Digital Hive

The Age of Conversation - Hot Off the Press!

The Age of Conversation has finally joined the pantheon of marketing books. A global construct of marketing bloggers, techno geeks and advertising folks (that I've been blathering about for weeks) is finally available - and you can join "The Age of Conversation" by purchasing your own copy. Available in hardback, paperback and e-book - your purchase will make you smarter, enrich Variety Children's Charity and make me a very happy author (along with 102 others!) Click the icon below for marketing deliverance!

Jackie Huba Brings It to Digitas

Church of the Customer goddess/author Jackie Huba brought the Citizen Marketers book tour through Digitas Boston on Friday. Jackie is a super smart and thoroughly engaging tour guide through the wonders of her (and Ben McConnell's) new book about "When People Are The Message."

Jackie led us on a tour of the book with a solid presentation that highlighted some of the notable (if not necessarily the best) moments of consumer evangelism. It was nice to be reminded of George Masters' Tiny Machine video from 2004 and for the first time (for me) to witness the silly goodness that is Fernando & Thomas' McNuggets. Jackie's presentation beautifully highlights and illustrates the lessons in the book in a fantastic trip. She will never say "suck it up marketers, you are just observers now" but she'll give you a gentle warning that you don't own the channels of awareness any more.

Reminding us that the social media world is a "different culture" and that "control is out of control" was a scary way to start the day. Jackie show highlighted what the new "1 percenters" mean in our digital world and how the first page of Google results are your brand.

Control and success are not necessarily the same thing

Glenn Engler has been talking to a few of us about an interesting NY times article that also got the attention of other marketing blogs.  Its all about Scion missing its mark on targeting the youth market (average age of actual purchasers is more forty-something than twenty-something).

Reading this immediately made me think of Alex Wipperfurth's thesis in his excellent book Brand Hijack.

The reason I think this is relevant here is that Scion is, arguably, a brand that set out to be ‘hijacked’ by consumers. The way it turned out, they might have gotten hijacked by a group that was a little different from who they intended. While this might mean that they failed, this is not necessarily the case. Here is what Wipperfurth has to say about consumer targeting and brand hijacks:

Consumers of hijacked brands are looking for meaningful connections to the product. This connection is established through a common value system rather than a common demographic denominator, or even a psychographic one [my italics]. Consumers establish a community around a brand because they believe the brand believes in them. Marketers therefore need to humanize their targeting exercises. After all, you can’t collaborate with a statistic. You can’t co-create your brand with a “twenty-one to thirty-five year old suburban college educated professional”, but you can collaborate with a group of people that share a set of values.

Active Branding Means INTER-Acting!

A new book adds to the clamour that traditional approaches to persuasion just don't work any more.  As marketers, we need to realize that we never really own our brands, the consumer does.  New media are just giving consumers more voice and more choice.  The days of "telling them" are over!  The days of working with them are just beginning. 

A Book Review of Alex Wipperfurth's "Brand Hijack" From Booklist

In an age of marketing saturation, consumers are pleading with advertisers to "tone down the relentless yammering; you're talking too loud for us to listen." As backlash to constant media hype, products sometimes become "hot" when consumers ignore corporate America's overt advances and embrace independent products such as Doc Martens, Red Bull, Napster, and Starbucks, creating a cult following and effectively hijacking the brand as their own. Even Pabst Blue Ribbon beer has made a comeback recently precisely because it is the antithesis of a microbrew. So how do you market to an audience that rejects marketing? Wipperfurth explains how to walk this thin line by "seeding" the right audience to create a buzz and patient development of brand recognition. Of course, there is no guarantee that any of this will work, but Wipperfurth has the expertise to give you an advantage over the big guys. He has been called "a marketing subversive . . . The guy who will make your brands cool" by Adweek and is a partner at marketing boutique Plan B in San Francisco. David Siegfried
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Here are some tips for "getting hijacked"

- Let go of the fallacy that your brand belongs to you. It belongs to the market.

- Co-create your brand by collaborating with your consumers.

- Facilitate your most influential and passionate consumers in translating your brand's message to a broader audience.

- Lose control. Free yourself to seize sudden opportunities that only last for moments.

- Resist the paranoid urge for consistency. Embrace the value of being surprising and imperfect.

- Respect your community. Draw the line between promotion and the adbusting trinity of manipulation, intrusion and co-option

Ode to Malcolm Gladwell

So I'm mid-way through Blink - the latest in thought provocation from Malcolm Gladwell and - aside from thinking this book should be handed out with each DTAS employee GDP assessment - I marvel at the implications for the web medium.

The premise of the book is about the power of snap judgements, gut reactions, "thin slicing" in the face of an abundance of data driven decisions.  Cut to the web - a mecca of detail, information, literal bits and bites.  While there is tremendous opportunity to feed the brains of those hungry for data to the nth degree, there is also a huge opportunity to reach our consumers' emotions.  To connect on a visceral level and deliver something that - without tremendous need for examination - they simply "know" to be true and relevant to their lives.  (This is true for our clients as well.  We see so often the power of a truly great :30 TV spot - it garners enthusiasm, brand advocacy within corporations, large sums of money for marketing investment....all without the need for extensive matrices of back-up and support.)

Acceptance and proliferation of broadband only helps this case - we are embedded in the details, the data, the niches of consumer lives - all the more reason that we can reach them succinctly, emotionally and with impact that moves them.