Chris Writes.

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This might be one of the best ads I’ve seen in a long, long time. The things I like about it:

1. It speaks specificially to potential customers, not existing customers

2. It is long enough that it says something useful, without being so long that it’s a chore to read.

3. It is something that can be placed in small publications, cheaply, by local dealers

Oh, and it probably cost $34 to produce.

How great is that? And why aren’t there more ads like this? if the goal is to change consumer behavior, and to have that new behavior include buying something you sell, then why is this so unusual?

There will probably always be a problem with sales and marketing. It’s kinda like a brotherly love situation, where the two basically punch each others lights out on random occasion. Sales has their ear to the ground, the finger on the pulse, etc. They *know* the customers they serve. They see marketing as a collection of unicorn-riding savants that have no tenable grasp on reality. Growth to sales means more sales.

And Marketing looks at sales, shakes it’s oversized bobblehead, and wonders why sales can’t understand concepts like long-term strategies, or branding, or target markets that reach beyond the existing customer base. Growth to marketing means more customers, and sales doesn’t always have the time for more customers.

So there’s the rub: sales sells. Marketing doesn’t sell, but would argue that they facilitate selling. And they might facilitate it in a way that doesn’t always mix with the incentive structure that sales answers to.

So let’s put this in context, shall we? Suppose my employer were to be throwing a big party, ostensibly to announce the upcoming 2007 lineup of stuff we will sell. If you ask sales where to hold this kind of a party, they’d tell you that Reno would be a great place: affordable, lots of space, and lots of cheap flights. Marketing thinks Reno smells bad, and is full of blue-haired old people who spend their pensions on nickel slots.
In contrast, marketing would like to hold this party on Jupiter. It would cost a bazillion dollars, would be in every newspaper in the world, and would have an uncharacteristically high mortality rate, if only for the number of rockets that would be needed to get 1000 people to Jupiter and back. But no press is bad press, and the branding effects would be remarkable. It should also be noted that marketing would eventually accept budget constraints, and accept an exotic-yet-relevant-to-the-target-demographic destination resort like Whistler BC, or Park City Utah. They would insist on the pegasus barbeque though. Sales would wonder why there are so many fireworks, and hope that the event doesn’t affect the profit sharing plan.

Who would win this conflict? There is no ZOPA here (Zone of Potential Agreement) – Sales wants to get their job done as efficiently as possible, while marketing wants the impossible but will settle for Gucci. So in this case, it comes down to the decision of those who are responsible for the event, and the result is based on how those people are rewarded. Is their mandate to meet minimum requirements, or to achieve maximum success?
The likely result, whatever it is, isn’t that marketing gets hurt, and it’s not that sales suffers. It’s that the two don’t find consensus, and don’t build any bridges. But the company perhaps misses a growth opportunity, and no one even sees it to realize it was missed.

So my lady Leah rode the Death Ride.  The difference between her and me, besides the litany of obvious biological ones, and the fact that she’s far better looking, is that she has been riding bikes for, oh, you know, a year.  Yup.  12 months ago, she barely owned her bike.  Saturday, she did a ride most human beings couldn’t accomplish under any circumstances.  So, for that, she is my crush of the week. 

And next week, I’ll ask her what she thought of it.  Glory is far more lasting than pain, but pain tends to command more attention at the outset.  My guess is that she’ll take a few weeks off, and then be right back at it. 

 

We did it!  129 miles, and over 15,000 feet of vertical elevation gain, at elevation ranges of about 5000ft to 9000ft, in a single day.  13.5 hours, in fact.  And at a few minutes shy of 11 hours, know what I was most fixated on?  Most mentally drained by?  Most aggrivated by? 

The fact that my Garmin Edge 305 would dare run out of batteries at just 11 hours. 

I nearly convinced myself that I’d return it, that such battery life is “useless” and “ill-designed for cycling”.  Eventually I realized that this might have been the first time I’d *ever* ridden more than 10 hours straight.  So seriously, what was I thinking? 

11 hours into a ride, you can convince yourself of nearly anything. 

The Edge was a really fun ride partner.  I had all my data at my fingertips, and apart from a few heart rate blips of allegedly 235bpm and a few instances of lost satellite signals when it got cloudy, it worked very well, and with surprising accuracy.  I’m not using the wheel speed sensor, just the GPS to track speed, and it seems pretty darn accurate.  So, I think I’ll keep it for now, and start playing with my Motionbased.com account. 

Once I figure out how to make very pretty pictures with this thing, I’ll post a few. 

 

 

 

My Garmin Edge 305 arrived today.  This should be interesting: a way of mapping my rides, in 3D.  I’m equally curious about Garmin’s social site, http://www.motionbased.com where people can share their routes with each other.  As soon as I can, I’ll post an example of a ride, and initial thoughts about Garmin’s site.  This is a prime example of customers leading the industry.  We (that’s the royal ‘we’, the collective ‘we’, and specifically the outdoor action-sports industries ‘we’) provide people fun toys to go play with, and then (generally) do a poor job of facilitating that play behavior.  The ideal ownership experience of a kayak or a bicycle is not, typically, one of hanging it in the garage where it gets dusty.  Lots of people talk about sports they ‘used to be into’.  Why do we lose these people?  Probably because other fun things do a better job of making it easier to do those fun things.  It’s not difficult at all to go golfing.  The courses are well publicized, often plentiful, and easily approachable for a golfer who’s never been there before.  Same with Tennis – you really only need to know the location of the court.  After that, it’s pretty darn easy. Contrast that with, oh, I don’t know…bicycles (I know, I know, big surprise, eh?).  Buy the bike, and then find other people to show you where to ride.  Get lost a few times in your local trail system.  Find yourself on the wrong side of a highway, and contemplating retracing your 80-mile ride to get 300 meters to the other side (where you started).  Dig around online to find outdated maps.  Find new people of your ability level to ride with, so you might not get lost.   Find out what it’s like to ride with people faster than you.  Or slower.  Overall, in comparison to golf, it’s a bunch more difficult.  And we do very little as an industry to alleviate this difficulty. 

Sure, many of us support Bikes Belong, and like many I’m a paying member of IMBA, and we tell ourselves that we do what we can.  But we’re living in a sport that thrives and survives on the heavily contextualized and localized knowledge buried within the people who are within the sport.  This is the main point here: enjoyment of the experience is dependent upon knowledge that is contextualized (is the ride appropriate for me?) and localized (is the ride near me?).  The people who can best contribute to the industry’s consciousness are, well, all of us.  And we’re often happy to share, but we don’t typically have much of a voice.  This is where Garmin’s example shines – let the people who are already out there tell the rest of the world where to go, and in doing so, invite others to explore.  Make it easy to participate.  This sounds like a simple concept, but it’s been eluding many sports that are being crushed by baby-boomer past times.  Garmin currently builds the enabling device (and let’s face it, GPS will be in every phone within a couple years anyways, so this is only going to become more prevalent), and yet they see the great power of capitalizing on the power of their own user base.  Better still, they’re building an established base of users that will likely be complemented by next gen cell phone users – not replaced by it.  Cell phone companies aren’t likely to forward-integrate into the hiking and kayaking navigation business.  Garmin will only be able to make devices like this for so long before cell phones do everything my new $400 GPS can do.  But with a base of subscription-paying users who value the social data for a reason that goes beyond the device, they’re building a defensible stronghold that is a natural extension of their existing business.

Invite all your customers in for tea and let them say something.  No doubt, you’ll be left with a lot to listen to.  And some good ideas you wouldn’t have thought up yourself.