I knew spam was profitable. Otherwise it would have stopped long ago. Researchers have found that the Response rate is 1 in 12.5 million spam messages sent.

A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam. [Washington Post]

Here’s the results in a nutshell, “After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” [DSLReports]

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.