Marketers are known to pick up catchy phrases to represent what they do, and the latest one in this league is "Renaissance Marketing". If you are thinking that "Renaissance Marketing" falls in the domain of "Interactive Marketing", well, it does not, but it has some interesting implications to interactive marketing which is why we are discussing it here.
Lets review some of the basics before we try to understand this term better. Online retailing has been one of the most profitable and viable business that have been setup since internet came into being. One of the prime reasons for its success has been the fact that most of the retail sites have been championed by companies that have been in the retailing business for years, that have had huge success in doing the retailing business offline and that have looked at online retailing as an additional channel to sell their goods, not as a replacement for their existing channels **. What does this say about the vision these companies had of online retail ?
Well, one of the things that is readily apparent is the fact that anyone who has a history in offline retail would knows the importance of customer interaction. If they are planning to augment the retail channel with an online solution, wouldn't they want their online retail channel to have the same level of interactivity ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to act like a salesperson for them ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to provide their customers with the same freedom of movement and the same freedom of choice ?
Unfortunately, one of the areas where online retail has been very disappointing is in bringing this vision to reality. Primitive internet technologies have forced online retail to turn into a sequential process, often referred to as the "Retail Funnel". The user is shoved down the funnel where he is forced to select some options along the way in an attempt to take him to the holy grail. One wrong choice and there is no way to go back and fix it. The end result is a lot of frustrated and fuming users who abandon their quest midway in disillusionment.
"Renaissance Marketing" proposes a solution to this problem by providing users choice, control and customization of experience. "Renaisance Marketing" rejects the idea of purchase funnel as a sequential series of steps and proposes a more fluid environment where unconstricted consumers easily float from upper funnel marketing assets to lower funnel assets at their own whim. The basic idea is derived from thinking of online retail as any other marketplace - afterall, if a user is allowed to roam freely in a shopping mall, why not allow him to roam freely in the online marketplace ?
Now that you have understood the concept of "Renaissance Marketing" can you think of where "Interactive Marketing" fits in ? Hey, I'm not going to answer that today - maybe in another post a few days later.
**You might argue that there are/were retail sites built by companies that have had no prior experience in retailing whatsoever. I would argue that most of them have vanished today except for the ones that had a sound business model to back them. Amazon is a great example of the latter.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
Another Tipping Advertisement
A lot of people who have read my previous post on advertisements that tip, have been asking me if I happen to have a bagful of interesting advertisements that they can munch on in their spare time. While I don't have a bagful, I certainly have another one that I admire a lot.
This advertisement is very special. Not only do I admire the creativity of the guys who conceived this and the patience of the people who turned it into reality, I truly admire the courage of the marketer who spent a whopping 6 million dollars to shoot this advertisement. I do not know whether the company was able to get more than 6 million dollars worth of value from this advertisement, but without further deliberation on that, ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you, the new Honda Accord.
This advertisement is very special. Not only do I admire the creativity of the guys who conceived this and the patience of the people who turned it into reality, I truly admire the courage of the marketer who spent a whopping 6 million dollars to shoot this advertisement. I do not know whether the company was able to get more than 6 million dollars worth of value from this advertisement, but without further deliberation on that, ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you, the new Honda Accord.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Tracking Campaign Metrics
Let us start with a small quiz - you will find answers to the questions at the end of this post.
1. Assume that you are the CEO of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)
2. Assume that you are the VP Marketing of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)
3. Once you have allocated the marketing spend to various media channels, how would you judge the effectiveness of the media channel ?
a) I will select the media channel only if I am sure it will be effective
b) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who see the ad ( or click it if the media is online )
c) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel
d) Effectiveness will be measured by the popularity of the ad for offline media and ( search engine ) ranking of the ad for online media
Now that you have selected your answers, I must tell you that the focus of this post will be on question 3 above and I am surprised how few people can actually answer the third question correctly. Think about it for a moment - if you are running an ad campaign, wouldn't you want to track all the time how well the campaign is doing ? More importantly, if your business is to sell cars, wouldn't you want to know how many cars is the campaign helping you sell ? Wouldn't you want to know how much it costs you to sell a car through the media channel ?
