E-Commerce Link : Acquisition 2.0
Experiential marketing is changing the game
March 2008 By Jeff Molander
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Selling on the Web is quickly becoming less about marketers’ supply meeting up with customers’ demand, and more about customers actively bringing demand toward supply. The question is: Who is driving the bus?
Given the Web’s increasingly social nature, today’s customers are bypassing “interceptive” strategies like search marketing and are instead choosing a variety of nontraditional paths to discover products and services—faster and easier than ever before. What’s a savvy marketing executive to do?
The answer may seem radical. Today’s marketers must help customers find, consider and purchase products and services by creating authentic digital experiences. That’s the new twist—and it’s not just a load of hyped-up social media spin.
This new paradigm will be fueled by the recently announced Data Portability Working Group. This consortium of unlikely partners (including Plaxo, LinkedIn, Google, SixApart, Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr) is banding together to ensure users of the “social Web” can have power over the data they’re putting out. By ensuring social media sites and services are interoperable, the user experience becomes simple, and the social information becomes portable and shared. It’s the first step toward providing marketers with a serious “social marketing platform.”
Acquisition in a Socialized Web
Fundamental elements of the customer/marketer relationship are changing. Why? The Web is inherently interactive and, yes, increasingly social. Therefore, how customers interact via the Web with your brand is proving to be experiential.
Marketers are continually hearing the mantra: “Participate and have a conversation with customers.” This is because customers are finding new ways to participate in various online activities. Sure, they still love search, but they’re rapidly finding more social and participatory elements such as product reviews, product design suggestions and a new thing called “crowdsourcing” (more on that in a moment) to be helpful and even fun.
As customer behaviors emerge, new marketing practices are needed. Acquisition and retention cannot survive on strategies like affiliate and search marketing alone. Intercepting customers during their buying processes isn’t enough. What is the new philosophy? Some call it “conversational” marketing. Whatever name you give it, this emerging practice area is all about joining in with customers—listening to them and interacting on a more intimate level.
A Fundamentally New Approach
Before all else, the key to success in today’s digital, multichannel shopping world is a bold, fresh mindset. This foundation is rooted in new, nontraditional concepts. In fact, some say it’s not marketing at all. Bottom line: This customer-centric framework is being forced by a hyper-connected, always-on interactive ecosystem. Success in this world is about recognizing and acting on this shift.
“Advertising is about supply finding and ‘creating’ demand,” noted Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[There is] nothing wrong with that. At its best, it’s good and necessary stuff. But think about what will happen when demand can find and create supply.”
Searls wrote about this concept years ago. Today, the vision is becoming reality. Search engines, described as “databases of human intentions,” quickly birthed search engine marketing to capitalize on human gestures communicating commercial intentions. Masses of customers created and articulated their demand in the form of search queries.
SEM quickly was followed by reverse online auctions such as Hotwire, Priceline and LendingTree. Here, customers create demand and go further by actively negotiating pricing. Marketers compete for their business. When taken to an extreme, the idea of allowing customers to create demand and bring it toward supply can be … well, scary. It’s called “crowdsourcing,” and it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Here, supply creation—namely, product design and production—is driven entirely by customers. For example, customers of Threadless.com band together (create demand) and design their own clothing (supply/inventory). Product is then sold to the group of buyers.
“Threadless was built as an art project,” says founder Jake Nickell. “It was really just a hobby for us. We were just two members in the community trying to help people find a way to express themselves and get their work shown to a large audience.”
Most marketers, for now, aren’t quite as experimental. Yet elements of crowdsourcing’s power are catching on and should be kept in mind.
The Secret Sauce: Authenticity
According to media analyst and blogger Jeff Jarvis (www.buzzmachine.com), the kind of entrepreneurial happenstance that crowdsourcing feeds on is what marketers should be noticing. As media firms and marketers debate which is king, content or distribution, Jarvis points to the real issue: “Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value; you want to add value. You don’t want to build walls, fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in. And once you get your head around that, you’ll see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.”
Let’s look at how one big company does this. As much as it probably would like to, auto insurer Progressive Corp. doesn’t ask its customers and prospects to stop comparing policies and prices. Rather, it boldly offers them assistance in doing so on its Web site. Progressive’s executives realize that prospects will shop around. In accepting this fact, it’s able to enter a new and helpful mindset. If price-shopping is its prospects’ goal, then why not take action to help them achieve it?
