once" campaign, where it was advertised that if you have to phone a second time about a query the bank would donate some money to charity. We spoke to a Nedbank employee who said that the first time she heard about it was when she read the ad in the Sunday Times. It’s rumoured that the ad agency stole that idea from a bank in New Zealand. Clearly this was not a major push to transform their staff into customer-service Gods – it was a gimmick designed for some media air-time.

At Yuppiechef we decided to follow in Amazon’s shoes (SA is usually around 5 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to e-commerce trends), and we’re offering free delivery to anywhere in South Africa, on any order. We’re going to run at a loss on the small orders, but we’ll take that money from our marketing budget in the faith that we are going to gain more than a few clients for life, and hopefully a number of word-of-mouth evangelists.

We are betting that our clients are tired of advertising hype, "terms and conditions apply", and "mandotory caller ID". They want to be genuinely served (now there’s a word with big implications), and they want honesty in our communications. In return we’ll hopefully be rewarded with their loyalty and a few glowing mentions of our names around a braai.

That’s marketing that I can live with.

Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.

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