Professionals love the simplicity of SOSTAC® Planning method. This short book helps you to write plans that:

1. Get Approved
2. Boost Results
3. Make Better Decisions
4. Build Strong Strategies (separate from tactics)
5. Deliver a Reassuring Sense of Order

SOSTAC® has changed the work lives of so many marketers and business owners over the years.

SOSTAC® Delivers Success
whether growing businesses, winning pitches, attracting investors or getting a new job, SOSTAC® planning skills delivers great plans. SOSTAC® was voted in the Top 3 Biz Models Worldwide by the Chartered Inst of Marketing.

What They Say about SOSTAC®
‘saves time’
‘catapulted my career’
‘avoids costly omissions’
‘trebled our conversion rates’
‘creates impressive strategies’
‘a whole new world of logical thinking’
‘the clearest approach to strategic marketing planning’

See the full reviews on ‘Why Sostac?’  on the sostac.org  site

So, What’s New in SOSTAC® Guide 2025 (AI Ed)?

In addition to showing you how to:
ask great questions,
make better decisions and
write the perfect plan,

this 10^th edition, is very special.  

SOSTAC® Plans Explained

This SOSTAC® 2025 AI Edition also includes:

• The Advantages and Disadvantages of AI (1st chapter)
• 3 AI Waves + 4 AI Limiting Factors (1st chapter)
• The Essence of Ethics being central in AI 1st chapter)
• How AI’s Virtuous Data Cycle is also key (1st chapter)
• Some AI tools, tips and warnings – sprinkled throughout the book

Easy To Digest:
SOSTAC® can be learned in 3 minutes.
The 2025 Guide can be skimmed in 30 minutes
and digested fully in a few hours, prepping you to write great plans and/or to become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner.

I’ve tried to make this edition particularly entertaining as well as educating i.e. an edutainment experience.

If absorbed, this book will improve people’s work-lives, careers and organisations performances/results.

I really do hope you enjoy this SOSTAC® Guide 2025 (AI ed.). I welcome any feedback.

Paul
PR Smith

The SOSTAC® Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan 2025 (AI edition) is at last, finished, published and now, finally, available from Amazon.

We will talk about the SOSTAC 2025 AI ed. in our weekly chat about AI, Innovation & Ethics  on Friday at 1pm UK time (NB these 30 minute chats are now recorded. Go to my Linkedin and scroll down to ‘Events’ to listen live or previous chats.

The post What’s So Great About SOSTAC® & the SOSTAC® Guide 2025 AI edition? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

Enjoy this best-selling updated 8^th edition – packed with new material, keeping abreast with AI, AR, VR, MR, MA and other innovative approaches to marketing communications. All integrated with the world’s most popular SOSTAC® Planning methodology that delivers a reassuring sense of order in a chaotic digital world and also that delivers success from better, MarComms’ ‘information-based’ decisions.

In Part 2 – all ten marcomms tactical tools (incl ads, PR, sponsorship, Owned, Earned and Paid Media etc.)  has a sample SOSTAC® Plan at the end of chapter.

Ze Zook and I are so pleased with it.  So much new material including AI integrating with MarComms.  We’ve tried to keep the edutainment angle so readers actually enjoy discovering some cutting-edge examples, tips and tools throughout the book. Thanks to the team at @Kogan Page including: Alison, Donna, Bruna and  Jack, Jeylan, Susie and of course, Helen Kogan.

What New Marketing and What Classic Marketing is in the 8th ed.?

What’s new and what’s old in Marketing Communications 8th ed.?

20% author’s discount can be used legitimately by following these instructions.

1. Go to koganpage.com/MC8
2. Click ‘Add to Cart’
3. Click ‘Checkout’ on the top right corner of the screen.
4. Complete your Billing & Delivery Information
5. Click ‘Continue to Review & Pay’
6. Scroll down to ‘Review Items’
7. In this section, click the ‘Add an offer code’ button – bottom right
8. Enter your code AMK20 in the box provided
9. Scroll down to input your payment information
10. Click the ‘Buy Now’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Enjoy Your Book

The post Marketing Communications 8th ed Released! appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

Some English fans booed their own team when they took the knee before kick-off in the Euro 2020 competition (played in 2021). However, Britons are more likely to view Black Lives Matter as a force for good than ill, a YouGov poll suggests. Nearly half (46%) of voters saw the movement as a force for good compared to 35% per who saw it as negative The exclusive polling was carried out for a More In Common paper on the culture wars. The organisation, set up in the wake of the extremist murder of MP Jo Cox, also found through focus groups that “the public can and do make a distinction between the movement and the political organisation”.