It sounds really counter-intuitive, but when it comes to tracking ad campaigns, a lot of marketers make the mistake of using intermediate metrics like web traffic generated or search engine ranking instead of using ROI or sales oriented metrics. A part of the problem is that tracking an ad campaign against ROI metrics is significantly harder, but for the benefits you get, it is a small price to pay.
As an example, how would you attribute credit to an online campaign for conversions that happen offline if you are not tracking your campaign on a sales oriented metric ? Well, the answer is that you would not be able to attribute sales to the online campaign, which eventually means that your metrics portray the channel as less effective than it really is. If you continue to percieve the channel's performance that way, it would not be long before you declare the channel ineffective and stop using it completely - all because you were using the incorrect metric for tracking it in the first place.
So is using a ROI or sales oriented metric the solution to all problem ? Well, as I think more about it, I realize that we haven't even touched the real problem so far. The real problem is the existence of multiple media channels, every channel so diverse that there can be no common platform to track its performance. The usage of incorrect metrics is only a way in which the problem manifests itself today.
The solution to the real problem lies in taking a holistic view of your media channels and understanding how they work in synergy with each other to help you achieve your targets. ROI or sales based metrics are really the first step in understanding that synergy. There is a long long road that lies ahead and we shall never be able to tread on it if we are scared to take the first step.
Answers:
1. Increased Car Sales. A CEO always cares about the core business and if the company is into selling cars, then the motivation behind the campaign should be to sell more cars. Yes, brand building is important, but the end goal of building a brand is again to sell more cars. A CEO would treat brand building as a side effect of achieving his target - afterall, if his cars sell more than his competitors, doesn't that give him a good brand anyway.
2. Increased Car Sales & Brand Building. Since you are VP Marketing, you would be concerned about the brand as well in addition to achieving the target sales. For you as the VP Marketing, brand building is one of the goals, not just a side effect. Infact, a VP Marketing would sometimes go to the extent of considering just brand building as their end goal, considering that a good brand would help them sell more cars then their competitors.
3. Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel. If you have read through the blog, you would know why.
1. Assume that you are the CEO of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)
2. Assume that you are the VP Marketing of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)
3. Once you have allocated the marketing spend to various media channels, how would you judge the effectiveness of the media channel ?
a) I will select the media channel only if I am sure it will be effective
b) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who see the ad ( or click it if the media is online )
c) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel
d) Effectiveness will be measured by the popularity of the ad for offline media and ( search engine ) ranking of the ad for online media
Now that you have selected your answers, I must tell you that the focus of this post will be on question 3 above and I am surprised how few people can actually answer the third question correctly. Think about it for a moment - if you are running an ad campaign, wouldn't you want to track all the time how well the campaign is doing ? More importantly, if your business is to sell cars, wouldn't you want to know how many cars is the campaign helping you sell ? Wouldn't you want to know how much it costs you to sell a car through the media channel ?
It sounds really counter-intuitive, but when it comes to tracking ad campaigns, a lot of marketers make the mistake of using intermediate metrics like web traffic generated or search engine ranking instead of using ROI or sales oriented metrics. A part of the problem is that tracking an ad campaign against ROI metrics is significantly harder, but for the benefits you get, it is a small price to pay.
As an example, how would you attribute credit to an online campaign for conversions that happen offline if you are not tracking your campaign on a sales oriented metric ? Well, the answer is that you would not be able to attribute sales to the online campaign, which eventually means that your metrics portray the channel as less effective than it really is. If you continue to percieve the channel's performance that way, it would not be long before you declare the channel ineffective and stop using it completely - all because you were using the incorrect metric for tracking it in the first place.
So is using a ROI or sales oriented metric the solution to all problem ? Well, as I think more about it, I realize that we haven't even touched the real problem so far. The real problem is the existence of multiple media channels, every channel so diverse that there can be no common platform to track its performance. The usage of incorrect metrics is only a way in which the problem manifests itself today.
