When the web turned marketing on its head (p 2)
“If we all had perfect information” (Continued from will social media save the marketing star?)
During my stint as Lycos Mobile Product manager I learned a valuable lesson.
Vodaphone, the colossus that bestrides the UK mobile sector was launching Vizzaviz (now no more), a web based mobile community site, one not dissimilar to ours at Lycos. It catered for 18 to 24 your olds and their mobile life styles. This launch was more or less at the same time as Lycos launched its new Mobile channel.
I was slightly perturbed by the fact that I read that Vizaviz was to spend around £100 million - if my memory serves me correct - on marketing their site. We were due to spend ziltch.
I need not have fretted. We kicked their big budget butts. Lycos’s Mobile channel soon became the largest site of its kind in the UK, attracting 800, 000 unique users to its site per month.
Why? Nice design. It wasn’t all bad. Easy peasy and a pleasure to use? Err… not really state of the art in that respect.
But we had a killer app. We were very very useful. We offered a really compelling service. You could send 5 free SMS messages per day from our web based app.
In no time everybody knew about us. Even if we spent zero on marketing, our customers did our marketing for us.
Is marketing obsolete?
My boss at the time, Damian Glover commented wryly.
“The web is making marketing obsolete.”
The arrival of the web has brought us closer to a state of perfect information he said. If all consumers knew everything and could easily find out about a product, it’s cost, it’s quality - then whats the point of advertising?
A good point. But it does beg a few questions.
- But do we live in a world of perfect information?
- And, is buying based purely on rational consideration? (Or why are there so many iPods and so few iRivers?)
- And if advertising is under threat on the web, why is Google making so much money?
- And what are all the ad people going to do if ads are pointless?
- And why are marketeers so excited by social media?
3 comments
[...] Part 2 (When the web turned marketing on its head) [...]
The question is not even one of a world of perfect info, cause the fact is that we would not be able to use/filter that info anyway and we will always be making choices based on heuristics, short cuts and emotional values. And that’s what marketing gives us, or works hard to do. Marketing jobs will continue to do that, so no need to worry about that. Following the same argument, because purchasing decisions are tied in with desirability and branding (along with eg design superiority, now that you mention the ipod ;) ) people will continue to buy (eg) ipods.
As for why marketeers are keen on getting on the social media bånd wagon, you answered that yourself in part 1, didn’t you?
Anne Mette, thanks for the very good comment.
I agree with what you say. Marketeers are not obsolete. There is too much info and we do take common sense approaches to buying decisions because we don’t have the time to do all the research.
But I do think the web is changing the way marketeers approach customers.
Hype without substance is more difficult than in the past.
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