Right, one of those short posts from marketing guru Seth Godin today, which - as ever - hits the nail squarely on the head. In How to answer the phone he recounts the difficulty of getting through to a company on the phone, and reiterates the maxim: the only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy.

Bland yes, but also dead right. He continues: “If you’re not doing this or you are unable to do this, do not answer the phone. There is no middle ground on this discussion. There are no half measures”.

Saving a few pence a call with a complicated menu tree is a big mistake, he says, because let’s face it, you’d save even more money if you just stopped answering altogether. Where you make money is by making people happy.

Seth’s Blog is always good for articles which make you go away and reassess your outlook to marketing and customer relations. In Old marketing with new tools he says we use technology to do less for our customers, when we should be using it to do more. It’s a good point, and something all of us (including me) are probably guilty of. It’s amazing how little individualised care we give to high-value customers because we’ve become so used to mass-communication tools. But if this is a general problem (and it is), then there’s an opportunity there to do something which your competitors probably aren’t.

I don’t want to seem like some sort of unquestioning fanboy for Seth Godin’s Blog, but the guy hits the nail on the head so squarely sometimes that you can only sit back and admire. In Should small businesses whine?, Godin points out that people are happy to do business with small suppliers - but these have to differentiate themselves from the big ones, and provide tangible benefits.

Duh, you may say, of course they have to. But are they making the most of that? If your competitors are bigger than you, what are you offering that they can’t? And are you focusing on that in your marketing? Conversely, if you’re the big daddy of the market, why are some customers going to smaller companies? Is it really impossible, with your resources, to offer what they’re offering?

OK, I know the point of this blog is to seek out articles which are of particular relevance to the UK industrial and scientific marketing community, but I’m going to break the rules slightly today by quoting an article which is about high-volume consumer marketing. What’s more, it’s about how to manage scarcity, which is a problem I doubt many of us will ever have the luxury of having to deal with. However, apart from being a fascinating article, I think Scarcity, from Seth’s Blog, raises many issues which should get us all thinking, most notably, how to reward our best customers.

And I still reckon the Apple iPhone is the most desirable bit of gadgetry of all time.

I don’t want this blog to get too technical about online marketing, so I try to draw attention to more conceptual marketing thinkpieces as often as I do to ones which talk about search engine optimisation or pay-per-click advertising. When it comes to making you think, one of my favourite blogs is from the American writer Seth Godin, and in the latest entry on Seth’s Blog he once again gives us a worthwhile coffee-time read.

In The statesman, the lawyer and the marketer, Seth asks why as marketers, we act more like lawyers (taking one side and arguing it) than like statesmen (saying what we see, whoever’s interest it may be in). Perhaps, he suggests, there’s mileage in telling the truth - or at least not fighting reality. The best salesmen I’ve ever worked with are the ones who occasionally walk away from a customer, saying: “Do you know what? My competitor’s product is more appropriate for you this time”.

“In study after study, respondents rate themselves as less racist than average, smarter than average, more generous than average”, says an amusing short posting in Seth’s Blog called All customers are smarter than average. The lesson is not so much “the customer is always right”, more “don’t try to reason with them”. Industrial marketing folks should take this one to heart.