Has your product become a commodity?
Such that anyone anywhere can offer an identical (or near enough) product such that your customers don’t know the difference.
You may not think so but think again.
You’d be surprised.
You could be closer to a commodity than you initially thought….
A brand experience is magnitudes times more valuable than observing a brand.
You experience the Apple lifestyle, you experience the Gary Vaynerchuk brand through his video blog, you experience my brand through this very blog.
Seeing an advertisement at a bus stop just doesn’t compare – however pairing that up with an experience completely changes the game. A great example is a free ringtone which you can grab via bluetooth from the advertisement which then gives you something to walk away with and experience.
Living a brand is so much more fun, engaging and most of all attractive to others as they want to be a part of it.
Sure it’s not for everyone but those that can master it will reap the outrageous rewards….
Why do people keep coming back for more on Twitter? Blogs? Podcasts?
It is like a drug, getting great content is like the mouse in the cocaine experiment, he can press a lever for a pellet of cocaine or sugar. Inevitably he keeps pressing cocaine, as he likes the feeling.
I have absolutely no scientific proof but I suspect that is why once your in, your in.
You keep coming back to twitter for the great content & people you meet, the same with your favourite blogs they write in a fashion you understand, is relevant and what you demand. Podcasts the same.
You keep chasing that experience….
When you watch a movie it is a combination of thousands of different shots, all put together to create a story.
Stand alone they have not nearly as much value as they do together.
A classic example in an action film, is a 2 second shot showing a police car driving through people with one ring of the siren.
The very next shot shows the stars, either in an ambulance, or talking to police, or off to the side talking to one another. Everything is safe now, it’s ok, what’s next?
That 2 second shot communicates, things have quietened down, everyone is safe (the police have arrived) we can slow down for a while.
Your interactions with your customers are exactly the same, you need to build them into an overall experience.
Tourist operators are fantastic at this, they decide what experience they want to have and ensure that all interactions help build it.
Another example is board rooms, often outside the board room are picture connotating success (mountains, graphs of success, newspaper clippings), the books you can read are on super yahcts, luxury cards, golf. All things associated with success. This is a priming tactic so that you walk into the board room thinking of being successful.
What is the story you want your customers to have? Define that, and work backwards.
Ps. Apologies if you never watch a movie the same again!
I am a bit of a Physics buff so always keen to read up on the latest experiments taking place.
One I saw late last year was on our perception of time.
As part of fight or flight response to a stimulus our body will shut off certain functions to divert energy and focus to other vital functions.
This most commonly occurs as flow or tunnel vision, where you hold a lot of focus on a task such that you lose track of time.
This particular experiment had a guy dropped from a large height onto a big net. On his wrist he had a watch like device that was flashing a number at a high frequency that you cannot normally view it.
As he fell the idea was to see if he could see the number.
And he could everytime. That is during a heightened response his ability to perceive his surroundings was much better than normal.
In fact you can watch the video here: Free Fall Experiment
I thought this was pretty neat especially in how it ties into Marketing and in particular usability.
If you can change your customers perception of time through stimulating flow or enjoyment you create a strong customer relationship with your product & service.
(Extras for experts read my research on Live Search’s inability to create a compelling experience. )
Today is as some of you may know BlogActionDay.
Blogs all around the world are going to talk about Poverty.
Their take on it.
Objective: stimulate conversations around poverty.
Many of you will know i’m a huge advocate of Kiva, discussing it here Giving something back.
However.
We all know Poverty exists. It is just out of touch. We can’t touch it, or feel it, or have it affect our daily lives.
It is easier to let it exist, somewhere over there, out of sight out of mind.
To be frank, it’s bullshit but it’s a fact.
So how could we change that?
How can we make Poverty real. To everyone.
If we expose it, people will just block it out.
Stop looking at the bad.
Start looking at the good.
And no i don’t mean, the upsides of poverty.
Share the good times, the experience, the world through which people in poverty live in.
Take Mara Triangle for example, a wild life game reserve in Kenya. They brought it direct to us via their blog and twitter. Raising both money and their profile.
Or
EnglishRussia.com, something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the earth.
Take one or both of these models.
Bring the experience direct to us. Give us stories to discuss, give us a conversation to tell our families, give us a connection. Give us meaning!
That’s how marketing can help Poverty.
Thoughts?
The best story ever told to kiwi’s
Put a speights ale house on a freighter
Take it to london
We need 4 blokes to man it
The greatest beer run of all time
120,000 kiwi males applied…. thats 6% or about 1 in 19 of ALL males in new zealand…
Crazy numbers
The story for them is i drank speights all the way to the uk on the greatest beer run of all time…
What a story!
What story can you tell?
