A plain simple marketing truth
Being in business is fast becoming a celebrity shoot out.
Isn’t buying an iPod very similar to calling a number and voting for our favourite singer, dancer, aspiring business person, whatever? ….It’s a contract, we buy, and Steve Jobs promises to come back next week to entertain and delight us with his designs and deliver us a unique experience.
I’m tempted to compare the iPhone purchase to a tactical vote – because ‘the public’ likes the look of the current vote leaders even less. Looking at it like that, then it’s no suprise people will pay more ($550) to keep their favourite in the game. It’s just the equivalent to phoning in twice.
On some mass level, the public longs to buy into and be a part of the corporate celebrity story, if only to give it more legs (cue a kate moss clothing joke), and give us the next chapter in the soap that is corporate stardom.
So, if buying something is a vote to keep someone in business, then the better we know, understand and like that business, the more likely we are to contribute to that corporate ’story’ by making the vote (purchase) and ignoring the competitor.
We’re all consumers on some level, and we now like to know everything in the shortest and most entertaining way possible. Even if it’s about widgets.
We want the skinny, and fast. No more brochures thanks very much, bring on the youtube demo. Especially if you’re talking to a technologically aware audience. Web 2.0 is the early internet equivalent of the x-factor.
Publishing is publishing, whatever the quality and quantity, it’s the audience that counts. Just look at Big Brother – ok, me neither. But the means of this sort of production just got delivered to everyone and anyone on the planet, and there’s no turning this cavalcade around, it’s speeding up dramatically.
Businesses will have to raise their game. In order to compete, they need to get transparent with viral marketing and staff and customer interviews, and even blogging.
Deliver news with entertainment and remarkability, and integrity of course. But the ‘company’ will have to have a look at their back story and it had better get interesting.
Here endeth the analogy – any chords struck?
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