MarketMix and Another Reason To Skip the Ugly

Just got home from an interesting MarketMix conference. Overall, it was great: good conversations, lots of idea sharing, a sense of camaraderie. Compared with a certain current client of mine, it was a breath of fresh air to hear things said like "Reward failure." This quote was from Tom Vogl of REI, suggesting that experimentation and innovation need to be encouraged. Yes, we all need to pay attention to ROI, but new technologies and even optimization have learning curves.

There were some low-lights: the first breakout session was taken over by folks who didn't seem to even have a Twitter account (the session was about PR and Social Media). While that's fine, my humble request is to keep your lips shut and just listen, if you're that new to this. However, I still felt the panelists kept things moving and I did get something out of it, namely, that what your instinct is about doing PR via SM is correct (message to the right audience, stay relevant, etc. etc.)

I met some great people--and I'm fairly shy, so that's really saying something. The surprise hit of the day was Tom Douglas (yes, THAT Tom Douglas, our local food celeb). He's a terrific speaker, and while his talk was all over the place, was not in "marketing-ese" it was wonderful hands-on, full of his examples and humor. I had very low expectations, and he instilled me with civic/regional pride (as did Vogl of REI). His political leanings showed occasionally (re: healthcare, buy local, etc.) and these meshed with my own, so of course I'm a little biased.

At any rate, let me wrap up with the new reason to say no to ugly marketing (see my previous post). Tom Vogl used Nordstrom and Costco as local examples of online/offline integration (national presence with brick-and-mortar retail stores, so similar to REI). Costco was an example of what not to do: hideous website, not usable, all the most useful tools were buried. He compared that to Walmart--while not local, I'd argue a similar value prop and target consumers. The Walmart site was clean, easily navigable, and still on-brand. See folks? It can be done.