Feb 2, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
I purchased a set of Sidchrome tools as a 20 year old working on my first car, simply because a mate doing an apprenticeship told me they were the best tools, and 40 years later, I still think Sidchrome are worth the money, despite not putting a spanner on a cylinder head for 30 years.
The power of word of mouth referral for a brand.
The world has changed, and we all now go looking for product reviews on line, and as the volume of those searches has sky-rocketed, so has the incentive for marketers to game the system. Use a pseudonym, or pay for someone to tell the world how great your product is, nothing stopping you. The line between advertising and endorsement by a trusted figure blurred beyond recognition? Perhaps not, so long as negative reviews are able to get equal time.
Social media is a great leveler, both positive and negative reviews get oxygen, reviewers can build a bank of credibility by being even-handed. EBay’s rating system of the performance of buyers and sellers is a great example of the way it can works, as is Amazons book review system.
Planting reviews that are advertising cowering as reviews is dodgy, but ultimately OK, so long as the product delivers on the promise. False reviews are immoral, wrong, and dangerous, as the power of social networks will find you out, and shoot your lousy product dead. This infographic from Hubspot makes for interesting reading.
Feb 1, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
I’m 60, an early adopter of marketing analytics in the 70’s. Demographics, U&A, and product positioning research all hooked into mass marketing media, the foundation of our mass market, consumer led social revolution.
Now all that is irrelevant, or almost.
Marketing now is about engaging with an individual, and groups of individuals with a common mind-set, weather they be social butterflies from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, or driving a truck in the Kimberley’s.
Their demographics do not matter any more, what matters is their mind set, and increasingly we can communicate to a mind set with the tools of the web 2.0.
This just makes marketing harder and more accountable, as creativity and innovative thinking now trumps budget dollars, and mass reach every time, and you can measure the return from every dollar spent.
It also makes it more rewarding for those who embrace the challenge.
Jan 31, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Traditional paper publishing is going down the slot, we all know that, but it still has a place, particularly the magazines, and most particularly the lower volume, niche end, high fashion and exotic cars for example.
So what happens to websites included in a print ad when a magazine releases an App for a tablet? There are a bunch of new dimensions here:
- Does the advertiser pay more for the website to be activated on the tablet?, or
- Does the cost of the ad to the advertiser include the cost of activating the website?,
- Is an activation fee a one -off, or per site activation fee?
- Should an advertiser pay an additional fee as a tablet subscriber clicks on an activated link?
- Should the subscriber to the print edition have free access to the web edition?, or do they need to pay again for what they have bought already?
- What is the cost relativity between the tablet version and the print? Does the tablet subscriber get a discount on the paper edition to put on her table?
This is making my head hurt, but I am pretty sure that there will be a huge amount of experimentation going on, and in 10 years we will be wondering what all the fuss was about, as the answer will be obvious.
Jan 18, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Marketing
In the good old days of mass marketing, you could survive in a marketing role, even a senior one, with a pretty generic set of analytical, project management and people management skills.
That is no more, just as mass marketing is no more.
Markets have globalised and fragmented at the same time, consumer and customer behavior is no longer reasonably predictable across demographics, channels are evolving daily, communication options are now in the thousands, and information on product performance, price, features, availability, and so on, is everywhere.
The key marketing KPI is now curiosity.
Marketing people need to be prepared to go and see, to experiment, be brave, spend time at the coalface with consumers, and generally know far more than they had to in the past.
If I was recruiting to-day, Curiosity would be at the very top of my “must have” list.
Jan 17, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
Marketers have long understand that word of mouth advertising is the most powerful form of advertising, now enhanced by social media tools, evolving into the term “word of mouse” to describe the phenomenon.
This leads to a further distinction: media that is paid for, Vs media that is earned.
Consumers understand that paid media has a commercial purpose for the advertiser, they have a vested interest in being persuasive, and not necessarily being long on facts. By contrast, the notion of “earned media” content that is spread because it has value, approaches the value of word of mouth endorsement.
The fragmentation of media options has made life much more interesting for marketers, for those with a bit of creativity and curiosity, it is a smorgasbord, for most, just a pain in the arse and an opportunity to game the unwary.
Jan 11, 2012 | Change, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Kodak used to “own” photography, having a massive share of the film market, end to end.
No more, Kodak is virtually broke, subject to continuous take-over speculation.
The really interesting thing is that one of the assets that makes Kodak valuable to an aggressor is its bank of patents that relate to the technology that drives the product innovation in the digital space.
The failure for Kodak is therefore not in being unable to develop the science, for individuals in the labs to see a different path, and to imagine the next iteration but to do something about it in the marketplace, disrupt themselves before somebody else does it.
Coming in parallel, but I have not seen it really considered before is the fundamental change in the way people think about photography, a complete disruption in behavior that has gone unnoticed.
Photographs used to be used to preserve memories. No more, at least, not much.
They are now used as a foundation piece of the individual communication process.
What are we doing now, who we are seeing, where we are, an expression of ourselves are now the motivations to take a photo on whatever device happens to be in our hand at the time. Creating a record for our kids is a useful by-product of these activities, although I am not sure how the current 20 year old will react to their children in 20 years seeing photos of them pissed at a party 20 years before, so perhaps creating some records will be problematic in the long term.
The photographic market has been totally disrupted, not just by the development of digital technology, but in the way consumers behave. For a marketer, being able to build a corporate mind-set that enables the science, and at the same time embraces the ambiguity and uncertainty of consumer behavior changes is the challenge that keeps life interesting.
