Fern Mallis, widely credited with creating New York “Fashion Week” and former VP of Marketing at IMG, discusses marketing in the fashion industry.
Fern Mallis was interviewed by Green Buzz Agency after a panel she led on Social Media and Marketing at Afingo’s “Behind the Seams.” Presented at Manhattan’s world-famous Fashion Institute of Technology, “Behind The Seams” saw 30 top designers, apparel manufacturing insiders, head buyers of top retail chains, editors, and celebrity tastemakers to offer wisdom, opinions, and tips to a diverse audience of fashion fans.
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We are the leader in corporate, web, and online video production services in Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, and NYC!
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A Guest Blog Post by Jennifer Schaus, Principal of Jennifer Schaus & Associates, Washington, DC
Marketing any product or service requires understanding your buyer; the what, the who, where, when, how and why. Marketing to the government is the same. The Federal Government is the worlds LARGEST buyer, spending over $400 Billion dollars annually on anything from armored vehicles to pens and pencils to socks.
The WHAT
The Federal Government buys anything from armored vehicles to socks and pens and pencils. In addition to products, they also buy services ranging from IT to HVAC and construction. The key component in your offering is to ensure you have a solution that fits the needs and budget of the government.
The WHO
There are usually several players involved in the buying process. This will usually include several individuals such as a Program Manager and a Contracting Officer (those who sign off and approve the purchase).
The WHERE
Although Washington, DC is the hub of the Federal Government, much of what happens here is policy related. Major and minor purchases take place both in Washington and at various government locations around the country and world. These locations can be military bases or field offices for The FBI or The Department of Agriculture. This information is public and therefore spending some time to build relationships within your local government community will be advantageous to your sales process.
The WHEN
The Federal Government fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 31st. Every agency has a publically available budget information as well as details on historical purchases. Because of a use-it-or-lose-it process, the federal 4th quarter tends to see great spikes in purchases. The 1st quarter can tend to be slow due to budgets being approved (“Continuing Resolution”).
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The HOW
The government is a slow buyer. They tend to be risk-adverse. Anything you can do to make the buying process easier for them, the more likely they are to buy from you. The government can purchase using p-cards (procurement cards) most of which have spending limits at $3k. They can purchase directly from you using a competitive bid system, sole sourcing your solution &/or through contract vehicles such as the GSA Schedule, the VA Schedule, etc. These contract vehicles usually have completed the vetting process and established your “best” pricing upfront, thus eliminating paperwork and time on the buyers side.
The WHY
The government tends to be reactive rather than proactive and this is a simple fact. Most of what they buy is in response to a crisis or great need and these are usually the high-dollar purchases. For example, as a reaction to 9/11, there was a tremendous increase in the government purchasing security systems – products and services. All agencies have a website stating their mission. Using this available data to conduct research and understanding your customer will help you make a more effective and tailored marketing pitch.
Additionally The Small Business Administration has set-aside goals for contracts. They set levels and disperse grades at the end of the fiscal year to every agency based on meeting (or not) certain goals. You can use the grades to determine which agency received poor marks and back into targeting them (if you meet one of the small business designations). These goals can range from awarding contracts to woman-owned businesses, HUB-zone businesses, Veteran-owned, disabled, 8a, etc. If your firm holds any of these formal designations, you become more attractive to the buyer.
Resources Available
Various resources are available both for purchase (from commercial companies who specialize in B2G) and gratis (government websites). Carroll Publishing, FedSources, Input (now Deltek), Leadership Directories are examples of commercial firms, data aggregators, who provide marketing list of government buyers as well as some value-added data on solicitations and agency intel. FedBizOps and FPDS are examples of government websites that house data on solicitations, budgets, past and future. PTAC offices are also available and useful to those who are just beginning in the B2G sector.
For more information on any of the above services, please contact Jennifer Schaus at JSchaus@JenniferSchaus.com
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This is a book excerpt from our friends at FT Press. This excerpt is taken from Real-Time Marketing for Business Growth: How to Use Social Media, Measure Marketing, and Create a Culture of Execution by Monique Reece.
Purpose-Driven Companies Make Higher Profits
If you want higher profits, have a purpose. Writing this section of your plan will increase profits while also creating a business that is more fun and meaningful for you, your employees, and your customers. Companies that clearly define their mission, vision, and guiding principles, and communicate this consistently across the organization, have significantly higher profit per employee than companies who perform poorly in this area.1 Success Profiles, a performance management company, studied 600 businesses and found that the average profit per employee in the survey increased from $7,802 per employee to $27,401 in companies that make this a best practice in their organization.
