November 7, 2005
long-term value
A conversation I’ve been having with a lot of people recently:
The long-term value of English Cut comes not from the profit margins of each $3,000 suit, or how brisk sales were last month. The real value comes from happy customers, who continue to dig what we do over the long haul. It is not uncommon for an established Savile Row customer to spend twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars on a wardrobe over time. A good Savile Row tailor will easily have a few hundred customers on his books, by the time he’s established his reputation. Do the math.
Another thing I’m fond of saying:
Blogs, when they work, are cheap and easy.
But of course, society has taught us you can “only” make money by doing stuff that is expensive and difficult. To me, this explains the cultural resistance blogs first encountered. Too many people had little buzzword-infested, top-down fiefdoms to protect.
Sure, making a hand-made suit from scratch is a pretty complicated business. But does that mean the marketing & communication has to be?
[Speaking of long-term value:] According to the logs, Google drives roughly 5 times as much traffic to English Cut than Yahoo. Rock on, Google.
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I think you can ‘only’ make money by doing things that (as Tom Peters says) are insanely great.
That means your products must be excellent, your service must be fantastic, and yes, your marketing must also be amazing.
However, amazing marketing does not equal expensive marketing. Great marketing for me is getting your ‘idea virus’ to spread, not coming up with million dollar ad campaigns.
Yeah Ed, I’m with you on that one. Good points you made, thanks.
One phrase in this post really caught my attention,
“Too many people had little buzzword-infested, top-down fiefdoms to protect.“
Buzzword-infested strikes at the heart of why we operate in such a dysfunctional world. The 20th century paradigm is to protect your territory, your special knowledge. We do this with jargon. Knowledge is best used when shared, but the special language everyone creates prevents this.
This post aligns well with Seth’s post “Mine, ours, everyone”
Sure, making a hand-made suit from scratch is a pretty complicated business. But does that mean the marketing & communication has to be?
Do you think putting together a marketing campaign is less complicated than tailor making a suit? If anything, I would say the two are related.
“But of course, society has taught us you can “only” make money by doing stuff that is expensive and difficult. To me, this explains the cultural resistance blogs first encountered. Too many people had little buzzword-infested, top-down fiefdoms to protect.“
As a marketing tool, I think the reason why blogs are meeting with resistance is because companies haven’t figured out how to control the message yet. Eventually, when they realize that the beauty of blogs is that the message goes where the bloggers take it, they will either:
1 — Accept the potential of blogs, and work on ways to implement them into their marketing strategy
2 — Say ‘Hell no!’ and run away as fast as they can.
The companies that do #2 are the ones that can’t be trusted
“buzzard infested fiefdoms” more like!
the media genie is out of the bottle and cannot be “controlled”. hurrah!