Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media.
The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that beyond low cost commodity items, cost is not the way we make decisions, they are made on the basis of perceived value. Therefore there seems to be a disjoint between what we recognise as the foundation of selling, and the manner in which we make most purchase decisions.
The emergence of social media is all about the opportunity to build connections and relationships, with people, brands, locations, groups, you name it, all there, so why would a banner ad work in that environment?.
Sooner or later, Social Media platforms will realise that their future is in finding ways to monetarise the opportunity for a relationship provided by access to the interactions of their users.
Facebook, the great IPO failure of the year, is in a prime position, being the place everyone goes, so the current stock price may be cheap if they figure out how to sell the value of the opportunity to engage in a conversation, rather than the charge for the opportunity to interrupt it.
How far can you stretch a brand without diluting the power of the core?
The answer it seems is “it depends”. The stronger and more defined the brand, the more it stands for something specific, the less adaptable it is, and the converse is also true, the less defined a brand, the more able it is to be stretched, but on the other hand, why would you bother?
Should Coke launch a lemon variety?
Should Harley Davidson build a scooter?
Should Louis Vuiton sell a 69.99 suitcase?
Extending a brand is a sport of choice amongst marketers, the arguments are strong, mostly around leveraging the brand building investment that has already gone in, but it fails to understand that consumers build brands, not marketers.
3-D printing has been around for a while, extraordinary technology evolving rapidly offering many “Oohh, Arrhh” moments, as we saw various items like wrenches, and skeletal joints being “printed” as working models. The technology is now going further, watch here for a look at an exhibition in Paris that is simply fantastic, and an interview with one of the brains driving the development.
7 years ago I watched astonishing designs being done using “Solidworks” software by an SME client in the plastics industry. The software offered 3-D design and animation functionality that was beyond anything I had seen to that time, and seemed to take the product development process of physical products, in this case complicated closures, by the scruff of the neck. It completely changed the drivers of the product design and development model that had been in place.
Now attaching this stuff to 3-D printing enables working models to be built in prototype as they are being designed, at a cost that is almost to the point of being irrelevant.
The pace of change is still accelerating, what are you doing to consider how to stay ahead of the pack?