If you think things like mission, vision, values, goals, culture, and company purpose are merely “soft,” nice-to-have attributes for a business, this fact alone should change your mind.
As the leader driving the development of this important effort, you have the opportunity to create the experience people have with your company. If you are the company founder, you will develop the mission, vision, values, and goals to inspire your employees. If you are a marketing or strategic planning executive, you will have the opportunity to drive this process and communicate the messages in unique and creative ways so they are understood and integrated into the company culture. You will facilitate this important assignment and communicate the messages in your internal company brand campaign. As you will learn in the chapters that follow, an internal brand campaign is as important as your external campaigns because it inspires the actions and behaviors that ultimately become part of your brand.
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We will explore several examples of companies that have done an exceptional job of defining their purpose. We will also look at a few special companies that have taken the road less traveled to create a company where company purpose is THE distinct competitive advantage for their company. Author Jim Collins defines the characteristics of companies like this in his book Good to Great. CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Kimberly Jordon of New Belgium Brewery run companies powered by purpose.
Create Raving Fans
While hundreds of companies are beginning to embrace the concept of a purpose-driven organization, these companies tend to be the exception, rather than the rule. I find this surprising given the fact that not only are these companies adored by their employees and customers, but they also deliver consistent profitability and return to their shareholders. Perhaps I am oversimplifying this concept, but when you have a choice to run a great company versus a mediocre company, why not create a great company? Not only will you have more fun; but you will create loyal employees and customers who are “Raving Fans.” 2
Raving Fans, the title of a book coauthored by Ken Blanchard, describes customers who believe so much in a company’s people and products that they actually become a part of the sales force. The way to create customers who are raving fans is to first treat your employees with great care and respect. If you do this, they in turn will care for customers. The result of creating raving fan customers, being the employer of choice, and the investment of choice is a “triple bottom line.” As Blanchard is famous for saying, “Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.”3
Blanchard not only writes about companies with extraordinary purpose, he runs a company that lives by these principles every day. As Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, Ken Blanchard’s role is to lead others at a higher level. He not only does this in his organization, but he also teaches other companies to embrace this concept. If you don’t think this concept is important, especially in tough economic times, read on to see how Blanchard handled a difficult choice in our last recession during the period of time immediately following the 9/11 tragedy.
This is a book excerpt from our friends at Pearson Education. Each excerpt will be taken from one of Pearson’s excellent Marketing titles. This is our second excerpt from Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, 2nd Edition by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt from Que Publishing.
Search Marketing Is Big Business
You can tell a new marketing technique is taking off by noticing the number of consultants who
hang out their shingles to help you do it! Several kinds of firms are involved in search marketing:
• Search consultants. A brand new kind of consultancy has sprung up in the past several
years, variously known as SEO consultants or SEM consultants. These new firms, led by
iProspect, OneupWeb, and Global Strategies International, handle search marketing and
nothing else.
• Traditional advertising agencies. At the other end of the spectrum are the old-line adver-
tising agencies that have been around for years. Just as firms such as Young & Rubicam
and Ogilvy & Mather handle TV, radio, and print advertising, in recent years they have
taken on Web advertising. Starting with banner ads, they have now moved into search
marketing, too. Some ad agencies handle paid search only, whereas others offer SEO
consulting for organic search, too.
• Interactive advertising agencies. In between the two extremes, interactive agencies
handle anything online, ranging from search marketing to banner ads to e-mail cam-
paigns. Sometimes these agencies are subsidiaries of the traditional ad agencies, such
as OgilvyInteractive, whereas others, such as Avenue A | Razorfish, are smaller, inde-
pendent firms.
All of these firms are competing for your growing interactive marketing budget—projected
to be 9 percent of all advertising spending by 2011. Your organization might already work with
one of these companies, or might be looking for a search marketing partner. What is most impor-
tant at this point is your interest in allocating part of your marketing budget to search, because
you will soon see that achieving success is rather challenging.
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The Challenge of Search Success
Now that you know the basics of Web search, and you know how big a marketing opportunity it
is, it must be time for a reality check: Search marketing is not easy to do.
And, unlike most marketing efforts, the bigger you are, the harder it is. We know that in
marketing, size has inherent advantages. The bigger the budget, the more advertising you can
buy, the more free media coverage you can coax, the better a public relations person you can hire,
and on and on. But search marketing is different.
