The Pompetus of Marketing
My six year old son recently discovered the Steve Miller band, and has honed in on “The Joker” as his current favorite to sing at the top of his lungs as I drive him to school each morning. One of his first questions was ‘what does pompetus mean?”, for which I could not give a ready answer. I did a bit of research, and discovered that the closest working definition was a secret language used by people who share a tight connection. This got me thinking that there is, in fact, a pompetus of marketing, and from what I can tell, very few marketers can speak it.
A true marketing pompetus is a combination of what is said, to who, and how. If you nail it, then you’ve reached the zone where your message truly resonates; you’re saying the right thing, to the right person, in the right way, and you get the results you want. Unfortunately, most marketing efforts measure returns in the very low percentages (2% is the current standard–which means a 98% failure rate). No pompetus here.
So how can we become marketing Maurices (the one who speaks of pompetus)? Current customer analytic applications are either disconnected from outbound marketing efforts, or they’re flat out wrong–how else do you explain a 2% response rate? There is so much information available to work with; people put so much of themselves on-line that there is a staggering wealth of information available–and yet we sit at 2%. One of the challenges is that moving above two percent tends to set off privacy triggers, and there is a shrill minority out there that will scream their heads off if they think someone is trying to reach out to them more accurately. This limitation can be dealt with; as I’ve mentioned on prior blogs, marketers ignore the privacy advocates at their own peril. These people are not going away, so we need to learn to deal with them constructively.
But what of the pompetus itself? How do you truly connect with someone in a way that compels them to do business with you? This requires a deeper level of understanding, and an analytic framework that goes way beyond existing solutions. You need to address the who (demographic), what (transactional and collaborative apps), where (GIS and Mobile apps), when (temporal data), how (clickstream), and why (psychometrics). But more importantly, it needs to be understandable. Sophisticated analysis is the province of highly trained analysts, but the end user is always a marketing or business person. How do you take complex multivariate data and make it accesible to the masses?
This is where visualization tools start to earn their keep. The more complex the data set, the greater the need for abstraction and visualization, and fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on which side of the table you’re sitting on) this whole domain is vastly underdeveloped. A good visulization tool provides the operating context for a good pompetus, and if you can also pompetize your way through the privacy quagmire, maybe people can finally start getting the kind of information they need, when they need it.