Kelly Mooney, president and CEO of Resource Interactive, an interactive marketing and technology firm, and author of the books, “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” and “The Ten Demandments: Rules to Live by in the Age of the Demanding Customer,” is a proponent of keeping customers loyal through winning their hearts. She writes: “With the rise of the Internet-empowered consumer, brands are increasingly co-created with consumers, whether brands are on board or not. So, it’s best to begin engaging your consumers and their communities.”
In the end, helpful acts earn both trust and increased purchase consideration. They’re remarkably authentic and breed good experiences. Participating in an authentic way bonds otherwise fickle customers to you.
Emerging Best Practices
Assuming your customers are actively seeking authentic experiences and information within your category, the sky is the limit.
Pet supply catalog company Drs. Foster & Smith is producing video programs and distributing them free via its Web site, PetEducation.com. The videos are meant to help educate pet owners; one recently posted video showed viewers how to clean a dog’s teeth. This innovative company makes its production and post-production investments internally. “We aren’t shooting and posting infomercials,” says Gordon Magee, Internet manager. “When used correctly, video provides a better way to communicate information that customers want and need.”
In this kind of environment, your product or service must stand on its own. Your brand must be perceived as respectful and authentic, not a purveyor of crass come-ons. Social marketing expert Rob Key says being an authentic marketer demands a sense of politeness. As the CEO of Converseon, a digital communications firm, Key notices how most direct marketers have not yet been invited into online social communities. He believes the role of social marketers is more like that of cultural anthropologists.
Key also challenges the notion of ROI and measurement within social media strategies—suggesting that ROI must be redefined and placed behind a genuine desire to contribute to the community. Key suggests that you ask yourself, “What can I give?” and you’ll get your return.
Social media and marketing consultant Deborah Schultz (www.deborahschultz.com) offers similar advice. “I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me: ‘Have you seen any interesting social media campaigns these days?’ That’s the wrong question. There is no such thing as a social media campaign. Social media is not a campaign. You cannot view it through an outdated advertising lens.”
Schultz says this is all about a new attitude: a behavioral and cultural shift. “It should be about persistence and dialogue, and being in it for the long haul. It’s strategic.”
Indeed, interaction forces experience. More than anything else, customers are experiencing through their interactivity. Will their experiences be fun, frustrating or confusing? As a marketer, the answer is up to you.
Jeff G. Molander is a digital strategy consultant and principal of management consulting firm Molander & Associates Inc., and can be reached at jeff@jeffmolander.com. He blogs at www.jeffmolander.com.
Given the Web’s increasingly social nature, today’s customers are bypassing “interceptive” strategies like search marketing and are instead choosing a variety of nontraditional paths to discover products and services—faster and easier than ever before. What’s a savvy marketing executive to do?
The answer may seem radical. Today’s marketers must help customers find, consider and purchase products and services by creating authentic digital experiences. That’s the new twist—and it’s not just a load of hyped-up social media spin.
This new paradigm will be fueled by the recently announced Data Portability Working Group. This consortium of unlikely partners (including Plaxo, LinkedIn, Google, SixApart, Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr) is banding together to ensure users of the “social Web” can have power over the data they’re putting out. By ensuring social media sites and services are interoperable, the user experience becomes simple, and the social information becomes portable and shared. It’s the first step toward providing marketers with a serious “social marketing platform.”
Acquisition in a Socialized Web
Fundamental elements of the customer/marketer relationship are changing. Why? The Web is inherently interactive and, yes, increasingly social. Therefore, how customers interact via the Web with your brand is proving to be experiential.
Marketers are continually hearing the mantra: “Participate and have a conversation with customers.” This is because customers are finding new ways to participate in various online activities. Sure, they still love search, but they’re rapidly finding more social and participatory elements such as product reviews, product design suggestions and a new thing called “crowdsourcing” (more on that in a moment) to be helpful and even fun.
As customer behaviors emerge, new marketing practices are needed. Acquisition and retention cannot survive on strategies like affiliate and search marketing alone. Intercepting customers during their buying processes isn’t enough. What is the new philosophy? Some call it “conversational” marketing. Whatever name you give it, this emerging practice area is all about joining in with customers—listening to them and interacting on a more intimate level.
A Fundamentally New Approach
Before all else, the key to success in today’s digital, multichannel shopping world is a bold, fresh mindset. This foundation is rooted in new, nontraditional concepts. In fact, some say it’s not marketing at all. Bottom line: This customer-centric framework is being forced by a hyper-connected, always-on interactive ecosystem. Success in this world is about recognizing and acting on this shift.