That distinction has been at the heart of recent rows over England footballers taking the knee (going down on knee) before matches, in a gesture popularised by the BLM movement. The players said they were doing it to protest against racism and discrimination, but several prominent right-wing figures denounced their stance.

Some English fans booed their own players when they took the knee (they also booed  other countries’ national anthems).  Home Secretary, Priti Patel said it was ‘gesture politics’ and that ‘everyone has a right to boo’. Prime Minister Johnson refused to condemn the booing. Conservative MP MP Lee Anderson boycotted all England games on the team’s run to the Euro 2020 final this month because he believed taking the knee amounted to supporting an organisation with “quite sinister motives”.

Racist Tweets Storm – What Happened Before, During and After the Euro 2020 Final?

I spotted a short post by Dr John Bustard ‘Here is a short blog relating to recent research on twitter’.   It was shocking and uplifting. Coincidentally, this coincided with an ongoing discussion we are having about marketing tools including social media, automated journeys,  AI  and even racism online in #Clubhouse chat-app where, our club called #SOSTAC (r) Plans. We have a lively 30 min chat from 3.30pm-4.00pm each week about what’s new in marketing and SOSTAC (r) Planning Q&A.

Last week we talked about Gareth Southgate (English football/soccer manager) amazing post about his players taking the knee and a lot more inspirational uplifting thinking.  It was, in fact, a letter called ‘Dear England’. It was a classy demonstration of real leadership. Real values, Real harmony. Real humanity. A masterpiece. And an appeal, I think, to English fans not to boo their own team when they take the knee, before each game.  England lost the final to Italy and the racist hate tweets immediately flowed. In fact, they became a storm. Picking on three brave young black lads who missed their penalties.

So I am delighted to introduce our 3 guests today Dr. John Bustard (Ulster University), Dr. Nicole Ferdinand (Oxford Brookes), and Dr. Nigel Williams Uni Portsmouth who are members of  Ruaire and have written  Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens?.

But first, to summarise our previous weeks’ chats about SOSTAC® Plans ….. at the heart of marketing is building relationships via brands, automated journeys, personalised & passionate chat bots. We have discussed

Chinese Girlbot with 465m boyfriends

• Relationships – Chinese Girlbot 465m personalised relationships with boys – AI -Driven chatbots – prsmith.org/blog
• Relationships – England Football Manager & his Customers & Stakeholders– 60m+ via a letter from Gareth Southgate – playerstribune.com called Dear England
• Relationships – with media channels (social media) – Social Media Boycotts by the Premier League + Other sports – Guardian article (29 Apr). NB the  England and Wales Cricket Board, Premiership Rugby and the Lawn Tennis Association + F1 World Champ: Lewis Hamilton – demanded that   the social media giants to do more to eradicate online hate.  NOTE: Ahead of the boycott, the Professional Footballers Association labelled Twitter’s response to abusive posts aimed towards players as “absolutely unacceptable”.

Today, we have three experts here in the SOSTAC ® Plans club who can help the social media companies to rid us of most racist hate posts. They are from an AI Research Think Tank RUAIRE   (Responsible Use of AI in Recreation & International Events)

Social media can nurture loneliness, rage, extremism relationships

We know that social media can nurture loneliness, rage, extremism relationships

I saw Jeff Orlowski, director of the must-see documentary, The Social Dilemma,  interviewed on CNN TV 10 Jan 2021, saying:.

– Lies spread six times faster on Twitter than the truth (MIT)

– ‘The truth cannot keep up in a system that profits off of misinformation’

– We know social platforms can push radicalisation, it can be built into its algorithms – in the systems

– Insider leaked research from FB allegedly revealed that 64% of people who were radicalised because of the group recommendations suggestions that FB algorithms were pushing out….

