As Ken Schafer points out, those two newsworthy Canadian beavers, Frank and Gordon, that you either love or hate, seem to have been pushed out by Bell Canada. If you go to their website, frankandgordon.ca, the website is down. Bell Canada bought this domain and the .com version for three years through to October 5, 2008. But already Frank and Gordon are no more.

Perhaps one of them still appears on the main Bell Canada website as of today. He asks plaintively, “Put me in coach!” We don’t even know whether it’s Frank or Gordon. Is there a lesson to be learned from this? Did Canadian beavers turn out to be less effective than rabbits or monkeys in the telecommunications business? Only Bell Canada can answer on how good Frank and Gordon were as sales representatives.

Perhaps there’s a bigger issue involved here. Old style marketing or Push marketing is a one-way communication process. It was particularly prevalent prior to the Internet. You’d normally have a marketing campaign that could be quite costly and often only affordable by the really big companies. Each year or so you might try a different campaign, sometimes changing the advertising agency at the same time. Perhaps Bell Canada saw Frank and Gordon like that. .. Just another campaign.

With the Internet, a new type of marketing is possible – Pull marketing. Marketing can be a dialogue process with your customers through your website. Such a dialogue requires continuity. Through time a website develops a certain visibility. Hopefully it is more visible than the competitors’ websites. Thus you develop a marketing asset, which can be a powerful element in growing your sales through Internet marketing. Part of this comes through being visible to the search engines. However if you do not maintain a certain consistency through time, then the search engines may well show you less visibly as a recent article by William Slawski suggests.

The Frank and Gordon website has just disappeared completely. Bell Canada has abandoned this Internet asset. Perhaps Ken Schafer will be the beneficiary and derive at least some benefit through his gordonandfrank.ca website.

Update: Frank and Gordon Live in Push Marketing

Related: Bell Canada Website User Experience

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