Permission of communication

An excellent presentation from Seth on why we could not afford to leave marketing to marketing department alone. To build marketing into the product is the essence of how to succeed in a cluttered commodity environment. The end customers can and will not only make their own decision on the choice of products to spend their money on, but also represent a more and more important means of marketing, or influence. This concept itself is not new. We have old saying such as have one's ear.

What is interesting to me is that Seth has revealed a fact which is difficult to argue and impossible to ignore. A successful product and organisation these days starts from being remarkable. Where they start smart marketing strategy - to connect people, or to give people something to talk about. It is a remarkable experience for myself to witness big boys like Apple, Google, Amazon win over their users again and again. Where did they start from? Being remarkable, telling a story, creating tribes, establishing customer loyalty, helping to build up lifestyle, utilising word of mouth. Have you ever seen a 30 seconds, million dollars advertisement on TV during your Prison break session to ask you to search on Google? No you won't. Because that is not the choice of yours. An interruptive marketing does not gain the permission to get to your ear and eye, instead they force you to listen, to see. That's why many companies spend astronomical amount of money in developing good ads on traditional media channels which can access their end customers, hopefully in a not too intrusive way. 20 years back, we do not really have many choices, which nowadays we have much to enjoy and much to be distracted by. All these seems to be that they started from the wrong end - to try to pay off the debt created due to the selection of intrusive marketing channel, a significant extra amount of efforts is needed to counter balance and hopefully win some customers over with. The other problem is, the intrusive marketing approach is really shoot-in-the-dark. Even with carefully statistic sampling and measurement analysis, there is little to be learnt in terms of your ROI on expensive marketing budget, not to mention suggestions for next round marketing investment.

Now, 180 degree U turn. What happen if we make a different kind of start - building in story points for people to talk about, to be proud of, to be 'sneezing' in Seth's term?

If you earn trust from someone, you have his/her/its permission to feed information through this channel to and from the other end. This type of establishment is now often seen in the format of following someone on Twitter, subscribing to someone's rss feed or podcast, reading blogs etc. This level of trust has ensured the information receiver the quality, relevance and standard. More importantly, it opens up a mutual trustworthy channel to discuss, debate and tell stories. It does not have the problem of turning negativity around from the start. There are many companies in Seth's example list who have managed to establish this connection with their customer after first purchase or usage. They have built in something remarkable, different in their products or services, empowering their customer to take something away other than the pure functionalities, allowing a way to assist their customer either express interest or identities through the usage of the product and influence people around them via trusted channels.

I have seen some companies picking up the first part of hint but failed to recognise the starting point. Marketing departments create organisational facebook account, company twitter, linkedin group hope to attract and build up effective marketing channels. However, as Seth said with which I could not agree more, you have to start from being remarkable first - building something which is unique and significant, something can win your first date by. Then you kick off the circle, rather than the other way round.