It seems that social media can push people towards radical thought. interestingly, Dr John Bustard’s recent LinkedIn post ‘Here is a short blog relating to recent research on twitter’ mentions:  Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum says ‘racism presents a threat to the UK from ‘hostile states’ who are fanning right-wing extremism as a means to create a terrorist threat within the UK (quoted on the BBC Radio 4 show ): “Racism is a toxic issue feeding into right-wing terrorism.” There is clearly therefore a need for event teams, their sponsoring countries and tech companies to work together to combat this issue of misinformation and disinformation.

Interestingly, The Chief Whistle-Blower in Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, openly talks about  the ‘Destruction of society’  in his shocking video in my 2018 blog post called:  ‘The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture’  in which he says: “if you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. And it’s only when you break it is when you can remould the pieces into your vision of a new society. This was the weapon that Steve Bannon* wanted to fight his culture war.”  PRSmith.org/blog

The Dark Arts of Marketing (see end of post references and links).

So we had a heated discussion last week – really about ‘culture wars’, Gareth Southgate and his players taking a stand on this. Then came the Euro Final – tweets started flowing – before, during and after the match & soon after they turned racist – picking on the three young brave black lads who missed their penalties – turned nasty. It was a bonanza of pure hate racism. Here is a summary of the themes being used alongside  #Euro2020final before, during and after the game, as analysed by Bustard, Ferdinand and Williams 2021. They used the publicly accessible tool TAGS which archives Twitter postings via a search application programming interface. While this source is not exhaustive, they were able to collect 32,765 tweets using the hashtag #Euro2020final in the hour leading up to kick-off, 100,282 during the match and 44,554 after the match until midnight.

They then applied topic modelling, an approach that uses machine learning to identify underlying themes in large bodies of text.  The following visualisations present the three most prominent topics during each time period and the three most prominent keywords associated with each of them.

Themes being tweeted before the match

Themes being tweeted during the match

Themes being tweeted post match

These graphics are from:  Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens? (theconversation.com)

Twitter responded to the abuse on its platform by using a combination of machine learning based automation and human review to remove over 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended several accounts. However, ‘this action failed to effectively suppress the negative picture that emerged after the #Euro2020final. We suggest that Twitter could be taking action to stop online firestorms, even before they start.’ (Bustard et al 2021) The sad truth is: ‘Twitter trolls know that racist or hateful content about a high profile event will be widely condemned online. But condemnation of racist or hateful content only serves to further magnify the impact of these posts on such an event. Any positive message will be overshadowed by the discussions of hateful or racist posts.’ (Bustard et al 2021).

Racist hate tweets impact could be ‘minimised using tools Twitter have already developed, such as prompting users to rethink their tweets that may include harmful language. These tools could be adapted to provide warnings that encourage users to think before they retweet…’ (Bustard et al 2021). The other really sad fact is that ‘the discussions the day after the Euro 2020 final should have been about a history-making team, not about the abuse that a small number of trolls were able to turn into a firestorm’ (Bustard et al 2021).

The Prime Minister and the  Secretary of State

for the Home Department, Priti Patel, both condemned this racism YET they previously refused to condemn fans booing their own English team players taking the knee. Priti Patel said it was ‘gesture politics’ and that ‘everyone has a right to boo’.

So the yobos took the cue & smashed, and brutalised their own stadium and city and beat up Italians – having had the ‘apparent approval’ to behave like yobboes by the highest office in the land.

Wembley waste

With racists verbally attacking the three black players who missed the penalties , for me, it proves the English players were 100% correct when they ‘took the knee’, since racism is still, in 2021, big in football. All the more reason for taking the knee. Plus solidarity with American sports players suffering from racism.

The English central defender,  Tyrone Ming  called out, via twitter,  the home secretary Priti Patel –  who would not condemn English fans booing ‘taking the knee’. Originally Patel called taking the knee ‘gesture politics’ and then said she was appalled by the subsequent racism! Here’s Mings tweet.

Tyrone Mings

Microsoft News even featured an article (from the Independent)  ‘A fire they poured petrol on’: Boris Johnson and Priti Patel condemned over football racism ‘hypocrisy’ about both the Prime Minister’s and the Home Secretary’s lack of real anti-racism stance, in fact, they ‘poured petrol on it.’

