> Same here.
>
> Being this is a business list - how would other sales/business/marketing minded people promote their 911 service? Would you incorporate a real life scenario? Yes? How would you address the tact aspect?
>
> Your thoughts,
>
>
My personal thoughts are this:
1) Using the death of a child in marketing of ANY kind is an emotional
appeal. With emotional appeals, you get emotional responses. That's just
the way marketing goes. They may be positive emotional responses (people
linking their compassion to a desire to 'never let it happen again' sort
of feeling), or they may be negative emotional responses (id est, "How
could you exploit the death of a child for your financial gain!").
Either way, you have to be prepared for that sort of response, and
market accordingly.
There's a great book called The Leader's Guide to Storytelling:
Mastering the Art and Discipline of the Business Narrative (Stephen
Denning) where he discusses the most common reactions to stories of a
particular theme. In this case, a negative story is often associated
with teaching a lesson. It is NOT, however, the best approach for
motivating a person or company to actually proactively change or gear up
toward a new strategy. For that, you need to present a different KIND of
supporting story.
When looking for a positive emotional response, you need to give a
positive emotional stimulus.
2) Build trust. You can't just simply drop into a mailing list and say,
"Don't let tragedy happen to you. Trust me to help you avert it." Who
are you? Why should I trust you with the averting this tragedy? Again,
back to the business narrative, it helps to be able to give a situation
in which trust in you was well-placed. Even if it's something as simple
as a customer testimonial or example in which you were able to help
someone with your services. If you don't have this, you had better start
getting that information, because people are going to want it. Metrics
and statistics help, but they only go so far toward assuaging the
misgivings people may have.
Above all, speak the truth. When you're giving your examples or relating
your stories, they must be true. Artificial customer testimonials do not
build trust. If your customers are truly so thankful for your services,
they will often consent to being a reference and will allow others to
contact them as such.
3) Don't grab your supporting data fresh from the headlines before all
the truth and details come out. In this story, for instance, there's no
mention given as to WHY the 911 call went to the wrong city. In the US,
that ends up usually being inconvenient, but the E911 call centers are
generally pretty good at transferring you to a call center close by. Did
this not happen? Why not? What would have caused the ambulance to take
so long? Was it actually being DISPATCHED from a city too far away?
That's a breakdown of the 911 system, not of VoIP.
Clearly the call went through from VoIP to a 911 call center, so the
provider WAS giving 911 services. It just went to the wrong call center.
Why? Was this the VoIP provider's fault? The customer for not updating
location information? The 911 provider's fault for not routing properly?
None of these questions are answered, so we're left with more questions.
It's not a simple, clear-cut case of a VoIP provider not having 911
services. It's a case of a provider having 911 services, but they didn't
work properly. THIS is the most important aspect of this, because it
creates a scenario in which one distrusts the VoIP 911 provider almost
immediately out of the gate. How can one expect to sell services when
one is fostering an automatic distrust in them at the start of the
marketing appeal?
While this is a mailing list, basic marketing rules still most
definitely apply.
N.
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