Category: Brain Buster

One of the more boring parts of adulthood is getting to make decision about what will suffice. For example, I was looking at TV’s right around the Superbowl. There’s a Sony Bravia flat panel with 20,000:1 contrast ratio that looks incredible, but the sad truth is: am I willing to cough up a huge pile of cash for a TV with less than 100 square inches more viewing area?

Sadly, no.

I got a offer for a new thermostat with a rebate from the gas company. Is it worth it to upgrade so I can now program every day as opposed to 2 modes (weekday/weekend). No.

The XBox has the dreaded Red Ring of Death, should I take this opportunity to upgrade the hard drive? It’s not worth the work to transfer the data to a new drive.

Our 2nd car has over 175,000 miles on it and has a repair every 6 months, but with my wife taking the train to work the car gets less than 2,000 miles put on it in those 6 months. It’s not worth taking on a new car payment to upgrade.

Remember this sorry message when marketing. It’s not enough to be (a little bit) better than your competition, you’ve got to overcome the switching cost too.

The Evil is growing. This pattern has been repeated over and over again:

New network springs up -> Golden Era, early adopters come on board and love it -> Mainstream Adoption
(it’s still cool but there’s a lot of new people and some odd things happening)

Exploitation Begins – some new users jump on board not to communicate but sell their own agenda, Celebrities emerge who can drive traffic, conversations fall to mundane topics like “Let me bitch about bad customer service”, or “Who’s hot”

At this point the drama begins, eventually the evildoers that slip up are revealed and start throwing chain lighting at young Skywalker. The better masterminds remain in the shadows, perhaps some of them even working for good (or at least non-malevolent causes).

At this point often a New Network arises to draw off the early adopters (when’s the last time you logged into Second Life? Podcast Alley? MySpace?)

Some opportunities that arise from this cycle that you might consider:

1. When the new network arises and the cool kids leave, there’s still the back half of the bell curve to exploit – this is why email marketing still works like a champ – yes the kids are leaving messages on facebook so they don’t have to remember email addresses, but mom and dad are still slaves to the inbox.
2. Are you exploiting a social network? Considering Facebook your digital home is not the same as seeing it as a list to be harvested. Both could be considered “Right” not “Wrong” – the happy citizen likes a nice place to hang out, a person with a business plan is looking for the .01% of users that could be customers and has no concern or interest in the rest of the community. Check out this cool post about Target allegedly setting up an astroturf group.
3. Are you being exploited and do you care? A very interesting issue this week, Juila Roy vs. Justine Ezarik. Ms. Roy has been featured on Dig a Tech Girl (get the story from her), a site to vote for the Tech Girl you like. Ms. Ezarik is reportedly not a fan of the site. As much as I want to believe in the dignity and honor of the human condition, I’ve done enough in marketing to know that if either of these women looked like the 95 year old substitute teacher I had in high school, they probably wouldn’t be enjoying the same type of traffic.

Are you willing to trade the moral disdain some may try to hold over you for the additional traffic?

Is there a difference between silently benefiting from your appearance rather than actively capitalizing on it?

Are you still able to have it “Your Way” at Burger King (that one really bothers me) Forget it.

The only compass I can offer here are some marketing lessons. One: What does your Brand Stand for?  Let who you want to be guide where you showcase who you are. Remember that every digital neighborhood invokes personal opinion. Some of these opinions may strengthen your brand others may damage it. Two: Remember that human behavior is irrational. There’s nothing wrong with using humor, physical attraction, or FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to open a conversation to talk about something else.

Any time I’ve seen Sprint advertising the Centro Palm smartphone it is with a $99 price. I have a Sprint plan with 4 phones on it that is running me over $100 a month. I called to get the Centro and the best price they could do was $250. The rep that I talked to on the phone said that the $99 price was only for new customers.

So the truth is that some terrorist looking for a throwaway phone, who has no intention of ever paying a bill, is getting a better deal than I am. Am I wrong to think that I’m getting treated like the new prisoner on the cellblock? Is there any reason besides the PITA factor (pain in the a$$) that I shouldn’t just get us all iPhones so that I can get the new customer deal from Sprint 2 years from now (if they have some less crappy phones)?
I’ve always had a problem with companies that give better deals to new customers than their existing ones, but that is life in the commodity market – too bad iPhones aren’t a commodity. Many will defend this point saying that one time offers are a good tactic for new customer acquisition, I say it’s at the cost of the resentment factor. Existing customers that are smart understand that they are subsidizing somebody else’s better deal.

For relationships like this we need a term more accurate than customer, for business models like this the customer is just another commodity in the equation, not really a human.

Merry Christmas!

Update: Sprint completely turned this around with some exemplary service at one of their stores. Why sit on hold, I’m going to hang out at the store if I have issues.

I’m still struggling with the unpredictability of marketing – the problem of trying to predict the irrational. My latest thought is to consider the application of chaos theory. The idea is that even though you cannot predict the results of individual decisions (who will buy?), there are still recurring patterns that become visible as you look at the system as a whole.

Please keep in mind that this is the Sesame Street version of theories that are almost as complex as proving gravity. How well can one predict human behavior by measuring a smaller sample? In a marketing sense we have to group these decision makers by both cultural and economic characteristics. You can keep slicing the groups and hopefully your results get more and more accurate. Perhaps it’s time for me to head back to the library and see what I can find…