Katy has posted this awesome clip on her Seemingly Unconnected blog.

It’s a great monologue, explaining how marketing is to blame for the stupidification of culture, by encouraging us to worship youthfulness and ignorance.

However, I’m not sure about his logic of selling to younger people “so that they buy stuff for their whole life”; actually, marketing is much more myopic than that. This quarter’s targets are usually too important to worry about a customer’s lifetime value.

Instead, I would say that it’s actually the malleability of young minds that has always made them attractive to the Ad Men hungry for quick wins.

Part of the problem is that nearly everything we measure (sales; visits; click-through rates) is short-term. If we are to move beyond making a quick buck and start building value, then marketing and social media metrics needs a Balanced Scorecard, which is what our PESH model is aiming to do. Measuring participation and advocacy scores is then as (or more) important than measuring direct clicks and sales.

Everything seems to be moving at breakneck twitter-speed nowadays, but building genuine value and relationships still takes time.

The alternative is more viral videos… of the Jonas Brothers… wearing Crocs. And nobody in their right mind wants much of that.

PESH model

It seems to cover most of what we want to do at Nokia from a digital marketing perspective:

Particpate (Twitter, blogs.nokia.com etc)

Enable (Ovi Services, Royal Artist Club)

Sell (Nokia Online Store)

Help (Nokia Support Discussions)

Here are a couple of my observations about the model now that we’ve had some time to map things against it (we’re mapping everything against it, not just the examples above):

Better balanced

The model allows you to accept that not every activity and every venue needs to do everything. For instance, it tells you that a corporate site does not need to be a community, and that a participatory experience does not need to lead to direct sales. Rather than trying to do everything on one site or with one type of social media presence, instead you can build a well-balanced set of initiatives that fit with what you are trying to achieve.

Sales/supplying is vitally important for a business, but there are times to do this and times to not. Dell has used Twitter for offers and generated a lot of sales, but that does not mean that Twitter should be used exclusively for sales. As Dan Ariely has pointed out, social behaviour and sales do not often sit well together; separating the two can help people understand what your intentions are.

Metrics

In terms of fitting this approach with objectives, it is important that metrics are mapped to each segment, so that you can tell how much each is adding to your business goals.

Advocacy should absolutely be one of your goals, and one good way of measuring this is the Net Promoter Score. We’ve re-drawn the original model now with Participant and Helper on the left hand side which could be seen as representing the NPS: low-scoring Detractors at the bottom and Advocates at the top.

(One interesting side note is that Detractors can, if managed well, become your biggest Advocates: their overly negative response is often indicative of disappointment which shows them to be emotionally involved with the Brand, which is a good thing. Handle that well and you can create advocacy)

Customer Service = Marketing

“Helper” is not an obvious role for a traditional marketer, but this is one of the most important quadrants, in my opinion. As I have said before, and Faris has also said recently, helping customers is great marketing. It should not be seen as a separate activity done by the Support Team. Great customer service is the most remarkable thing you can do, it makes people happy, and causes your marketing to have Emotional Density.

Is the PESH a model only useful for “digital”?

On Arto’s blog post, you can read the typically insightful comments from Asi about how it should be tested and extended. Although the model was originally built to map a brand’s social media activities, Asi also believes that the model could perhaps be used for a broader view on what we in marketing should be doing (this is consistent with Asi’s view that essentially everything is now social media).

Anyway, we’re still working on this, so input is welcomed!