Detractors would say it’s childish to email your customers reminding them of such menial tasks as cleaning a vacuum filter, but I really like this email from Dyson. No selling, no offers, no coupons, no upgrades, no end of season bumf… just service.

No, it doesn’t help the till ring today, but it’s a great example of email marketers following my TRaP rule:

Timely – Dyson’s example is just perfect. They knew when I purchased and with typical usage they know when I should clean the filter (for another example, think baby products as your consumer’s child grows).

Relevant – if you’re a sports provider and know I’m a guy interested in rugby, don’t send me content on women’s golf (unless you know of a natural correlation).

Personalised – make it as much about me as possible. Do I think I’m just part of a corporate mailing list or a special and respected customer that you’ve paid attention to?

When I say personalised I also mean with permission. Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing is every bit as relevant today as it was when it first printed a decade ago and is a must read for anyone looking to grow their database asset.

SMEs will always struggle to mine the data needed for TRaP and they’ll argue over text versus imagery, along with style over content and sell over service, but if they want to unlock the potential repeat custom (acquisition, even, in some cases) they need to put their thinking hats on.

A product, service or brand that’s being raved about is all well and good until you try it out for the first time. With mountains of people talking so wildly about something, you’ve naturally put it in the remarkable box. But what happens when it’s not remarkable; when it’s only OK; when it doesn’t blow your mind?

Apple has this hype problem. Mac lovers sermonise so wildly about using them instead of PCs anyone taking one out of the box for the first time almost expects a Mac to do the work for them – or at least perform it by telepathy. I met a Mac newbie this week and they were seriously underwhelmed by their box-fresh MacBook Pro, “It’s not as special as everyone bangs on about, is it?”

Buy an iPad this weekend and see if it lives up to your undoubtedly weighty expectation. (What do you mean it doesn’t change nappies?)

Word of mouth is the pinnacle of marketing – until, that is, when it sets the bar too high. Then it leads to disappointment and a distrust of the next ‘big thing’ and marketing in general.

Photo credit: Mashable

I met someone this week that thinks they were burgled because they tweeted that they were away from home (i.e. London, when their location says Brighton). Such scare stories are only more likely as location-based services begin to make traction.

Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Yelp etc are still in their relevant infancies but with Facebook launching Places and smartphone take-up sky rocketing, these services/games are going to thrive. They’re not there yet simply because the reason for broadcasting isn’t compelling enough.

Somewhat negatively for a social media darling, Chris Brogan wrote recently, “I’m just not always keen on decloaking for social-only reasons.” I wouldn’t if I was him either; with 146,000 Twitter followers he’s going to be mobbed and spammed big time.

Users are struggling to find a real value in location at the moment but with generation Y willing to publish everything about themselves, I can’t imagine decloaking and revealing location being a worry for them. It’s more likely the opposite as they ‘like’ and ‘check in’ at bars, cafes, clubs, shops and places all over world.

As usual, John Battelle voices the clearest business connect, “…location aware services are not yet a cultural habit, in particular ambient ones. But it won’t be long before we assume that our public presence is, in effect, a search, one for which we will expect a response from any number of potential respondents.”

There are some clever early adopters though. Example: Daily Candy will point you to ‘current local happenings like designer sales, spa deals, and underground concerts,’ as you travel around New York, but we’ve not really seen anything yet.

So marketers will create places pages inside Facebook and scramble to offer you discounts to broadcast you’re in the cinema, coffee shop or wine bar. And, inevitably, the privacy debate will become mainstream news (read ACLU’s concerns).

Location is marketing’s unconquered frontier (and privacy the debate to come). But not for much longer.

Photo credit: Kerryvaugan

The world of Formula 1 is taking an enforced break for two weeks as part of a cost cutting exercise.

Speaking of the break, Ferrari team manager, Stefano Domenicali said, “We will be on holiday, but that does not mean our brains will stop working. Maybe one can even find fresh inspiration when outside the normal working environment and I expect this time to be a fertile one for ideas, which when all is said and done, are what make the difference.”

Isn’t that par for the course with most of us?

Reading novels on a sun lounger, assembling that garden shed, hiking up that mountain pass and scuba diving are all great stress relievers but they’re also a brilliant way to reinvigorate ideas and solutions.