“Advertising is about supply finding and ‘creating’ demand,” noted Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[There is] nothing wrong with that. At its best, it’s good and necessary stuff. But think about what will happen when demand can find and create supply.”
Searls wrote about this concept years ago. Today, the vision is becoming reality. Search engines, described as “databases of human intentions,” quickly birthed search engine marketing to capitalize on human gestures communicating commercial intentions. Masses of customers created and articulated their demand in the form of search queries.
SEM quickly was followed by reverse online auctions such as Hotwire, Priceline and LendingTree. Here, customers create demand and go further by actively negotiating pricing. Marketers compete for their business. When taken to an extreme, the idea of allowing customers to create demand and bring it toward supply can be … well, scary. It’s called “crowdsourcing,” and it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Here, supply creation—namely, product design and production—is driven entirely by customers. For example, customers of Threadless.com band together (create demand) and design their own clothing (supply/inventory). Product is then sold to the group of buyers.
“Threadless was built as an art project,” says founder Jake Nickell. “It was really just a hobby for us. We were just two members in the community trying to help people find a way to express themselves and get their work shown to a large audience.”
Most marketers, for now, aren’t quite as experimental. Yet elements of crowdsourcing’s power are catching on and should be kept in mind.
The Secret Sauce: Authenticity
According to media analyst and blogger Jeff Jarvis (www.buzzmachine.com), the kind of entrepreneurial happenstance that crowdsourcing feeds on is what marketers should be noticing. As media firms and marketers debate which is king, content or distribution, Jarvis points to the real issue: “Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value; you want to add value. You don’t want to build walls, fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in. And once you get your head around that, you’ll see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.”
Let’s look at how one big company does this. As much as it probably would like to, auto insurer Progressive Corp. doesn’t ask its customers and prospects to stop comparing policies and prices. Rather, it boldly offers them assistance in doing so on its Web site. Progressive’s executives realize that prospects will shop around. In accepting this fact, it’s able to enter a new and helpful mindset. If price-shopping is its prospects’ goal, then why not take action to help them achieve it?
Kelly Mooney, president and CEO of Resource Interactive, an interactive marketing and technology firm, and author of the books, “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” and “The Ten Demandments: Rules to Live by in the Age of the Demanding Customer,” is a proponent of keeping customers loyal through winning their hearts. She writes: “With the rise of the Internet-empowered consumer, brands are increasingly co-created with consumers, whether brands are on board or not. So, it’s best to begin engaging your consumers and their communities.”
In the end, helpful acts earn both trust and increased purchase consideration. They’re remarkably authentic and breed good experiences. Participating in an authentic way bonds otherwise fickle customers to you.
Emerging Best Practices
Assuming your customers are actively seeking authentic experiences and information within your category, the sky is the limit.
Pet supply catalog company Drs. Foster & Smith is producing video programs and distributing them free via its Web site, PetEducation.com. The videos are meant to help educate pet owners; one recently posted video showed viewers how to clean a dog’s teeth. This innovative company makes its production and post-production investments internally. “We aren’t shooting and posting infomercials,” says Gordon Magee, Internet manager. “When used correctly, video provides a better way to communicate information that customers want and need.”
In this kind of environment, your product or service must stand on its own. Your brand must be perceived as respectful and authentic, not a purveyor of crass come-ons. Social marketing expert Rob Key says being an authentic marketer demands a sense of politeness. As the CEO of Converseon, a digital communications firm, Key notices how most direct marketers have not yet been invited into online social communities. He believes the role of social marketers is more like that of cultural anthropologists.
Key also challenges the notion of ROI and measurement within social media strategies—suggesting that ROI must be redefined and placed behind a genuine desire to contribute to the community. Key suggests that you ask yourself, “What can I give?” and you’ll get your return.
Social media and marketing consultant Deborah Schultz (www.deborahschultz.com) offers similar advice. “I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me: ‘Have you seen any interesting social media campaigns these days?’ That’s the wrong question. There is no such thing as a social media campaign. Social media is not a campaign. You cannot view it through an outdated advertising lens.”
Schultz says this is all about a new attitude: a behavioral and cultural shift. “It should be about persistence and dialogue, and being in it for the long haul. It’s strategic.”
Indeed, interaction forces experience. More than anything else, customers are experiencing through their interactivity. Will their experiences be fun, frustrating or confusing? As a marketer, the answer is up to you.
Jeff G. Molander is a digital strategy consultant and principal of management consulting firm Molander & Associates Inc., and can be reached at jeff@jeffmolander.com. He blogs at www.jeffmolander.com.
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