As a blog writer about all things involved in phone marketing, I’m constantly reading about new products, services and techniques, sorting through the world of information for the most relevant news to share with my readers. When I read Seth Godin’s blog post from yesterday, however, it made me put down my writer’s pen (figuratively speaking, of course in reality I just stopped typing) to contemplate his insights.
Here’s an excerpt from the post, “In Between Frames”:
A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we’re as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.
Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.
Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad… but the consumer’s take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.
Marketing is what happens when you’re not trying, when you’re being transparent and when there’s no script in place.
For the past 24 hrs., I’ve been thinking about what this all means for phone marketing. When it comes to IVR, cloud telephony, voice broadcasting, etc., marketing is not all about the customer service survey generated by the automated phone system. It’s about what the customer thinks about the company after completing the survey. Marketing is not about your automated phone system script. It’s about whether the customer walks away from the phone call having experienced a positive interaction with the company, not just with a machine. Marketing with automated phone services is not just about how quickly and efficiently you can route the customer to the right place. It’s about whether the customer feels that they are being directed linearly towards a goal or being turned in a circle.
So what lesson should marketers learn from Godin’s point as it relates to phones?
The first step is obviously to choose the best services available to automate your business’s phone calls. Top quality voice recognition, efficient call routing and interactive voice broadcast work very well, but still require first rate technology while cloud telephony remains fresh. But, beyond the question of actual business efficiency, excellent marketers should also evaluate the customer’s perception of the automated phone service. According to Godin, “Consumers are too smart for the frames. It’s the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.”
I’m still left with one unresolved issue. If the enjoyment of comic books resides in the reader’s ability to fill in the frames, then does a marketer’s diversion of attention to the “in between frames” diminish the customer’s active role in the business? Or maybe the comic book analogy shouldn’t extend this far… for in the end of the day, isn’t a business’s recognition of the customer perception also in the customer’s best interest?
Related posts:
- Marketing Through Education: A Lesson From New York Real Estate
- Phone Marketing Insider’s Greatest Highlights
- Marketing Lesson from “Five Things You Didn’t Know About VoIP”
- A Quick Lesson in Storytelling
- Blocking Caller ID? 3 Better Ways to Run Your Phone Marketing Campaign
