“I Have Seen the Future and It’s Square.” Also Comes with Its Own Missionaries.

Square is the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s easy to use and comes with a free credit card reader for your phone or iPad. Sign up is quick. When you swipe cards with Square there is just one fee: 2.75%. No complicated contracts, monthly fees, or merchant account.

Fifty words – and a straight-to-the-point picture – make the USP behind Square brand mobile payments as clear as day. Yet because I don’t work with credit card payments I wasn’t immediately aware of the power of this idea that comes from the company headed by Jack Dorsey, who was also the founder of Twitter.

It sure has power, along with key appeal points that have created a dedicated band of missionaries for the new system: convenience and cost containment.

I looked Square in the face at a lavender festival in Blanco, TX. I wanted to purchase some panoramic photography greeting cards from Revealing Light Photography’s Bill Brockmeier, working from one of the many small artists’ booths there. Nice cards. I asked if he took the American Express card; that’s when Brockmeier pulled the Square card reader out of its pouch and attached it to his iPhone.

Transacting – my AMEX, his reader and iPhone, photographing me holding the cards for the receipt, my signing the iPhone screen – took about four minutes. Another 25 minutes passed in the presentation of the whole micro-retailer concept between Brockmeier and me.

Brockmeier is a convert to Square benefits – one of its righteous missionaries for maximum convenience and lower transaction processing fees; much lower than could be obtained with any merchant bank-card program. There’s complete transparency, too: the cost-per-transaction rate is a major selling point featured on the Square website: 2.75% per swipe. You better believe that the app itself is free.

Square has been featured in so many “Best of” lists and write-ups that the only excuse I can make for not having been aware of it sooner is that I’m not a retailer.

It is precisely this small-retail enabling power that is such a game-changer, in my opinion. Its concise, benefit-driven narrative makes it easy for people like Brockmeier to proselytize for new believers. Founder Dorsey has already been credited for fine-shaping Square’s go-to-market story: “Everything we do here is design,” he’s noted as saying in a TechCrunch piece. “It is about the importance of telling good stories through your products and editing them down to their core narrative.”

A good story makes for a good brand; plus makes for easier fund-raising: Square has just finished raising $100 million in new financing. VCs believe in it, too.

PS: The difference between WOM and mission work is probably passion. Thanks and a tip of the marketing mob-cap to Bill Brockmeier for the passionate marketing missionary experience.

When You Reach Heaven: Missionary Marketing Trumps Customer Loyalty.

Continuing to follow the iPad phenomenon is like watching a NASA shuttle launch (except for the obvious “end-of-the-road” thing imposed by the current Presidential administration). I not only wrote about how iPad has gone to market below (“How Has Apple Advertised the iPad”), but I posted about the effect of missionary marketing on the AMAHouston blog.

This week I was asked if Steve Jobs’s work with the iPad – like the iPod before it – wasn’t simply an extension of customer loyalty marketing: exceptionally powerful but still within the realm of CL.

No – I do not believe it’s the same thing. Even though there’s a path through customer loyalty programs that will turn a client’s customers into loyal missionaries for the business, CL classically helps you build strong relationships with your customers “by identifying, retaining and growing your best customers.”

This is one definition of CL by motivational experts Maritz. If you accept it, it consists of outwardly directed programs that foment brand loyalty and, in theory, strong Word-of-Mouth promotion activity. An Artists’ Center post about customer loyalty yields a slivver of wisdom about the needful effort: “…one of the best and easiest ways to get raving fans is to impress the $#@* out of them with your thoughtfulness.”

Missionaries, on the other hand, are true believers. This is more than a degree of difference from CL – yes, it does encompass the actual, stand-up-and-shout passion of the users of your company’s product or service. It is also self-powered. The missionaries themselves provide the energy and the initiative in marketing the product/service.

Therein lies the huge advantage that CEOs like Jobs can bring to their marketing. It’s not just Apple, either. It’s Starbucks (whether you agree or not) and Costco. [A fine BusinessWeek article about this is fortunately still online here.] When you are fortunate enough to have such a product or service in your line-up, or can make one happen, then you really are knock-knock-knocking on Heaven’s door.

“How Has Apple Advertised the iPad” Is Worth a Reprise.

Having gone through this year’s Offshore Technology Conference and created a perfectly good post for the AMAHouston blog about iPad missionaries, I wanted to explore the state of marketing for Apple’s newest miracle a bit further.

Floating the sea of content about the tablet is a fine post on the Penn Olson blog by Willis Wee – a fine if not quite up to date review of how Apple has taken the iPad to market. Read this. See how many of the initial parts were fitted together to make whoopee for Apple (and early adopters throughout the US).

Come on: It took the company only 28 days to sell one million iPads. Apple also announced that iPad customers have downloaded over 12 million apps and more than 1.5 million e-books from iBookstore since its April 3 launch.

So while it’s wonderful to think that missionary marketing was the key to this achievement, Apple – as usual – hardly left such things to chance. Wee’s article shows how the pipe was laid. Now I wonder how long I can keep from buying an iPad for myself.