And now the PM  wants to discuss with Social Media companies how to stop racist tweets.

There is an opportunity for social media companies to, once again, clean up their act, plus political leaders to show real leadership (or any leadership) in the fight against racism.

PLUS We now also have some people who could help the PM to help the Social Media companies to stop the rampant hate…..to stop racist content spreading like wildfire.

This is a must-read: Ruaire (2021) Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens,    TheConversation.com

I am so pleased these researchers have stood up. Nothing is impossible. Particularly, it seems, in a fast-moving world of AI. Hence a screaming opportunity to use the technology for the good of all humans on the planet.   

Thank you: Nicole Ferdinand (Oxford Brookes), John Bustard (Ulster University) and Nigel Williams Uni Portsmouth.

The Research Collective, RUAIRE,  stands for Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recreation and Events. RUAIRE is focused on investigating the ethical and effective use of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies in the fields of Tourism and Events.

—end–

If you liked this, you might also like:

• How Rats Work = How Twitter Works?
• Chinese Girlbot has 465m personalised relationships with boys 
• The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture
• Facebook Data: How it was used by Cambridge Analytica & Might Be Used in 2020 Election & Still Is Used in 2021? 
• Marketing Gone Wrong: Is the Dark Web Worse Than Subliminal Seduction?
• How Trump Won (a SOSTAC Analysis) – Part 1

• PM – 14/07/2021 – BBC Sounds    BBC 4 PM radio programme where Dr Nicole Ferdinand (one of our clubhouse speakers) has a robust discussion on the topic and others including authorities come in with different views

Or

Watch a 3 minute video explaining how to write the perfect plan with SOSTAC® Planning

Become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner 

The post Can Twitter Stop Racist Hate Tweets? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

Continuing from How Trump Won – part 1 – SOSTAC ® Analysis, where we looked at the first three stages of the plan: Situation Analysis (where was Trump?); Objectives (where did he want to go?) & Strategy (how was he going to get there?), now let’s explore Tactics (the details of strategy); Action (how to ensure excellent execution) and Control (how do we know we are getting there?). In particular, we’ll explore how he used, what I call, the Magic Marketing Formula to win.

PR Smith’s SOSTAC® Planning Framework www.SOSTAC.org

Tactics

Tactics include the marketing mix and this includes the communications mix. So whether it is a facebook ad, a social media post or tweet, a conference speech or any tactical tool, the key (apart from targeting) is to ensure the right message is shared (or ‘reflected to the audience’). This is, what I call, the Magic Marketing Formula.

The Magic Marketing Formula – IRD

The Magic Marketing Formula: IRD

Here it is: Identify (needs); Reflect (those needs with solutions or sometimes just slogans) back to your audience; Deliver (a reasonable product or service).

Make America Great Again = Magic Marketing Formula

Let’s start with the general message (the slogan that was used everywhere). This was shared (or reflected back to all audiences).  We will look at other, more specific messages, including ‘dark posts’, sent exclusively to very specific audiences (that others could not see easily as they targeted discrete audiences after they had profiled the personality of every adult in the USA – 220 million profiles). More on this in Part 3. But, first, let’s look at Trump’s slogan.

“Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was designed to make white working-class men remember when things were better for them or, at least, they thought they could remember.” Stephen Greyser, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School    Fottrell (2016).

‘Make America Great Again’ has a certain ‘darkness at the edge of that slogan as there is (also) a darkness at the edge of ‘Take Back Our Country’ (the Brexit Leave Campaign) & yet there’s also a glimmer of a legitimate & important aspiration in both of those slogans. … …. the legitimate aspiration underlying those slogans has to do with a sense of national community’ (Harvard’s Professor Sandel 2017). Trump addressed the people’s anger. Perhaps Clinton assumed the anger was against immigration and trade, and at the heart of that, is jobs. ‘But it’s also about even bigger things., about the loss of community, disempowerment, & social esteem (a sense that the work that ordinary people do is no longer honoured & recognised (& rewarded).’ Sandel (2017). So the need for community (national community), amongst other needs is reflected back through the consistent use of the slogan. Therefore appealing to hidden needs, needs that perhaps, many voters weren’t even conscious of during their voting. 