The solution to the real problem lies in taking a holistic view of your media channels and understanding how they work in synergy with each other to help you achieve your targets. ROI or sales based metrics are really the first step in understanding that synergy. There is a long long road that lies ahead and we shall never be able to tread on it if we are scared to take the first step.
Answers:
1. Increased Car Sales. A CEO always cares about the core business and if the company is into selling cars, then the motivation behind the campaign should be to sell more cars. Yes, brand building is important, but the end goal of building a brand is again to sell more cars. A CEO would treat brand building as a side effect of achieving his target - afterall, if his cars sell more than his competitors, doesn't that give him a good brand anyway.
2. Increased Car Sales & Brand Building. Since you are VP Marketing, you would be concerned about the brand as well in addition to achieving the target sales. For you as the VP Marketing, brand building is one of the goals, not just a side effect. Infact, a VP Marketing would sometimes go to the extent of considering just brand building as their end goal, considering that a good brand would help them sell more cars then their competitors.
3. Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel. If you have read through the blog, you would know why.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Crossing the chasm
Let me tell you that I am very new to the domain of "Interactive Marketing". Why, its been only 2 months since I started thinking about it, and one of the things that has always amazed me is the extent to which we can innovate in this domain.
"Money is the most powerful thing that exists in our world" - Is it the fact that there is a lot of money in interactive marketing domain that motivates the best management grads to put their heads together and figure out innovative ways to reach their target audience ? Not really - afterall its interactive marketing, not investment banking at wall street.
Then what is it that motivates an interactive marketer to innovate ? Well, a glance into the history of marketing would tell you that psychology has always played a significant role in the success or failure of a marketer and interactive marketing is no different. Everyday, an interactive marketer faces the challenge of understanding the human psychology, that too of people whom he hasn't met ( or even seen ). It is important to consider here that while the psychology of an individual is not important here, the psychology of the masses holds the key and an attempt to understand the secrets that lie beneath is as interesting as a Jungle Safari in Africa.
An interactive marketer constantly thinks of ways and means to get into the depth of mass psychology ( that the results are stored as statistical data is irrelevant to this discussion ) and to utilize that information to make informed decisions on marketing campaigns. What this really means is that an interactive marketer needs to innovate, to find ways to accumulate the information that gives him/her an understanding of mass psychology, to find ways to process this information to get new insights into mass psychology and to use these insights to find ways to influence the target audience better.
Now that sounds really exciting. But wait a minute - if there is really so much innovation happening in the interactive marketing domain, why is the change in the marketplace so gradual ? Why did it take so many years of struggle for interactive marketing to build a niche for itself in this big bad world ? Why isn't interactive marketing taking the biggest pie of the marketing spend of fortune 500 companies ?
The answer to these ( and other similar ) questions lie in the fact that the time lag between the time an innovation happens and the time it becomes mainstream is very large. If you have read "Crossing the Chasm" by "Geoffrey Moore", you might be familiar with the representation of this gap as a chasm, that every innovation has to cross before it goes mainstream. Unfortunately, every innovation has to face this acid test of survival and interactive marketing innovations are no different. If only this chasm could shrink....
"Money is the most powerful thing that exists in our world" - Is it the fact that there is a lot of money in interactive marketing domain that motivates the best management grads to put their heads together and figure out innovative ways to reach their target audience ? Not really - afterall its interactive marketing, not investment banking at wall street.
Then what is it that motivates an interactive marketer to innovate ? Well, a glance into the history of marketing would tell you that psychology has always played a significant role in the success or failure of a marketer and interactive marketing is no different. Everyday, an interactive marketer faces the challenge of understanding the human psychology, that too of people whom he hasn't met ( or even seen ). It is important to consider here that while the psychology of an individual is not important here, the psychology of the masses holds the key and an attempt to understand the secrets that lie beneath is as interesting as a Jungle Safari in Africa.
An interactive marketer constantly thinks of ways and means to get into the depth of mass psychology ( that the results are stored as statistical data is irrelevant to this discussion ) and to utilize that information to make informed decisions on marketing campaigns. What this really means is that an interactive marketer needs to innovate, to find ways to accumulate the information that gives him/her an understanding of mass psychology, to find ways to process this information to get new insights into mass psychology and to use these insights to find ways to influence the target audience better.
