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The Opposite of Big >> How to win at marketing in a world that’s getting smaller every day <<
1 © John Kewley 2012
The evolution of marketing in five easy steps. >> Once upon a time, the world was big, really big. Explorers spent their entire lives getting from there to here. Then came the telegraph, radio, TV, the Internet, mobile smartphones... and coming your way: the injectable Internet via implanted chips, not to mention airborne BreatheNet. What to do, dear marketer, what to do? Let’s go backward to go forward...
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1. You owned your brand. >> Ah, the good old days. Your job was to push TV, radio and print ads at unsuspecting people. Selling was based on USPs—Unique Selling Propositions, golden nuggets of competitive product difference guaranteed to penetrate the dormant brain cells of the target audience and incite them to rush out and make a purchase. ‘Brand-‐building’ was all the rage. Life, my friend, was peachy. Sales targets were easily attainable. Let’s give the CMO a big fat raise.
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2. Then came Social Media. >> It gives people the power to connect with each other while you’re soundly sleeping—after all, you got that big fat raise. Ungratefully, they used that power to trade stories about your brand, not all of them favourable. With the rise of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and rather more specific vehicles like Why I $#@!!% Hate [insert your brand here], complete with a YouTube video that’s been viewed 487,000 times. Geez.
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3. Your customer owns ‘your’ brand. >> These days, marketers are spending more time and money trying to ‘touch’ people via social media, meaning they have less money to invest in the generation of big ideas. As follower lists grow, ideas are getting smaller. Marshall McLuhan was right. The medium is the message. Gotta get something — anything — up on that Facebook wall, pronto, where somebody might ‘like’ it. Placement beats con-‐ tent. But never forget that brand love beats brand ‘like’. Tip? Go for the deeper emotion, pal.
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4. What’s next? >> You can’t own your brand any more. But you can still win—and keep your job—by investing more resources in big ideas. The kind that amuse, engage, inform, persuade and yes, add value to the brand, even though you don’t own it. Because people are still people. You know, they don’t actually live inside that little house in your browser that represents ‘Home’. They still exist offline. They breathe and laugh and cry and dream and hope and buy. They sit around in a real place with a roof and four walls and a leaky faucet, and yup, they do still watch TV. So think harder about how to reach ‘em where they live, not just where they virtually hang out.
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5. Your customer is your brand. >> Whoa, this is a pretty heavy concept. Only forward-‐thinking marketers get it. But think about it. You don’t own your brand, your customer does. A brand is an ephemeral thing. It resides in the neurons of everybody who has ever used your product or service, or heard an opinion from anyone who has. When they go online to tweet, or get up and go into the kitchen to make a sandwich, they carry ‘your’ brand with them. It’s inside their heads. Your brand is mobile. It walks and talks. Your job is to tell all of those people your brand story so they can tell others. The key word here is ‘tell’. Don’t sell. They can see right through that old trick. Respect, honor and elevate your customers. Remember, they are the brand. Tell unexpected and engaging stories that create new customer connections and illuminate old ones.
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How are you going to push your story out there? Better yet, how are you going to put it conveniently on your customer’s doorstep, quietly enough not to disturb them, then get out of the way and let them pull it into their lives? >> Getting your story into your customer’s head must be about piggybacking on the right distribution channel, right? Let’s see. Today, social media is sexy. But someday, sooner than later, it will not be. >> Radio used to be sexy, if you can believe that. Families got dressed in their finest clothes and sat primly beside a large piece of wooden furniture that weighed a couple of hundred pounds called a radio, giving it their full attention. >> They were interested in the content, sure. But they were enthralled by the media itself. Radio was magic. That sense of wonder faded.
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Social media is media. It’s a channel. Without content, a channel is an empty tube. It’s a water pipe without the water. It’s an empty conduit, full of echoes. >> Without content, channels are carriers with nothing to carry, vacant pathways, abandoned tunnels, bloodless arteries. Channels need content.
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The content in channels is often not an idea. There’s no reason it should be. >> Content fulfills its purpose as long as it occupies space in the channel. It’s perfectly fine if content is merely a data stream, a burst, a blip, a shout. The channel swells with pride. It feels full. >> Content can be pictures, messages, words, video, pings, hiccups. Sometimes these things convey an idea. Sometimes they don’t. Channels do not need ideas.
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Ideas need channels. >> Without a channel, the idea remains in one place, glued to the floor. You might come across it, as you would stumble over a toadstool in a dark forest. But you probably wouldn’t.
But an idea doesn’t care what kind of channel it is in. >> It will try very hard to move along in the channel. Ideas like to move. They will happily travel inside a whisper, a bullet, a kiss, a hug, a punch, a teardrop. They will work hard to get where they are going. They want to get inside as many heads as possible, as fast as possible.
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Ideas don’t know it, but they do not share equal ability to penetrate heads. >> Some ideas are so foolish they bounce right off. Other ideas are so foolish, they find a welcome mat waiting for them and so they go right in and make themselves at home. Lesson? People do not care if ideas are foolish.
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Ideas like to propagate. They don’t want to occupy just one head. They want to occupy them all. >> This is why media are important. Media allow ideas to enter many heads at the same time, as with a television broadcast.
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Media also allow ideas to enter many heads one after the other in a cascade called ‘viral’. >> The effect of viral is no greater than the effect of broadcast. The end result is the same: an idea moves from one place to many. The only variant is how long it takes to happen. Broadcast is faster, which sometimes is better, but only when speed of transmission matters.
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So even though social media is sexier than television or radio right now, it is no better. It is just a different channel. >> What really matters is the content being transmitted in the channel. It matters most when that content is an idea. >> Let’s summarize. Ideas need channels. Social media is the channel du jour. Traditional media like TV still matter because they give ideas the ability to enter many heads at the same time.
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Channels need content. Content does not have to be an idea. But when it is, it moves faster and gets inside more heads. >> Anyone who is capable of coming up with ideas is king. Generating ideas is a tremendously important talent. It is so important that it makes money move. Money moves toward people who can create ideas.
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This part is so important, we’ll say it again: Ideas make money move. Channels cannot do that. >> Money moves toward products and services that have ideas attached to them. That is why advertising exists. >> Advertising is not about channels. Marketing isn’t about channels. They’re about ideas. More specifically, marketing is about attaching ideas to products and services that are powerful enough to make money move.
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If you are a seller of products or services, you need to attach powerful ideas to whatever you’re selling. >> It is not enough to engage suppliers who bill themselves as ‘social media experts’. Social media is just a channel. >> You need people who are imaginative enough to generate ideas capable of moving through any channel, getting inside heads, attaching themselves to money, and pulling that money back to you.
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Powerful ideas ‘pull’ more money. They also pull it faster. Some ideas pull money forever. >> What makes an idea powerful? It needs to be unexpected. It also needs to be relevant to its receiver. >> An unexpected idea that is not relevant is capable of attracting attention, but will not be able to pull money over time, if at all. >> A relevant idea that is not unexpected will be unable to compete with all of the other ideas rushing through the channel like water through a firehose.
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If you want to sell more stuff to more people more often, you need to create a tornado inside your customer’s head. >> The best way to do that is with unexpected, relevant ideas. >> You need to really burrow in there and tickle those neurons. Because in this age of instantaneous zipping and zapping, opinions flying hither and yon on blogs that flog, and walls that bring people together instead of keeping them apart, you don’t own your brand. Your customers do. They’re just letting you borrow it.
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