Professor Michael Sandel, speaking at Davos 2017

Professor Sandel continues: ‘The language of patriotism has been appropriated by the right for the most part. There’s no reason why centre-left parties can’t reclaim and articulate their own conception of national purpose, national community and shared identity & patriotism. What the elite missed was the sources of the anger & resentment that has lead to the populist upheavals in the US & Britain & many other parts of the world.

Pavlovian Conditioning?

Although Trump is part of a different establishment (business establishment) swing voters seemed to accept his carefully controlled positioning as a non-establishment politician (see part 1: Positioning) . Perhaps a Pavlovian conditioning – repeating the same message again and again and after a while his audience believed this, despite seeing Trump flying around the country in his “Trump” branded 757 plane. Perhaps because by doing so he showcased an aspirational lifestyle that appealed to white, working-class Americans (NB the magic marketing formula: identify needs/aspirations – reflect them back, ironically, via your own mobile media/your own private jet).

Is it possible that Donald Trump conditioned voters just like Russian physiologist, Dr. Ivan Pavlov, conditioned dogs back in 1902? www.PRSmith.org/SOSTAC

Tactics: Proposition: ‘Change’

The promise of ‘change’ worked for Obama previously & this time it worked for Trump too. Interestingly, both Trump and Obama (in previous Obama campaigns) identified that many people still want change.  Obama promised it in a positive light ‘whilst Trump used anger to get it across’ (Kanski 2016). However, this time, Trump went after the disenchanted relentlessly and rammed home his message of ‘angry change’.

“In the end it was a clear-cut message: If you’re happy with the status quo, vote for her; if you want change, vote for me,” said Dan Scandling, senior director of public affairs at APCO Worldwide. “That was what resonated.”
“She (Clinton) never effectively communicated how she was going to make people’s lives better beyond hanging her hat on the last eight years,” says Aaron Gordon, partner at Schwartz Media. (Kanski 2016).

Clinton’s more rational (and longer) economic and social arguments might have missed the attention span of those swing voters, as did the ‘Remain’ campaign in the UK’s now notorious Brexit referendum. Lord Heseltine (former UK Deputy Prime Minister under John Major and Secretary of State under Margaret Thatcher ) summed up short attention spans, lack of facts and policies, when referring to the UK’s Brexit, he pointed the finger at one of its ‘Leave Campaign’ leaders who has since become the UK’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, and said:

“How convenient to substitute a slogan in place of arguments you have not got.”  (Rogers 2016)

As our attention spans have shrunk from 42 seconds in 1960 (see How Trump Won part 1) to 5 seconds in 2008 and now 4 seconds, the words of John C. Maxwell (‘leadership’ author) resonate more profoundly:

John C Maxwell (leadership author)

Proposing What Audiences LikeTo Hear (IRD)

‘What that translates into is a constant iterative process whereby he (Trump) experiments with pushing the conversation this way or that, and he sees how the crowd responds. If they like it, he goes there. If they don’t respond, he never goes there again, because he doesn’t want to be boring. If they respond by getting agitated, that’s a lot better than being bored. That’s how he learns….. In that sense, he’s perfectly objective, as in morally neutral. He just follows the numbers. He could be replaced by a robot that acts on a machine learning algorithm’ (O’Neil 2016).

Through data analysis (big data) Trump was able to send different messages to different groups of voters with different needs. ‘Cutting immigration’ or “draining the swamp” of corrupt or incompetent politicians and bureaucrats – messages were targeted only at those that connected with these messages. (I’m going to have to do a Part 3 to explain how this worked).

‘Once up and running at the end of the summer, it was soon sending out tailored messages to 100,000 targeted voters every day’ (Marr 2017).

See the BBC video in Part 1 that explains exactly how Cambridge Analytica analysed the adult voting population of America (without them knowing their data was being used in this way) and subsequently targeting precise ads to each personality type telling them just what they wanted to hear.

