Marketing as the top CMO’s understand it is about more than Brand Awareness. It is about total perception in the marketplace. Reputation if you will. It’s more than Public Relations and advertising. Telecommunications companies are finding that while bundles attracts clients, a clean bill, reliability, and customer care.

With websites like VerizonSucks.com and JobVent.com and DSLReports, people can research your reliability, installations, and customer service records quickly. And the bad stands out louder than the good.  (People woill likely bitch online faster than they will evangelize a company. Anger and frustration are high energy motivators.)  Under all that scrutiny, price and faster speeds will only get you so far.

Ultimately, marketing is about every touch of the prospective marketplace.  If Brand is the 1K of memory space that is allotted for your company, that 1K impression is the sum total of the experiences with your company and employees (and even contractors). Your tele-marketer, billing administrator, CS rep, Installation tech. It’s not just the competence and the attitude of these folks; it’s the presentation. Can they converse with your audience? Are they dressed clean and neat? Do they represent the image (maybe even culture) of your company?

Recently, issues of Marketing News profiled Zappos.com and Comcast as two examples of customer service cases. Zappos is the high water mark that follows the legendary Nordstrom spirit. The Chief Marketing Officer at Comcast is learning that their Customer Service reputation is destroying its brand. (US auto companies never learned this lesson to listen to the marketplace).

Marketing is the script that the CS rep used to hit the check marks of Hello, problem solving, upsell, and closure. (Have we resolved your issue today?)

In this commercial by Nike called Courage, Nike uses numerous video clips and pictures to express its message. I wish more presenters would do something similar with PowerPoint instead a screen filled with words that they will read to the audience.

Seth Godin has a detailed post about the Marketing Lessons we can learn from this 2008 US Presidential Election.  One of the things you need to take away is that you need to touch your customer often and in different ways - social media, direct mail, robo-calling, video, TV, radio, referrals, etc.

Each party gets a list of prospects (enrolled or independents) and hammers at them for money and a vote. You need to have a list of Prospective Clients and create a Plan to Win Each One Over.

• What will you say? More important: What story will you tell?
• What value will you give?
• Who could give you a referral or warm intro?
• How will you touch the customer 7 times? (Have a calendar for the 7 touches so you don’t miss).
• What personal and relevant message will you send and how?
• Will you enroll them into your Tribe?