Wayfinder is proud to welcome our newest client to the family, Arden Fair Mall. Arden Fair, located in Sacramento, is more than a collection of retail shops, it’s an integral part of the Sacramento community.

Featuring Nordstrom, Macy’s, Apple and over 165 premier retailers, the mall is perceived by shoppers as a community gathering place for friends to meet, socialize and shop. It is one of the original Sacramento malls and residents feel a special connection and loyalty to it. So do we.

We look forward to developing a new campaign that will create an even greater connection between shoppers and the mall while reinforcing the preference to shop there time and time again.

In the meantime, if you find yourself in Sacramento and want to take care of your shopping needs, give Arden Fair a try.

Well, we are proud parents of a new website today, and a new logo, and a new blog, and new messaging for Wayfinder. For that matter, we even have a new name, Wayfinder, not Wayfinder Response Marketing.

The reasons we made the changes are easy to explain: like any growing entity we out-grew our old identity and realized it did not portray the work we are currently doing for our clients: digital advertising, traditional advertising, SEM and social marketing. In fact, our old identity did not even reflect the types of clients we work with because more and more of them are consumer marketers, not B2B.

But even as I write this "birth announcement" I realize that this stuff is more like building a product than giving birth. With birth (at least with mammals), two members contribute equally to the creation, then it incubates for awhile and eventually out pops a new creature. The new identity for Wayfinder required contributions from a large team of people including our business partners Beyond Pix who produced the video sections.

Unlike a birth, we also had the ability to make improvements and refinements before the new us entered the world. Most importantly, we can continue to shape our identity, our service offerings and our business strategy to stay ahead of the market, way ahead.  And, we can do so without having to change diapers along the way.

We hope you enjoy the new site, the new blog, our updated Facebook page, our Twitter account, our Flicker page, our LinkedIn profile, and most importantly, the new Wayfinder.

It’s always great to help a great cause, but it’s also nice when a client thanks us for doing so. The following is taken from a Pacific Union press release.

“Pacific Union Real Estate has long been known in the communities it serves as a firm that is committed to giving back and doing the right thing to help others. In the company’s Marin offices, Pacific Union agents and leaders are investing their time and promotional dollars in a new Community Partnership Campaign with local charitable organizations. During August, Pacific Union will partner with Senior Access Adult Day Services to promote aging education and services in Marin. Senior Access is a San Rafael-based nonprofit that provides a range of programs enhancing the quality of life for older adults and their families dealing with memory loss.

Pacific Union salutes its partners Wayfinder in San Francisco and photographer Sean Desmond of Medicine Agency who have also generously contributed to this program by offering their creative services to develop ads and images.”

Everyone talks about lead-gen.  But, what about protecting what you’ve got?

I’m convinced that a lot of marketers are, as they say, “going out for hamburger when they’ve got steak at home.”

Why does this strategy get so little attention? There are the obvious reasons; it’s a long-term strategy, it’s tough to track, it requires coordination between service and marketing staffs.

But, I also get the sense that customer retention lacks sex appeal.  Telling the CEO (or a recruiter) that you grew the customer base 20% comes off a lot cooler than reporting that you cut customer defection by 20%.

It’s time to get serious about retention and its close cousin win-back marketing. The following numbers from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study make a compelling case:

• most companies lose 10 – 40% of their customers every year
• it costs 5 to 10 times more to get a customer than keep one
• reducing attrition by 2% has the same impact on profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Bottom line, the PWC study states that reducing customer defection by 5% increases profits by 25% to 85%.

How can cutting attrition have such a big impact on profits? The obvious benefit from keeping customers is incremental sales.  But hidden benefits are just as important:

• loyal customers increase referrals that bring in new business – for free
• loyal customers don’t need promotional pricing used to attract prospects
• loyal customers provide information (quantitative and qualitative) that helps the business acquire new customers more efficiently.

In a tough economy, every customer counts. Now is the time to pay more attention to those you have.

Better than best practices?

Let me start by saying we know best practices. Best practices are our friends. They keep us from wasting clients’ money.

But that doesn’t mean we’re married to them. Because when you use the same “best practices” as everyone else, you have no strategic advantage. And who wants to compete that way?

If ever there was a marketing discipline positioned to tell us what’s better than “best practice”, it’s response marketing. We can tell what works. We can measure how well it works. We can compare what works better. Damn, we can actually measure ROI.

And if there was ever a medium for experimenting with ”best practices” it’s online. Where else can we find out who’s responding to what and where, in real time? And where else does it cost so little to find out?

But many marketers are married to the comfort of “best practices” – they forget that best practice #1 is to find something better. And as they take their safe incremental efficiencies, competitors are out there testing “ideas” that’ll eat their lunch. (I’m pleased to say we just did that for one client, taking down a control that had been unbeaten for years.)

In What Sticks, an insightful research-driven study of what works, Briggs and Stuart recommend putting aside 10% of the marketing budget to test new ideas outside the comfort zone. High-risk concepts with big potential — the kind your most passionate people come up with but never get to fly. Seems like a no-brainer.

They say no one ever got fired for using best practices. Perhaps.
But, I’ll bet a lot of them are now working for someone who looked for something even better.