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What
Your Car Audio Can Teach You about Marketing
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by:
Mike Street
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Stand
next to any road, and every so often a young person will go by with the
latest rap CD blaring. If it happens to be a cold day, he (it is always
a he) may have the windows up. Then, all you will hear is the thud of
the overworked bass speaker in the back. After he turns 30, the young
driver probably won’t even be able to hear that, if he continues this
unwarranted assault on his ears.
That big bass bin can’t handle the vocal sounds, and the front speakers
would melt if they had all those thumps going through them. So the car
audio separates out the various frequencies using filters, sending only
the bass to the big bins in the back, and only the higher and more
delicate sounds to the little speakers at the front. Both, and
especially the bass, are then amplified so they are audible in the next
county.
Marketers have borrowed the same terminology as a way of looking at how
their business treats its customers. Marketing graduates will often
talk about ‘Filters’ and ‘Amplifiers’ almost as if they actually
understood them.
Filters
A filter in marketing speak is anything which prevents your customer
from doing business with you. Some filters are ‘natural’ – if you
provide personal training services for example all of your clients will
need to be within easy reach. This natural, geographic filter means
that you are unlikely to sell to someone in another country.
Others are contructed. Mercedes Benz dealers the world over have large,
bright, glassy establishments. They tend to intimidate anyone who can’t
afford the prices, acting as a natural, probably intentional, filter.
Filters can also be fairly subtle. If you send out a mailing by post,
research shows many are discarded without even being opened. If you
have a leaflet delivered, the ‘open an envelope’ filter is removed, so
people can’t help reading it, even while they are trying to throw it
away.
Amplifiers
An amplifier is anything which increases the ease of doing business
with you. Any business which decides to take payment via credit cards,
for example, will find the number of people who can do business with
them is amplified compared to when only cash was acceptable.
Marketers probably won’t admit it, but filters and amplifiers are
opposites of the same thing. Removing a filter has an amplifying
effect, and vice versa.
I insured my car the other day over the Internet. The first few sites I
tried only supported Internet Explorer. That, at least to me, is a
filter and I went somewhere a little more Firefox friendly!
Many corporate web sites insist you provide a lot of information before
they will send you that ‘free’ White Paper you are interested in. No
doubt that information is required by someone in the business, but it
filters out a lot of otherwise interested people who simply won’t take
the time to fill out the form and inevitably receive all the sales
calls afterwards. After all, they can’t be sure they’re even a prospect
before they read the White Paper!
Apple has potentially filtered out a large portion of their target
market for iTunes by only accepting credit cards. Most under 18s won’t
have a credit card, and they are the major buyers of chart music. The
‘Music Store Card’ is an attempt to turn this filter into an amplifier.
What Filters and Amplifiers Mean to Your Marketing
Importantly, this way of thinking allows you to look at all of your
marketing, online and offline, in a critical way to improve your
response rates and your sales. Every time you look at any aspect of
your business, ask yourself if this filters out customers you want to
serve, or if you can amplify the target market by improving the process.
Perhaps you could send postcards or use leaflets instead of putting
brochures in envelopes. Don’t insist on a customer’s life history
before you will allow them to buy from you. Make your web site
informative and easy to use, rather than slick, ‘cutting edge’ and hard
to understand. If you are providing services, make it clear on your
site where you are and the distance you will travel. Use local town and
county names as keywords to filter out people who will never be able to
buy from you, but to amplify the chance of attracting locals.
If you do this consistently, over time you will get your filters and
amplifiers to attract profitable customers to you, not send them away
to your competitors, never to return.
With more than 30 years in the IT
industry, Mike Street is now director of FastComm (www.fastcomm.net)
which specialises in information and tools to help increase sales,
including Airlook Mobile Email software, the Eye Catcher Video Phone
and the online Contact Management system, FastCRM. He is also webmaster
of his wife's Health and Beauty site Zenergie (www.zenergie.co.uk)
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