An assertion was made at our Summer Company Meeting yesterday (25th June, 2008) that Apple’s success wasn’t because of its products, but because of its brand equity.
Not only is this an incorrect assessment, it’s also missing the point. Apple only has a strong brand because of the quality of its products, yet even this isn’t a direct causal relationship. In the words of Kathy Sierra, Apple’s products enable their customers to kick ass; the customers then do much of Apple’s marketing for them in a peer-to-peer, conversational way.
In fact, you could almost call Apple’s marketing team’s activities “buzz creation” rather than “marketing.” They seed the ideas; the customers take them and run with them because the customers are genuinely passionate about the company and the products.
One other thing: traditional marketing wisdom says “we must control the message” and is very much about a monologue of approved, on-message communications handed down from on high. A news flash: the internet enables conversation, both between customers and (hopefully) between companies and their customers.
In the conversation-enabled climate in which we now operate, any attempts to be the single, approved voice representing a product or company is doomed to a slow, painful death of irrelevance. Customers are grasping the opportunity to converse on a massive scale, and very often trust their peers more than they trust the “official” communication channels.
There are several people out there on the Web blogging about these issues and helping to redefine what marketing is in a Web world. I recommend checking them out:
Tara Hunt
Tara has written a book called The Whuffie Factor
Everyone knows about blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. And they’ve heard about someone who has used them to grow a huge customer base. Everyone wants to be hands-on, grass roots and interactive. But what does this mean? And more to the point, how do you do it?
Eric Weaver
Eric blogs at Brand Dialogue and is an experienced marketing professional. He writes in this blog post about how interactive agencies still don’t understand Social Media:
Social Marketing represents a massive opportunity for marketers: not to create more inbound links, not to push your message to places where people congregate, but to package and demonstrate relevance and value amongst consumers and to leverage their trust and connections as advocates of your offering.
OK, so he said “leverage” but we’ll let that slide.
Kathy Sierra
Not blogging at the moment, but her blog archive is a rich goldmine of tips on Creating Passionate Users.
An aside
Ex-IOPP employee Tim Marsh pointed me in the direction of a very interesting blog post:
There has always been a clash between those that make a product, and those that sell it.
Software engineers are pessimistic, negative and cynical. All engineers have to be. I don’t mean that they have negative personalities as such - they just need to constantly worry about what might go wrong. You never want engineers to just ‘hope for the best’.
Sales people are optimistic, positive and deal in certainty. They have to be. As often as not they’ll have absolutely nothing to do with actually delivering the product, yet they are always happy to promise that it’ll be fantastic. They’re not dishonest, they’re just assuming that the best outcomes will happen.
Art Kleiner puts it particularly well in his article Corporate Culture in Internet Time (free registration required), where he refers to it as a clash of hype against craft. His solution, which I’ll briefly over-simplify as build a cross-discipline team culture, is a good one - especially for small entrepreneurial organisations.
– http://bizvprog.blogspot.com/2008/06/hype-versus-craft.html
The tension between design, technical, marketing and sales has worried me for a while. Jeffrey Zeldman called for the creation of multi-disciplinary Web teams and Art Kleiner backs this up. It avoids the “toss requirements over the wall” mentality which can and does happen when you have a client-provider situation and encourages all parties to work together towards a common goal. Well, maybe not, but it would at the very least help each employee to understand the other parties’ rôles better.
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