Proposition, Message Credibility & Messages

Trump reached many disenchanted blue collar male voters by reflecting his messages in their language e.g. by ‘talking about the world and globalism in terms of winners and losers,’ Eric Bovim (Kanski 2016). Not everyone can understand social economics, but everyone understands the concept of winners and losers. Short. Simple. And not weighed down by actual facts or policies.

Having said that, if a significant proportion of the voting population do not want to hear long-winded arguments, then Trump just applied the Magic Marketing Formula (IRD) again and again, by keeping it short, tapping into fears and emotions, reflecting keywords that connect, but avoiding detail at all costs.

Trump Is A ‘Meaningfully Different Brand’

‘Meaningfully different brands’ are much more likely to be selected, to command greater premiums and to grow in the future,” says Christopher Murphy, chief client officer at brand analysts, Millward Brown North America.

Q1 Does the candidate meaningfully connect – either functionally or emotionally?

Q2 Is the candidate seen as different or capable of driving positive change?”

Trump, Murphy concluded, did both (Fottrell 2016).

Tactical Tool –  twitter

Trump’s preferred vehicle to spread his message was largely his Twitter feed. He built his momentum on Twitter, spreading the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain or #MAGA hashtag widely.  12 million followers (9 Nov –  now 16.4m)
Clinton’s Twitter feed (11.4m) felt more traditional and political (Kanski  2016). Clinton’s slogan ‘Stronger Together’ did not generate nearly as much traction. It is possible to predict which tweets/messages will get the most retweets (see IBM twitter analysis). Though I could have forecasted ‘Stronger Together’ was limp and wouldn’t gain much traction.

Tactical Tool –  Targeting Facebook Ads: 1,000% Increase in Sales

Jared Kushner (Trump’s son in law) who set up the stage 2 Strategy (see Part 1), database decision making and highly targeted facebook ads (& other cable TV targeted ads), also quickly learned how to continually refine the targeting of facebook ads. See 200 variables available to target specific messages. In fact, he quickly increased the sales of Trump merchandising (e.g. baseball caps with ‘Make America Great Again’) from $8,000 to $80,000 per day – ‘simply by refining the target demographic’ (Marr 2017).

ACTION

Build A Campaign Team 

Soon, Jared Kushner, was assembling a speech and policy team, handling Trump’s schedule and managing the finances.

Build A Data Centre

As mentioned in Part 1, within three weeks, in a nondescript building outside San Antonio, Kushner built what would become a 100-person data hub designed to unify:

• fundraising
• messaging
• targeting

They also tapped into the ‘Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change’ (Bertoni 2016) . Forbes reported: ‘Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration.

Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.’

Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface

Very quickly data determined decisions, so just like Teddy Goff and previous Obama campaigns, data dictated almost every campaign decision including:

• travel
• fundraising
• advertising
• rally locations
• topics of the speeches

Big Data is everywhere

Build A Disruptive Start-Up Culture

Kushner was unschooled in traditional campaigning, he was, therefore, able to look at the business of politics in the same way that so many entrepreneurs analyse and attack other bloated industries.

Learn Rapidly

Kushner knew what he needed to know. He knew what he needed to learn and learn it quickly. So in Kushner’s own words: “I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff? They gave me their subcontractors. I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting.” Synched with Trump’s blunt, simple messaging, this would go on to work very well.

Constant Beta Testing 

Constant beta Testing = Constant Learning = Constant Improvement. Trump was selling $8,000 worth of hats and other items per day. Bit by bit Kushner learned how to improve this with better targeting via facebook ads.  Once they found something worked – they scaled it up. Result: sales grew from £8k to $80k per day thus:

• generating revenue
• expanding the number of human billboards

Constant Beta Testing requires a cultural shift which, in turn, requires constant monitoring and control (see ‘Control’ section). 

No Fear Of Failure 

The entrepreneurial spirit / disruptive start-up culture ensured that there was no fear of failure just a hunger for fast improvement & scalability.  “We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner says. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.” (Bertoni 2016).

“We weren’t afraid to fail.” Kushner

Scale Up What Works  –  Tailor Targeted Ads

Scale What Works & Stop What Doesn’t – quickly.  Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones were scaled up. Trump’s team ended up sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day.