Now that sounds really exciting. But wait a minute - if there is really so much innovation happening in the interactive marketing domain, why is the change in the marketplace so gradual ? Why did it take so many years of struggle for interactive marketing to build a niche for itself in this big bad world ? Why isn't interactive marketing taking the biggest pie of the marketing spend of fortune 500 companies ?
The answer to these ( and other similar ) questions lie in the fact that the time lag between the time an innovation happens and the time it becomes mainstream is very large. If you have read "Crossing the Chasm" by "Geoffrey Moore", you might be familiar with the representation of this gap as a chasm, that every innovation has to cross before it goes mainstream. Unfortunately, every innovation has to face this acid test of survival and interactive marketing innovations are no different. If only this chasm could shrink....
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Online Ads First ?
Whoever predicted that online marketing would never take off would find it hard to believe the radical progress that interactive marketing has made in the past four years.
In a twist to the traditional "TV First", "Web Later" sequence of launching new commercials, companies are beginning to launch web commercials first to gauge user reaction and reach their target market as quickly as possible. Recently, Coty Inc launched the commercial of their new perfume Lovely on a lifestyle site and they are planning to target a broader audience through a TV Commercial later this year.
This change in perception certainly marks the growing respect that internet is garnering as a marketing medium. According to Forrester Research, online advertising made up 5 percent of advertising budgets last year and will make up 8 percent by 2010. Someone rightly said "There are only two kinds in this world: Winners and Underdogs" and interactive marketing is moving rapidly out of its underdog shadow.
In a twist to the traditional "TV First", "Web Later" sequence of launching new commercials, companies are beginning to launch web commercials first to gauge user reaction and reach their target market as quickly as possible. Recently, Coty Inc launched the commercial of their new perfume Lovely on a lifestyle site and they are planning to target a broader audience through a TV Commercial later this year.
This change in perception certainly marks the growing respect that internet is garnering as a marketing medium. According to Forrester Research, online advertising made up 5 percent of advertising budgets last year and will make up 8 percent by 2010. Someone rightly said "There are only two kinds in this world: Winners and Underdogs" and interactive marketing is moving rapidly out of its underdog shadow.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Folksonomy = Taxonomy - Taxis + Folks
For the uninitiated, "Taxis" means "Classification" and "Nomos" (or "Nomia") means "Management". "Folk" are people. So "Folksonomy" literally means "People's Classification Management".
Some people might argue why "Folksonomy" does not mean "People's Management" and if you are one of those, you might want to join your friends who are debating "Folksonomy" vs "Folks Taxonomy".
Lets forget the etymological nitty-gritties for a while and focus on what this new buzz-word actually means. To completely understand the need of this concept and its significance, you would need a crash course in the history of the famous ( or infamous ) "Search Wars".
Once upon a time, there was a company called "Microsoft" that had the largest share in the retail software space. The ruler of "Microsoft", "Billie Wille Gates" was very happy with his dominance in the retail software space, but he had a bigger ambition - the ambition to dominate the lives of all computer users on this planet called "Earth" ( he never cared about Martians though ). It didn't take him time to figure out that "Internet Search" was an activity he should indulge in to get closer to his ambition. During the same time, a couple of underdogs dropped out of Stanford and built a search engine that would put other search engines out of business. The company called itself "Google" ( after the magical number googol ) and [coincidentally] also called their search engine "Google".
The fairy tale doesn't end here. Having rapped "Microsoft" hard on the back of its head, "Google" went on to become the leaders in the online search space and built a set of businesses around it that would make it very profitable. Meantime, another company called "Amazon", that was into selling books online, got interested in internet search as well and jumped into the fray. "Yahoo!", the undisputed leader of search engines prior to the "Google" onslaught, also set out to take vengeance on those tresspassing into its holy grail. All of these companies had a common motive - to build a better search engine than the other, one that would draw all the people using the internet every single day.
