The advertising implications of Bill and Ray's two-dot-oh-gate affair
I was much pleased to read Ray Ozzie's point re advertiser funding of seamless services for the user. An implication here is something I articulated (largely to myself ...) a little while ago from the other side of this rickety table, the brand and agency side ... that in order to retain and maintain (indeed regain!) any kind of useful traction with the desirable customer, brands need to shift from the (typical above the line) model of sponsorship and interruption of content, towards the sponsorship and enhancement of the consumer experience itself.
If you buy this - and you may not (yet, but wait and see ...) - you begin to see some profound consequences:
Culturally, Microsoft has little understanding of traditional - let alone advanced - branding, and its attitude to the subtleties of user experience has been relatively reactive ... code first, customer later... eventually. This will be a key area of challenge for them, and simply adding rich media ads and contextual/behavioural smarts to their services will be very far from adequate. A solution will be found here, but not I imagine without egg on faces.
The "right to brand" the customer experience, bearing in mind the disappointments of former intimacy-based marketing philosophies, in particular CRM, is a fascinating area to examine. This will come to depend not merely on existing adtech smarts, but on the brands' abilities to deliver experience enhancements ("with OUR document sharing services you get online collaboration capabilities AND we give Air Miles by the word" ...) and ultimately with a customer value-based hacking up of customer domains, according to brands' willingness and abilities to move yet further, beyond service value to to take on "sector ownership".
This probably fluid sector ownership would be contested in an ongoing 2.0 marketing war whose rules would relate to the effective blending and management of folksonomies and taxonomies to balance individual, tribal and domain-specific elements of the customer experience. A particularly interesting zone here will in be the "Search +" opportunity, where issues of personal profile and preference blend with tribal attitudes and trust needs to mandate, as it were, 3-dimensional search criteria and results sorting.
I have quite usefully used the metaphor of a beehive to explain this modern relationship between brand and consumer. We like honey, but we don't speak bee. If we approach a bee inappropriately (easy to do if you don't belong here and don't have the language either) we get stung. If we manage to annoy the whole bee crew - and they are a perfect tribe, these bees - we get stung hundreds of times ... and still no honey! Therefore, we need to support the best possible experience - given our minimal understanding of bee jollies - for the bee tribe. So we build a hive, we adopt a stance of "gentle enablement" in regard to our honey habit, and eventually we are rewarded with the honey.
The key insight served by the beehive model is this: marketing has become a discipline where cause and effect (risk and reward) have become fractured from each other ... there is no "quid pro quo" whatsoever in the relationship between hive and keeper, and the same applies in the brand-consumer relationship.
If the leading marketers in the world are struggling to see, and then accept, this new shape, we can expect the folks in Redmond to need lots of help in the early steps of Bill and Ray's Excellent Ad-venture. More on this soon.
If you buy this - and you may not (yet, but wait and see ...) - you begin to see some profound consequences:
Culturally, Microsoft has little understanding of traditional - let alone advanced - branding, and its attitude to the subtleties of user experience has been relatively reactive ... code first, customer later... eventually. This will be a key area of challenge for them, and simply adding rich media ads and contextual/behavioural smarts to their services will be very far from adequate. A solution will be found here, but not I imagine without egg on faces.
The "right to brand" the customer experience, bearing in mind the disappointments of former intimacy-based marketing philosophies, in particular CRM, is a fascinating area to examine. This will come to depend not merely on existing adtech smarts, but on the brands' abilities to deliver experience enhancements ("with OUR document sharing services you get online collaboration capabilities AND we give Air Miles by the word" ...) and ultimately with a customer value-based hacking up of customer domains, according to brands' willingness and abilities to move yet further, beyond service value to to take on "sector ownership".
This probably fluid sector ownership would be contested in an ongoing 2.0 marketing war whose rules would relate to the effective blending and management of folksonomies and taxonomies to balance individual, tribal and domain-specific elements of the customer experience. A particularly interesting zone here will in be the "Search +" opportunity, where issues of personal profile and preference blend with tribal attitudes and trust needs to mandate, as it were, 3-dimensional search criteria and results sorting.
I have quite usefully used the metaphor of a beehive to explain this modern relationship between brand and consumer. We like honey, but we don't speak bee. If we approach a bee inappropriately (easy to do if you don't belong here and don't have the language either) we get stung. If we manage to annoy the whole bee crew - and they are a perfect tribe, these bees - we get stung hundreds of times ... and still no honey! Therefore, we need to support the best possible experience - given our minimal understanding of bee jollies - for the bee tribe. So we build a hive, we adopt a stance of "gentle enablement" in regard to our honey habit, and eventually we are rewarded with the honey.
The key insight served by the beehive model is this: marketing has become a discipline where cause and effect (risk and reward) have become fractured from each other ... there is no "quid pro quo" whatsoever in the relationship between hive and keeper, and the same applies in the brand-consumer relationship.
If the leading marketers in the world are struggling to see, and then accept, this new shape, we can expect the folks in Redmond to need lots of help in the early steps of Bill and Ray's Excellent Ad-venture. More on this soon.
posted by Michael Mouse at 7:26 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home