Use Machine Learning 

Machine learning helped to boost their fundraising efforts. Kushner installed digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. If anyone has more information on how Donald Trump’s team used machine learning, please do let me know, as I will be doing a Part 3 about Big Data helped Trump to win. 

Control

Sales Revenues & Donations 

The Trump team monitored revenues every day. The campaign raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors. They kept monitoring and learning what worked best and then scaled up.

Constant Real-Time Analysis 

Constant up-to-the-minute voter data, provided both ample cash and the insight on where to spend it. ‘When the campaign registered the fact that momentum in Michigan and Pennsylvania was turning Trump’s way, Kushner unleashed tailored TV ads, last-minute rallies and thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls’ (Bertoni). See Part 3 (‘How Big Data helped Trump’.

Ask Great Questions

Kushner asked this seemingly basic question which really focussed the campaign team’s minds: “How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did (Bertoni 2016).

Monitor Bangs For Your Buck

Kushner even spent $160,000 to promote a series of low-tech Trump policy videos which generated more than 74 million views which equated $2 CPT (Cost Per Thousand people reached). In addition to getting more cost effective, Kushner was learning which video messages worked best.

Constant Beta Testing

“We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,… Kushner

Monitor Twitter Streams 

Using 3,000 tweets from Trump and 3,000 from Clinton, here is Trump’s most frequently used words visualised in a word-cloud:

Trump’s Word Cloud identifying his most frequently used words

Here is Clinton’s most frequently used words:

Clinton’s Word Cloud identifying her most popular words

Trump’s most common words used in his tweets were positive (i.e., great, will, thank, as well as the hashtag #MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN). These all have positive meanings. Clinton’s most frequently used word on Twitter was trump (NB lower case disrespect!). What does this tell you?

Incidentally, it is possible to predict how successful* a tweet will be (or predict the performance of a selection of tweets and thus select the best one to send). * One success criteria is the number of retweets forecasted (within a certain level of confidence) Cortana 2016. If you enjoy data mining, you might enjoy this from Microsoft’s machine learning people. Everything generates feedback and learning, which is fed back into the system to update the situation analysis, refine objectives, inform strategy and tactics as you can see in the diagram below.  part 3 will explore how door-door canvassers fed back data regarding which message worked best for each household.

Control monitors and collects feedback which is constantly used to update all other sections of a SOSTAC® plan.

In the end….

crystal clear positioning and targeting driven by clever use of data layered on top of the Magic Marketing Formula combined with a ‘disruptive start-up’ attitude’ always ready to learn and constantly improve every hour – delivered Trump, the outsider, the most unexpected of wins (despite winning less than 2 million votes than Clinton). As Forbe’s Bertoni reports:

‘If the campaign’s overarching sentiment was fear and anger, the deciding factor at the end was data and entrepreneurship.’

‘Trump looked at the US and correctly saw an anxious populace that was ripe for facile answers, scapegoats and a narrative of unjust victimisation. So he pounced.’ Frank Bruni, New York Times, 14 Dec 2018

—

See How Trump Won part 1 – Situation Analysis, Objectives and the critical Strategic choices (the BBC video explaining how Cambridge Analytica analysed a nation of voters).

You might also enjoy How Obama Became America’s First Black President

You might not enjoy, but perhaps need to read:  The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture – Using Data & IRD

How SOSTAC® Works – a 4 minute video by PR Smith

How SOSTAC® Works – a 4 minute video by PR Smith

Become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner  visit www.SOSTAC.org

The SOSTAC® Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan

The new SOSTAC(r) Guide for Digital Marketers

Sources:

Bertoni, S. (2016)   How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House , Forbes December 20

Cortana Intelligence & Machine Learning (2016) Data Mining the 2016 Presidential Campaign Finance Data, Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog, 10 Oct

Economist (2016) The post-truth world: Yes, I’d lie to you, 10 Sep

Flood, A. (2016) ‘Post-truth’ named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, The Guardian, 15 Nov.

Fottrell (2016) How TV reality star Donald Trump won the election with his ‘disruptive’ brand, MarketWatch.com 11 Nov.