The million dollar question is - what makes a search engine better than the other ? There are several million pages out on the internet that need to be searched and given that there is no definitive "best" answer to this problem, how do you quantify the "goodness" of a search engine ? Is it just the speed at which the search engine crunches through the results that counts or are there other factors that impact its "goodness" ?
As you might have figured out by now, there is no good answer to this question. Umm, yeah, I would like the search results faster, but what if the links that I am looking for are on the 10th page of the search results ? I would much prefer a search engine that takes 5 seconds more to return the results, but gets me the results that I want on the first page. If you were to ask a million internet users of their expectations from a search engine, I bet you would get the same response. Personalization of the results is the top priority and the performance is a close second.
So, the million dollar question changes to "How do you get every search user results that he/she cares about ?" What it really means is that if two people search for the keyword "bull", a finance guy should get links pertaining to wall street whereas a basketball fan should get links pertaining to Chicago Bulls. What it really means is that to be the undisputed market leader, you have to go the last mile and personalize the search results for every single user who performs a search and at the same time personalize it better than all the other search engines.
Ok, so now that you have had a crash course in "Search Wars", what do you think is the answer to this complex problem ? I'm afraid I still have to say - there is no good answer to this problem. But that does not mean there hasn't been progress. Each one of the companies that starred in the "Search Wars" have research teams setup that attempt to crack this problem before the other team does, and the latest solution they are playing with is "Folksonomy".
"Folksonomy" is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
Think of it as a circle of friends - if you were to ask your friends to list out the URLs that interest them, there is a high probability that you would find those URLs interesting. Now think about what would happen if everyone in your friends circle shares the URLs that they find interesting - you would easily be sitting on heap of information that interested you but that you did not know about.
Now think about what would happen if everyone on the internet lists out the URLs that interest them. Well, you don't personally know all of them so that is where the extrapolation meets a sudden death. What if, in addition to a list of all the URLs in this world that people care about, you also had the details of how those people are related to each other, you could build communities on the internet that belong to people who share similar interests. Given that you would never know the relationship between all the people on the internet ( nevermind the concept of six degrees of separation ), what if you used a common set of URLs between two people to simulate a relationship and then built communities around these relationships. That is exactly what "Folksonomy" is all about - figuring out common interests and building a community around it. And since it is the users that are organizing this information, advocates of "Folksonomy" believe that it is a better model to store all the information in this world.
How well it would do, only time would tell, but companies like "Yahoo!" and "TagCloud" are already building some interesting pieces to bring this concept to reality. There will soon be a day when the search engines would be able to tell me which of the several billion earthlings should be my friends.
Some people might argue why "Folksonomy" does not mean "People's Management" and if you are one of those, you might want to join your friends who are debating "Folksonomy" vs "Folks Taxonomy".
Lets forget the etymological nitty-gritties for a while and focus on what this new buzz-word actually means. To completely understand the need of this concept and its significance, you would need a crash course in the history of the famous ( or infamous ) "Search Wars".
Once upon a time, there was a company called "Microsoft" that had the largest share in the retail software space. The ruler of "Microsoft", "Billie Wille Gates" was very happy with his dominance in the retail software space, but he had a bigger ambition - the ambition to dominate the lives of all computer users on this planet called "Earth" ( he never cared about Martians though ). It didn't take him time to figure out that "Internet Search" was an activity he should indulge in to get closer to his ambition. During the same time, a couple of underdogs dropped out of Stanford and built a search engine that would put other search engines out of business. The company called itself "Google" ( after the magical number googol ) and [coincidentally] also called their search engine "Google".
The fairy tale doesn't end here. Having rapped "Microsoft" hard on the back of its head, "Google" went on to become the leaders in the online search space and built a set of businesses around it that would make it very profitable. Meantime, another company called "Amazon", that was into selling books online, got interested in internet search as well and jumped into the fray. "Yahoo!", the undisputed leader of search engines prior to the "Google" onslaught, also set out to take vengeance on those tresspassing into its holy grail. All of these companies had a common motive - to build a better search engine than the other, one that would draw all the people using the internet every single day.