Companies with well-known brand names assume it is easy for their Web site to rank
highly in search results, but John Tawadros (of search marketing firm iProspect) explains that
“the field is more equal. Just because you’re a big name doesn’t mean much to the search
engines.” In fact, well-known brands have lots of competition for search rankings, both from their
competitors and from their allies—many resellers rank highly for well-known brands. Amazon
may rank well when a searcher searches for “sony dvd player”—possibly even higher than
Sony’s Web site.
It is actually easier in some ways for small Web sites to succeed in search marketing than
large ones. For instance, fewer people need to know what to do, and the whole Web site is man-
aged one way by one team. As soon as your site is large enough that you hear some telltale con-
versations about separating your team or even your site into multiple parts, then search marketing
has just gotten tougher:
• We need multiple teams of specialists. “The copy writers and the HTML coders really
should be in different departments. . . .”
• We need multiple product sites. “Each product line should really run its own separate
Web site. . . .”
• We need multiple audiences. “We should really have different user experiences for con-
sumers than for our business customers. . . .”
• We need multiple countries. “It is really easier for everyone if the Canada and the U.S.
sites are separate. . . .”
• We need multiple technologies. “We decided to keep using the Apache server for the mar-
keting information, but we are putting all of the commerce functions into WebSphere®. . . .”
“Green Buzz Agency staff and their finished product was of the highest professional quality. Our project requests were not only respected and delivered but also met with other, more expansive, suggestions and ideas. Their experience and dedication to their work was highly evident in our final project, which exceeded our original concept.”
Lisa Nichols, Director, International Programs: American Seed Trade Association
So youʼve been doing the local open-mic night circuit for a while now, youʼve just recorded
your first EP or album and are ready to start getting the word out about your brand. Hereʼs
a quick music marketing check-list to help you get on your way:
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1. Define your brand – Ensure you branding is clear, consistent and professional across all
your online and offline platforms. Define your identity who/where you target
audience are. Go to your fans, donʼt expect them to come to you.
2. Collect “currency” – Email addresses, mobile numbers and zip codes are the new
currency of the music industry. Email is one the most effective direct marketing
channels to fans. Make sure you are collecting fan data wherever you are both online
and offline. Two great newsletter services are mailchimp.com or fanbridge.com
3. Create a website – having your own website instantly create a professional brand. It
also acts as a uniting hub for all your other social networking sites. Remember, if
Myspace or Facebook died tomorrow, all your fan data would be lost. Having a website
ensure you are in total control of your brand and fan data. If you canʼt afford a website
yet, then just get a holding page with a newsletter sign-up on it and links to your social
networking sites.
4. Prioritize quality over quantity – Prioritize connecting with fans one by one over
applications that “autobot” fans onto your social networking sites. This will inspire
loyalty in your fan base and will ultimately be the most effective way in turning potential
fans into super fans.
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5. Be media ready – Ensure you have both physical and digital copies of your music
available, and a biography and/or press release too. Many journalists still want to
receive physical product in order to judge the professionalism of an artist. However
make sure you also have your full album available for download via a hidden website. I
recommend Soundcloud for this.
6. Donʼt forget about offline marketing – Online marketing has made connecting with fans
on a global level so much easier. We can now communicate with people in real time all
over the world. However, donʼt forget about your offline marketing. Your live
performance, fan interaction at gigs, and face to face networking are still fundamental.
Be aggressive (but nice!) in BOTH your offline and online marketing.
7. Know your rights – Ensure you aware of the different ways of earning money online and
offline. Make sure you sign up to SoundExchange (itʼs free!) in order to collect your
digital royalties and keep up to date with issues affecting musicians by checking in with
The Future of Music Coalition.
8. Be creative, be personal - Donʼt be afraid to ask your fans for input into your creative
process. If they see you are listening to them, it will incentivize their loyalty and you will
create word-of-mouth buzz.
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Jem Bahaijoub is the founder of imaginePR, a music PR and marketing company based in
Washington, DC. You can connect with her on twitter @jembahaijoub or Facebook
www.facebook.com/imaginePR
“Green Buzz Agency has been very easy to work with throughout the entire production process, from developing creative concepts to the receipt of deliverables. Open and clear communication can be difficult to find with out-sourced help, but it is definitely something that Green Buzz values and works hard to maintain. Their diligent work and quick turn-around makes them stand out from other agencies.”
Crystal Hudson, Game Operations & New Media Manager: Washington Mystics