Grassegger, H. & Krogerus, M. (2017), The Data That Turned the World Upside Down, Motherboard, 28 Jan

IBM (2016) Trump and Clinton may have used some Machine Learning, DataScience.ibm.com , 21 Dec  http://datascience.ibm.com/blog/election-2016-data-analysis/

Kanski, A. (2016) Change and authenticity: The messages that won over American voters, PR Week 09 Nov.

Marr, B. (2017) Why Big Data Wasn’t Trump’s Achilles Heel After All, Forbes 9 Feb

O’Neil, C. (2016) Donald Trump is like a biased machine learning algorithm, Mathbabe.org 11 Aug

Rogers, D. (2016) The Politics of Fear, in an interview with Lord Heseltein, PR Week, April 2016.

Sandel, M. (2017) ‘ Why The Democrats are so out of touch with the People‘, World Economic Forum, Davos 2017 – (a very interesting video).

The post How Trump Won (Part 2) – using the Magic Marketing Formula – a SOSTAC Planning Analysis appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

SOSTAC(r) Planning – offline & online -integration, innovation & engagement

Any problems with the above link – try this http://www.slideshare.net/prsmith

Good luck with it.

SOSTAC Certification Portal

The post SOSTAC ® Planning – integration, engagement & analytics appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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You simply have to see the world through your customers eyes. Customer empathy is a great skill. Not just for tactical marketers but for CEOs searching restlessly for competitive advantage.  Urbany & Davis (2007) Competitive Advantage ‘The 3 Circle Model’ is simply brilliant. It can be explained in 3 minutes in the this video or read the notes below.

So here’s the very simple yet enlightening Urbany and Davis 3 circle model.  Consider the 3 core concepts of Company, Customers and Competition. This is the Customer Circle

It represents the value sought by the customer – the requirements and benefits that they seek.  These requirements and benefits may include deeper values. Essentially the Customer Circle represents what the customer wants or what value the customer is seeking.

The second circle is your Company Circle.

It represents the value customers perceive, or think, you offer to them.  This is the way they see it. You have to understand this. The area in the middle within the broken lines (i.e. the overlapping area in the middle) and this is Positive Value. This is the value you/your brand is perceived to deliver to satisfy customer needs. The area on the left  is ‘Non-Value’, which Urbany and Davis describe as ‘the product or service you produce that the customer either doesn’t care about, or perhaps, doesn’t know about.’   The area on the right is called ‘Unmet Need’. Urbany and Davis describe these as ‘customer needs that are not satisfied by your products and services and hence they offer a possible future growth opportunity.’

The third circle (below the other two circles) is called the Competitor Circle.

The competitor circle is the piece of the jig saw. It soon opens up a whole new way of thinking…… The competitor circle represents what value does the customer perceive in your competitor’s offering.  It’s a Venn diagram. The overlapping shaded area at the top is ‘the pure definition of competitive advantage’.   As Urbany and Davis say, ‘this is the value that you create that matters to customers, but, that is different to competition. This is why people choose us.’ This is part of your Strengths & Weakness Analysis which is part of the Situation Analysis is the first part of  your marketing plan  (using SOSTAC ® Plan)

So the next big question for you is ‘What’s your competitive advantage?’ This excellent question forces you to begin the process of defining your distinctive competitive advantage.  Try asking six different members of your team, you might just get six different answers! You’ve got more work to do with your internal communications…….!

The above is extracted from PR Smith SOSTAC® Guide To Your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan (2015) and Professor Urbani’s Youtube video (see above).

Footnote:

2/3 Companies Think They Deeply Know Their Customers  But Only 1/3 Of Customers Agree

A recent survey by Pegasystems to see how well businesses in service-centric industries like banking and telco believe they serve their customers compared to what customers are actually experiencing revealed that 66 percent of companies think they deeply know their customers, but only 34 percent of consumers agree with them (Tas 2015). So perhaps your customers do not see your products’ competitive advantage the way, you think, they should see it! Your  competitive advantage may actually be a lot more than that which customers perceive. But it is what customers think, & not reality, that actually creates competitive advantage in the mind of your customers. Urbani captures this brilliantly.

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Regarding Competitive Advantage, How Integrated Content Marketing Creates Competitive Advantage shows you how to use marketing content to create competitive advantage.

The post Beware: Customers See Your Competitive Advantage Differently appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.