November 16th, 2008
The new rules for the new economy can be summarized as:
Where ever attention flows, money will follow.
Almost anything else except attention can be manufactured as a commodity. Luxury goods are only luxuries temporarily. They quickly are counterfeited and commodified. Premium brands are only premium because they garner a surplus of attention.
Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow.
August 29th, 2007
Great Article in AdAge, Below…
Don’t Convince Us Your Brand’s Better that it is If It Isn’t
Be True: So Your Product Isn’t Inherently the Winning Choice? Thats ok, Just Tell an Honest , genuine Story.
Balanced diet
If you practice what I call a brand-balanced diet, the following criteria will sound familiar:
July 12th, 2007
Seriously, why is spam illegal and so bad that you can go to jail for it?
Direct Mail is the real crime!
We checked out mail today and it would have had a kilo of junk mail in there.
Here’s why DM sucks soo badly
1. Direct mail wastes precious natural resources (paper, manufacturing, energy), on the otherhand, Spam is just a bunch of zeros and ones in a server somewhere.
2. Junk mail creates soooo much paper/trash waste for councils/landfill/garbagetrucks, spam makes none of this.
3. Collecting mail can now be very frustrating and we have to sort it out which takes time and thought. You can also miss REAL legitimate mail, or dont get a letter in time cause it is burried in junk. Just like spam, but without the spamfilters! (Lightbulb… new business idea.)
We’re not hippies or anti marketing or anything, just damn frustrated and even angry at the crap these brands expect us to put up with.
I wouldn’t tolerate direct email if it was email spam, would you?
July 9th, 2007
We have seen an explosion of consumer choice, a new level of scarcity of consumer attention, the growth of abundance of options and masses and masses of online consumer review and comparison sites.
Under 30’s have grown up with advertising, and are fully aware of the processes that corporate marketers use to sell them products.
Are there are more products than consumers need? Just go to the supermarket, you have 20 types of peanut butter, 200 types of cheese and 80 types of toothbrushes.
Want to but a tshirt online? Which one of the 10 million sites do you choose?
We could speculate that consumers and businesses make more choices based on social recommendation than advertisements.
We could also speculate that are seeing the end of the media-industrial era, and the rebirth of the pre-industrial era consumer run Market Place (this time with global, realtime efficiencies).
This new era is the market place of the people for the people. Of course there will still be a strong need for insustrial processes, but these will become commoditised as platforms, just like electricity and the railroads have become.
If you are selling a product, a service or an idea… spreading your brand will soon strongly rely on person to person social reccomendation.
But with so many products and features on offer, how do you get noticed? Instead of selling based on pure functionality, as a coat functionally keeps you warm, the new market is about style! So what defines style or fashion, social influence and reccomendation?
The drivers of social reccomendation are the early adopters, the merchants of cool. Those who take early risks and by breaking the norm send waves through the social landscape. Sometimes they succeed, and sometime they miss the mark. Aside from the risks of this space, this is the source of new social influence and trends. And this space must be recognised.
Dont think this only applies to consumer goods, business to business services and products follow the same rules. Business communities and social networks are potentially even closer, tighter and more intimate than those of the consumer social community. Is it possible that the tightness of the business community creates an even stronger desire to use the hip process or service or business practice?
The rules of consumer influenced have changed. Has your businsess shifted?
June 20th, 2007
Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry.
Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?
A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.
A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.
It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.
A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.
It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.
By now, you should have an understanding of just how powerful consumer generated media (CGM) is. Your next action could be the difference between your company’s success or failure. Do you click the back button and ignore the conversation, or; do you engage a partner who can help you manage and interact with this new online community?
Shifted Pixels is managing online reputation for some of australia’s largest companies, call us for a quick chat to let us know about your online reputation.
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