A Pet Project
In the current issue of Marketing Magazine is an article titled,
Around
and Around We Go that is about shopper marketing in Canada. The piece discusses all the tools that we
marketers have at our disposal to push consumers along the path to
purchase. But now, with the rise of
digital and mobile media, that path has transformed from a classic funnel model
to a loop. A Loyalty Loop. To build that
loopy thingy you need to:
·
Collect names, addresses, and email addresses
with permissions
·
Push messaging of products and activities with
texts and social media
·
Monitor social feeds like Twitter Facebook et al
·
Share consumer feedback of positive experiences
and referrals
One proposed method to use positive consumer feedback is to
create microsites populated with all those glowing reviews. After all, according to Nielson in its study
of the blatantly obvious, it found that 92% consumers trust recommendations
from the friends and family over opinions expressed in advertising.
To Mike Farrell of Conversion Marketing Communications, these
kinds of microsites are important because they are about humans communicating with humans. Now I’m sure Mike is a nice affable chap, that
he’s kind to children, old people, and dogs, but I have to call him out on
this. First off, humans communicating
with humans, as opposed to what, the Dead? (a Ouija board already has that
covered), animals? (see Doc Dolittle), Gaia? (peyote and LSD can do that for
you). He then goes on to say that if you
can get someone to say something positive about a deal or new product and drop
that onto your Facebook page, you’re
velocitizing your communications.
*Sigh*
I don’t think it’s a good idea to get someone to say something nice, AKA paid endorsements, if you’re
planning on keeping it authentic. How about just letting it just happen. Then
again, using people’s comments has it problems. Take Nick Bergus, for
example. Nick spotted something unusual
on Amazon: a 55-gallon drum of personal
lubricant—how or why he found it I don’t want to know. According to the
NYT, Nick saw it as an object deserving of ridicule, so he shared that link
on Facebook and added the pithy comment: For
Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life. Well… things, uh, sort of slid, um, downhill
from there: Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post
among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook —
or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and
transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.
Oh bugger! Better call the lawyers.
The Marketing Mag article goes on to say that mobile has a
lot of promise, especially for sending alerts about discounts and special
offers that can drive people into stores because, according to Rico DiGiovanni of
Spider Marketing, bricks and mortar is
where it’s at. This is the first
sensible and empirically proven point to appear in the article. People prefer to see, touch, and feel things
before buying them, especially big-ticket items.
Unfortunately, this moment of clarity was fleeting as next
came a description of a possible scenario that shows the increasing potential
and power of mobile. In it, a customer
comes into a store looking for a particular TV; he then proceeds to use his
phone to read blogs about the item and do a price comparison with other
vendors, all while in-store. If he finds
a better deal from, say eBay or Amazon, he’ll buy it that way and will leave the
store before the sales staff has a chance to talk with him. Really? What kind of knob would actually stand there,
chewing up his data plan, to do this?
It seems to me that anyone using mobile to check out a
product is pretty damn close to buying it, probably within hours—it’s only a
question of which store. He did all the
reading of blogs, product reviews, and price comparisons days or weeks earlier
from home on a desktop.
Anyway, I know that all these new technology toys present an
irresistible chance to flood people with messages, but geeks, brand managers,
and CMOs, please understand this key truth:
People don’t care. People don’t
want a relationship with a brand, they don’t care about interactions or
conversations with a brand, and, acting like the drunk on the all-night bus who
keeps trying to strike-up a conversation, forcing the issue usually results in
the intended target ignoring you or getting off a stop or two early.
Stolen from: Sellsell.co.uk
People go online to look for discounts, to buy things, and
get information about things they want to buy.
In that order. Which is almost
the inverse to what businesses believe the reasons are for why
people go online.
If this keeps up, we will become like the stream of
door-knocking itinerant duct cleaning peddlers, the students flogging chocolate
almonds, cheap light bulbs and shitty garbage bags, or those devoted
humanitarians who want me to sponsor them for some charity
run/walk-a-thon/hand-holding Affirmation Circle of Life event—but want me to
pay upfront. Bombarded consumers are
going to tell us, Get the fuck off my
front porch and don’t come back.
Pretty soon, some twenty-year old will develop a killer app that
sends a screw off message to technology-obsessed marketers each time they try
to clog up our inbox and mobile with conversations. I can see it being be named after a breed of
dog spelled with more consonants than vowels, with a couple of umlauts thrown
in, and is best pronounced with a heavy German accent.
