Just wanted to share a few thoughts today on where things are moving. This isn’t the long-term outlook so much as the direction stuff is shifting today thanks to the growing realization of the power the Web holds to tell stories, engage people, and give them things that are more relevant and useful as far as brands are concerned.
… Starbucks. They built a global coffee empire without global, or even national, advertising. Sure, they did local and grass roots to some extent, but largely it was people carrying around the cups and telling their friends… the product marketed itself.
So, what if your product isn’t innately cool?
Enhance the product through content
Let’s look at the music industry, where “nobody buys music anymore”
Here’s a rumor / urban legend from CP+B that I thought was interesting… Bogusky doesn’t want to see the script for the content - he wants to see how it will be talked about - how and why will people care - what is going to make people want to interact or get involved…
O.K., now moving on from engagement… the second area of content I wanted to cover is one that’s getting a lot of buzz right now. Utility.
R/GA helped Nike do this in creating Nike+ Offering an example of his own doing, R/GA's Law pointed to the Nike Plus campaign, which he spearheaded last year. To build a closer relationship with the runners, Nike Plus gives them the ability to record workouts on their Apple iPod Nano using a chip in their Nike running shoes. Users can then instantly upload and view their workouts on an illustrated graph online.
It’s not advertising. It’s an application, like Barbarian was talking about…
Now, how can we help our clients create this kind of marketing?
Sony’s co-founder believed people didn’t know what they wanted because they didn’t know what was possible for the most part…
Steve Jobs holds a similar belief…
So how do you create things for people if they don’t know what they want or need until they see it? By deeply understanding them and getting to the things they aren’t saying, but are revealing. Getting to rich insights.
Watch how people behave. How they shop. How they use things. How they go through a web site. How they play a game. Ask them questions. Listen. Ask more questions. Listen twice as much… Notice and note the areas that could be improved …
Another interesting thing brands can do is collaborate more closely with their agencies and customers/consumers - especially in the area of product innovation that we talked about before…
The Web is enabling collaboration to take place easier and quicker… companies can share information with consumers and get their input directly … agencies can pull insights out of that information exchange as well as get quick feedback on ideas as they develop… the agency and company can then take the learnings and insights to create things people need or want, even if they didn’t realize these things when they were talking to them… this goes along with a growing idea in the planner blog world for Brands in Beta … where brands are constantly tweaking and improving by getting real-time, on-going feedback from consumers… But to the earlier quotes from Sony and Apple… the web is enabling people to now know more about what they didn’t know. As this continues, brands can get even better insights and feedback, which is going on right now…
… I’ve probably gone just over my 15-minutes… (sorry Ben) … but I’ll close it up and ask that if you only remember one thing from all of this…
Think about this on whatever you’re creating now and next… how can we make this make peoples’ lives better…
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