The million dollar question is - what makes a search engine better than the other ? There are several million pages out on the internet that need to be searched and given that there is no definitive "best" answer to this problem, how do you quantify the "goodness" of a search engine ? Is it just the speed at which the search engine crunches through the results that counts or are there other factors that impact its "goodness" ?
As you might have figured out by now, there is no good answer to this question. Umm, yeah, I would like the search results faster, but what if the links that I am looking for are on the 10th page of the search results ? I would much prefer a search engine that takes 5 seconds more to return the results, but gets me the results that I want on the first page. If you were to ask a million internet users of their expectations from a search engine, I bet you would get the same response. Personalization of the results is the top priority and the performance is a close second.
So, the million dollar question changes to "How do you get every search user results that he/she cares about ?" What it really means is that if two people search for the keyword "bull", a finance guy should get links pertaining to wall street whereas a basketball fan should get links pertaining to Chicago Bulls. What it really means is that to be the undisputed market leader, you have to go the last mile and personalize the search results for every single user who performs a search and at the same time personalize it better than all the other search engines.
Ok, so now that you have had a crash course in "Search Wars", what do you think is the answer to this complex problem ? I'm afraid I still have to say - there is no good answer to this problem. But that does not mean there hasn't been progress. Each one of the companies that starred in the "Search Wars" have research teams setup that attempt to crack this problem before the other team does, and the latest solution they are playing with is "Folksonomy".
"Folksonomy" is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
Think of it as a circle of friends - if you were to ask your friends to list out the URLs that interest them, there is a high probability that you would find those URLs interesting. Now think about what would happen if everyone in your friends circle shares the URLs that they find interesting - you would easily be sitting on heap of information that interested you but that you did not know about.
Now think about what would happen if everyone on the internet lists out the URLs that interest them. Well, you don't personally know all of them so that is where the extrapolation meets a sudden death. What if, in addition to a list of all the URLs in this world that people care about, you also had the details of how those people are related to each other, you could build communities on the internet that belong to people who share similar interests. Given that you would never know the relationship between all the people on the internet ( nevermind the concept of six degrees of separation ), what if you used a common set of URLs between two people to simulate a relationship and then built communities around these relationships. That is exactly what "Folksonomy" is all about - figuring out common interests and building a community around it. And since it is the users that are organizing this information, advocates of "Folksonomy" believe that it is a better model to store all the information in this world.
How well it would do, only time would tell, but companies like "Yahoo!" and "TagCloud" are already building some interesting pieces to bring this concept to reality. There will soon be a day when the search engines would be able to tell me which of the several billion earthlings should be my friends.
Friday, September 02, 2005
The stickiness factor
The second most important concept in making things tip is what Malcom calls "The stickiness factor". The stickiness factor is a measure of how easily things are able to stick to a person's mind and infact is a hard thing to measure.
What makes an idea or a concept sticky ? If there is something that sticks to my mind, would it stick to your mind as well ? When we think of stickiness, do we think about the masses or just the few people who are gifted to make ideas tip ? When you come up with an idea, how do you know if it is sticky or how sticky it is ? I can bombard you with thousands of questions like this, but how about getting back to the mattresses ( as Godfather would say ) for now and focussing on the areas of immediate impact.
As I think about it, stickiness is not a radically new concept. Marketers have been putting their heads together for years to build a bait that would charm the unsuspecting shopper into doing what the marketer wants him to do. Some have been successful, some haven't, but for most part of it, nobody has thought of coming up with a metric for "stickiness".
It was only with the dawn of direct marketing ( reaching the customers directly through mail, telemarketing etc. ) that the concept of "stickiness" came into the forefront. Direct marketers would shoot mailers to the people on their list and the definition of success was very straightforward - "How many of the people that were mailed responded to the campaign ?". If the percentage of people responding is large, you go Hurrrrray !!!, if not, you get back to the drawing board.