I’m sure you’re thinking the same way, but is it unfair to expect likewise of your team? Clearly, it’s expected at Scuderia Ferrari.

I love meeting confident people. I don’t mean business networking arrogance; I’m talking about those who’ve really done something special. They stand that bit straighter, their heads that bit higher, with brighter eyes, and more alive faces.

Athletes have that confident look. So do military folks.

I recently met an ex-Marine commando who’d successfully led a Navy/Marine team to summit Everest and came back down rescuing another team’s casualty and won a Queen’s bravery award in the process. He exuded so much confidence it was like looking at the Ready Brek kid.

Unfortunately you can’t pick it up off a shelf in the supermarket, you have to earn it. The good news is that it can be earned in a small team SME every bit as much as it can from base camp on Everest. Team leader means the same in both all capacities.

Hadfield Road in Cardiff is a haven for the car buyer. It’s just a mile long but straddling nearly every inch of it you’ll find over 20 car dealerships. This proximity to your competitors certainly isn’t unique – pub chains all gather together in city centres. So does the sex industry in London’s Soho, and jewellry in New York’s diamond district around 47th Street. All apply the same phenomenon of proximity.

A similar thing is happening with e-book readers. The iPad launched earlier this year and threatened to decimate existing readers like Sony’s Pocket Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and, most notably, Amazon’s Kindle. But it appears to have done the opposite as sales of Kindle have trebled this year compared to the first half of 2009.

Amazon is now selling more E-books than they do hardbacks! Just think about that [undisclosed] number for a minute. In an interview with USA Today, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said, “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to twelve months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me.”

They’re releasing a new Kindle at the end of August that’s smaller, lighter, better and half the cost. I don’t know if it can launch an artillery strike but it’s going to further enliven their product life cycle.

All this should remind us that the next time competitors threaten to join our market or emulate our products, we should wonder if we cant use proximity to grow the whole together, rather than needing to turn into cannibals. It’s another argument for the thoroughly modern co-opertition, not necessarily competition.

‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary.

I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park (it certainly isn’t Disney)? How about the Trainline? Or Firefox?

Yes, Facebook is hooked into 8% of the world’s population (26 million in the UK) but when such buttons become ubiquitous clichés, what will you do to stand out?

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is now a year old and it’s been a good one.

They’ve clawed 12.7% of the enormous search market, which is no small feat. And they’ve got what political campaigners crave: momentum. Bing will be powering Yahoo search from this autumn and Yahoo’s got 18.9% of the market. Granted, it’s early days and Google is still undoubtedly the goliath, but there’s plenty of reason to break out the cake.

But what about Twitter? According to its co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter isn’t a social network, “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” He’s not kidding as they’re clocking 24 billion search queries a month! Test it yourself here. Look for your company name, your brands, your services, your competitors, your customers – it’s illuminating.

Fast Company have the search big hitters lining up like this:

Google 88 billion searches per mth
Twitter 24 billion searches per mth
Yahoo 9.4 billion searches per mth
Bing 4.1 billion searches per mth

Photo credit: Search Engine Land

Sky have been ordered by the media regulator Ofcom to open up their Sky Sports 1 and 2 channels to competitors. But just before the physical sharing is to take place there’s been a typical Murdoch move.

The wholesale price Sky can charge its (not so friendly) brethren at BT Vision is linked to their own retail price. Sky have lifted their retail, and therefore the wholesale price. This is cutting your nose off to spite your competitor. Of course they knew that BT had advertised the service at £16.99 forcing them into a loss-leader position.

The silver lining on BT’s cloud is that they’ll be the cheapest on the market until they decide the pain is too much to bear. They should vacuum up some price sensitive viewers from rivals, giving Sky an own goal in the short term.

It’s the epitome of bargaining versus negotiation. I met a wonderful professor recently who hit home that there’s a massive difference in the two:

- Bargaining occurs when each party seeks the best outcome for themselves i.e. win-lose (think about buying/selling a car with a complete stranger – you’re bargaining)

- Negotiation occurs when both parties try to ‘create value’ in unity. Our coalition government is a timely example of this win-win situation (they have little without each other).

Sky were forced into negotiating with competitors and turned it firmly into a bargaining situation. When you sit down with that supplier/client next week will you be bargaining or negotiating with them?

Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.

It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.

Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.

The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.

As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.

Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.

Image from Wired magazine.