Kodak's German Sacristan

Cross Channel Marketing: Start Selling What Your Customers Are Selling

  

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An OutputLinks Conversation With German Sacristan, Business Development Manager EAMER, Eastman Kodak Company

Ian Shircore: Greetings German. In January you relocated to the United States and before that you worked across many different European countries, helping print services providers that want to develop into multi-channel marketing services suppliers. So thank you for sharing time from your busy schedule with us.

I understand that in your work with print service providers you are focusing more on marketing principles and practice rather than on specific technologies. Is that correct? 

German Sacristan: Yes, absolutely.

There are other people within Kodak who can tell you a lot more about Kodak’s new InSite Campaign Manager and the related consultancy and advice services.

What I’m doing is a different role. I’m promoting digital marketing and talking to printers about marketing in general. I’m reminding them of the basics, because all these new channels and tools are only marketing enablers. At the end of the day, the new channels don’t guarantee success.

People get so excited about the potential of cross-media campaigns and all the new channels, and they think if you use them, you’re going to be successful. I am seeing that emerging as a definite problem in the marketplace, because these enablers can’t do it all. If you don’t have a strategy behind these enablers, you will fail.

So I’m reminding people of what they already know and trying to show them how they can use these new enablers to execute the basic fundamentals of marketing in a very different marketplace.

For me, 10 percent of marketing is the idea and 90 percent is the execution.

Ian Shircore: Who are the people you’re taking this message to?

German Sacristan: Some are the printers that are feeling the pressures of commoditization and looking to become marketing services providers or MSPs. Others are end customers, the people who buy from the printers.

I’m doing these marketing seminars in many different markets – Bulgaria one week, the UK next Monday. There’s a lot of travelling.

Ian Shircore: So when you are reminding these people of the basics and giving them a perspective on the potential of multi-channel campaigns, what are the main channels you talk to them about?

German Sacristan: Well, there’s the physical printed piece, direct mail. There are websites and landing pages and personalized URLs, email and SMS text messaging. And you can add in QR codes that effectively make the printed piece interactive and drive customers to the internet. That’s pretty much everything. And they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ian Shircore: But is print is always part of the mix?

German Sacristan: From a marketing perspective, printing still can do things that other channels can’t.  After all, where will brands face more competitors – on the internet, in your email or in your regular mailbox? When are consumers more relaxed and likely to listen – when they come home and sit down in front a cup of coffee or while they’re working in front of their emails? Does the postman filter the mail for you like your spam filter does? What gives you more information about a person – the email address or the home address? I could go on and on. Digital printing has the flexibility of personalization and individualized customer communication. That’s very powerful. But you need information to make that work. And the internet is the most wonderful source of information. So one feeds the other.

It’s just fantastic how the internet and printing work together. It’s absolutely amazing how they work really well together.

You can collect so much information on your website and use that to send a precisely targeted, personalized printed piece as a follow-up. It is a shame to think how many visitors some brands have on their websites every day and how little they know about them. Knowing who are they and what they want will help these brands to follow up with them, increasing the chance of selling them something.

Ian Shircore: “Personalized?” That’s the second time you’ve used that word, but somebody told me you don’t like “personalization”.

German Sacristan: Ha, yes. That’s right. Just the word, though, not the idea.

Today’s marketing is all about interactivity – and we all call it personalization or customization. It’s hard not to use the word, because it’s become a standard industry term, but I usually try to avoid it if I can.

I don’t like to use the word “personalization”, because it has the perception and history of just changing the name – and doing a bad job. So frankly, I try to avoid “personalization” unless I make a sentence out of it.

Marketing is all about telling people what they want to hear and not what we want to tell them, People want to hear different things because they all buy a product for different reasons. So why are we saying the same thing to everybody? That doesn’t make sense. I like to explain the power of personalization that way, versus just saying “personalization”, because it has a bad perception and a bad history.

Ian Shircore: But the ability to customize to the individual – whatever we’re going to call it – is a key factor in the power of multi-channel marketing, isn’t it? 

German Sacristan: Of course. But customization is about saying the right thing to the right person at the right time, in the right way. Just because you are using channels that allow you to change the messaging does not mean you are customizing. Some brands and print providers fail right there. They think that just because they are using data and changing the messages they will be successful. But they aren’t – because it takes more than that. What many of them have done well, though, is identify good applications like direct mail, transpromo, even books as relevant products to try to implement the values and opportunities of customization.  

Ian Shircore: Am I right in saying that it’s still a big step to make, from print services provider to MSP?

German Sacristan: It is a big challenge for these people. But it’s not as if they’re coming from another planet. They just need to change their mindset. I tell them “You have to stop selling what you’re selling and start selling what your customers are selling.” Once they start thinking that way, they quickly learn to do it well.

If they have customers who are selling automobiles, or vacations, they’re starting to creatively think, “How can I help these customers sell more cars? How can I help these people sell more holidays?” They start asking different questions and collecting more information. They start talking and thinking more about marketing, and for some of them, it’s working well.

But a print services provider’s biggest challenge is still customer perception. That attitude that says: “You are a printer and you don’t know anything about marketing.” Some printers know more about marketing than many marketers. But the assumption is often: “You don’t know anything about marketing, so I’m not going to give you the information for you to help me and contribute to my marketing campaign.”

Ian Shircore:  Are there any practical changes they can make to get over that? 

German Sacristan: Well, perception is one of the biggest hurdles and I work with them to change that perception – sometimes starting by creating a new business name that represents better what they sell, or by finding the right people to help them create the right impression when they contact their customers. Most importantly, if they want to sell marketing services they need to do that themselves for their own businesses. They need to show the potential customers that they are good at it by doing it themselves. This is critical. You have to stand back and think about these things, and maybe that’s something busy printers do find hard to do. I think the urgency of the day-to-day can sometimes stop them from doing important things.

Ian Shircore: I suppose there’s also a confidence issue that must arise. How does a fairly inexperienced marketing services provider know that the campaign approach he or she comes up with is valid? 

German Sacristan:  The good news is that no one knows! No one knows what response they are going to get before they launch a campaign. There are no guarantees, but we need to make sure we have the right methodology, sensitivity, imagination, and channels to increase the chances of success. The InSite Campaign Manager package can help with the methodology, including data analysis and segmentation, which are critical. But I always bring it back to some very basic concepts.

For example, when we’re promoting our products, using all the sophisticated tools and channels that are available to us now, what are we really trying to do? Actually, the way I see it, we are copying the sales person. We did marketing 300 years ago, before all these channels, and we did it face to face. We were visiting customers and promoting our products or our services. And this is what people forget. The basic fundamentals of marketing.

I always tell marketers, “When you’re planning a campaign, think: ‘How would we sell it face to face?’” Because the customer’s needs are going to be much the same in this context as they would be face to face. Forget multi-channel technologies for a minute. Think one to one, face to face.

What do you need to say? To whom? How many times? When? How? When you know the answers to those questions, you can begin piecing it together. You need information to be able to answer these questions, and to get that information you must either buy it or build it. You build it by engaging the market. You can start working out how a direct mail piece here and an email follow-up there could be combined with a pURL and a personalized landing page to cover the same ground that a sales person’s visit would cover. That is often to do with knowing what the sales person does not know but needs to know in order to sell the product. When the combined effect of the multi-media activities adds up to something like a visit from an experienced, old-fashioned sales representative, that’s when you know multi-channel marketing is doing a good job.

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business