In the realm of interactive marketing, building metrics for success and tracking them over a period of time is relatively easy. But every new media comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and internet is no exception to that rule. For an interactive marketer, the biggest problem lies in the size of the internet community - what is stick for some may not be sticky for others ? If there is an iota of truth in the law of averages, then the metrics recorded across all the users on the internet should cancel out each other and you would never be able to judge the effectiveness of an interactive marketing campaign ever. That is a problem big enough to mark the beginning of the end of interactive marketing.
Don't despair, not yet. The answer to this problem would not only make it insignificant, but would also pave way to one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising called "Creative Optimization". More details in a future blog.
What makes an idea or a concept sticky ? If there is something that sticks to my mind, would it stick to your mind as well ? When we think of stickiness, do we think about the masses or just the few people who are gifted to make ideas tip ? When you come up with an idea, how do you know if it is sticky or how sticky it is ? I can bombard you with thousands of questions like this, but how about getting back to the mattresses ( as Godfather would say ) for now and focussing on the areas of immediate impact.
As I think about it, stickiness is not a radically new concept. Marketers have been putting their heads together for years to build a bait that would charm the unsuspecting shopper into doing what the marketer wants him to do. Some have been successful, some haven't, but for most part of it, nobody has thought of coming up with a metric for "stickiness".
It was only with the dawn of direct marketing ( reaching the customers directly through mail, telemarketing etc. ) that the concept of "stickiness" came into the forefront. Direct marketers would shoot mailers to the people on their list and the definition of success was very straightforward - "How many of the people that were mailed responded to the campaign ?". If the percentage of people responding is large, you go Hurrrrray !!!, if not, you get back to the drawing board.
In the realm of interactive marketing, building metrics for success and tracking them over a period of time is relatively easy. But every new media comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and internet is no exception to that rule. For an interactive marketer, the biggest problem lies in the size of the internet community - what is stick for some may not be sticky for others ? If there is an iota of truth in the law of averages, then the metrics recorded across all the users on the internet should cancel out each other and you would never be able to judge the effectiveness of an interactive marketing campaign ever. That is a problem big enough to mark the beginning of the end of interactive marketing.
Don't despair, not yet. The answer to this problem would not only make it insignificant, but would also pave way to one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising called "Creative Optimization". More details in a future blog.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The law of the few
If you have read "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell, you would have guessed what I am going to talk about now. I finished reading the book last week and was thoroughly impressed with the ideas contained therein.
Since then, I've been thinking about how profound the implications are for interactive marketing. If only there were a way to quantify the tipping point.
Let me document some of my ramblings here and maybe all the intelligent souls who get their eyeballs to this blog can help me build up the idea.
The "Law of the Few" says that there are a few people in this world, that are gifted to make certain ideas tip. You just gotta find those guys, make your offering interesting enough for them and watch it float effortlessly millions across the globe. How do you think "Harry Potter" became such a fad or for that matter the "Carlton Draught Beer Ad" became such a rage across the internet community ? Well, I certainly believe that both of these caught fancy of a few people and those people started a chain making these tip in a short span of time. The question really is - can we find a way to consistently build advertisements ( or for that matter products ) that are designed to tip and make marketing an effortless job ?
My product manager asked me the same question a couple of days back and so far, I haven't found a way to make ideas tip. The day I find a way to do that, I'll be sailing in the crisp-green sea.
Since then, I've been thinking about how profound the implications are for interactive marketing. If only there were a way to quantify the tipping point.
Let me document some of my ramblings here and maybe all the intelligent souls who get their eyeballs to this blog can help me build up the idea.
The "Law of the Few" says that there are a few people in this world, that are gifted to make certain ideas tip. You just gotta find those guys, make your offering interesting enough for them and watch it float effortlessly millions across the globe. How do you think "Harry Potter" became such a fad or for that matter the "Carlton Draught Beer Ad" became such a rage across the internet community ? Well, I certainly believe that both of these caught fancy of a few people and those people started a chain making these tip in a short span of time. The question really is - can we find a way to consistently build advertisements ( or for that matter products ) that are designed to tip and make marketing an effortless job ?
My product manager asked me the same question a couple of days back and so far, I haven't found a way to make ideas tip. The day I find a way to do that, I'll be sailing in the crisp-green sea.
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