Spotlighting the Skeptics

Can you be trusted with customers' data?

The answer depends on who you ask, according to a new study by Royal Mail MarketReach.

The firm asked 7,000 consumers in the UK whether they trusted marketers to use their data ethically, and protect it from thieves and hackers. 

Its findings show:

• Older people worry about potential data abuse more than younger people;

• Women are more reluctant to give marketers data, and want greater reassurance that their data will be safe, than men; and

• High-wage earners trust marketers with their data more than low-wage earners do.

Embracing Swag

Mimicking their B2C cousins, savvy B2B marketers are plying swag to secure customers' loyalty, says a new white paper from Forrester Research.

B2B Loyalty, The B2C Way offers dozens of examples:

• On Super Bowl Sundays, a marketing automation provider—knowing its customers are at work—ships them "war room care packages."

• A B2B phone company sends customers a catalog of general merchandise they can buy for loyalty points.

• Another B2B phone company lets customers use their loyalty points to bid in an auction for tickets to sports events.

"Loyalty programs may be a B2C construct, but the concepts apply in B2B marketing," the white paper says. 

"As B2B marketers get serious about loyalty, they can jumpstart their efforts by embracing some B2C approaches. In some cases, it may be a matter of reframing, organizing, and scaling what’s already in place."

Un Words

Before you unfriend that geek you unearthed at the unconference on unmarketing last week, pause for a moment of gratitude.

You can thank two IBM researchers, Lance Miller and John Thomas, for our love of "un" words.

Musing over computer commands, they wrote in a 1976 report, “It would be quite useful to permit users to ‘take back’ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special ‘undo’ command).”

But Shakespeare also favored "un" words.

The Bard is responsible for no fewer than 314 of the ones that appear in The Oxford English Dictionary, including unsex, unshout, unspeak and unswear.

Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, has her character say, “I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now.”

And contemporary songsters like "un" words, too.

Among Bob Dylan lyrics, one of my favorites goes:

"You taught me how to love you, baby

You taught me, oh, so well.
Now, I can’t go back to what was, baby
I can’t unring the bell."

Seeing Differently

I've been taking a basic drawing class every Saturday for the past two years.

The art school's catalog promises the course will teach you to "see things like an artist."

After many repeat classes (I'm a slow learner) I can vouch that the catalog doesn't overpromise.

Learning to draw, in fact, rewires you to see differently.

You begin to focus on details and relationships that were once invisible to you.

In an essay, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (himself an artist) contrasts the experiences of two people strolling in the woods. One is "a good sketcher;" the other with "no taste of the kind."

The latter sees only trees. "He will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect, but that the trees make the lane shady and cool," Ruskin writes.

But the sketcher sees more: dancing motes of sunlight; emerald-bright mosses and surreally shaped lichens; gnarled and ancient trees awash in light and shadow; and a canopy of leaves of "a hundred varied colors."

"The enjoyment of the sketcher from the contemplation of nature is a thing which to another is almost incomprehensible," Ruskin writes.

"If a person who had no taste for drawing were at once to be endowed with both the taste and power, he would feel, on looking out upon nature, almost like a blind man who had just received his sight."

Brevity. Before It was Cool.

A recent study by Microsoft reveals that 67% of heavy social media users struggle to concentrate.

Ultrathin attention spans make brevity—or, more accurately, conciseness—more important to marketers than ever.

In his introduction to the 1979 edition of The Elements of Style, E.B. White praised his teacher and coauthor William Strunk for writing, fifty years earlier, "fifty-nine words that could change the world." 

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

It's little wonder Strunk revered brevity. 

He was an English professor at Cornell; forced to read undergraduates' papers, he understood well there are limits to the patience of every reader—even an academic.