The day they got inside my head
Digital marketing is reaching a tipping point – some 17 per cent of companies surveyed by The Chartered Institute of Marketing say that online advertising spend has now overtaken offline spend, and a further third expect this to happen within the next five years. Evidence from the Institute’s Marketing Trends Survey, conducted by Ipsos Mori, indicates that marketers will look towards digital marketing more than ever before to create better return on investment as the economy emerges from recession. While advertising overall is declining severely, digital advertising is bucking the trend and increasing ROI.v
There is an intuitive assumption that the internet widens our communities. But the reality is that people don’t generally behave in a way that encourages this. Do you go to new websites each day? Do you regularly explore the web, or do you stick to your tried and tested sites? Most of us choose to belong to particular “villages”, small clusters of people with whom we regularly communicate, and to visit a small number of websites frequently. The difference between the kinds of village we inhabited in the past is that this time we choose the village – we can decide on our community, rather than it being decided for us by where we happen to live. This is why social networking has been so successful, so quickly. Faced with the magnitude of the internet, people want a manageable map of places they visit online and want to feel these places are populated by like-minded people. When they can accept or decline invitations and create their own map, people willingly join networks.
Similarly, when searching the web, most people don’t look beyond the visible half-page of results, and only 19 per cent go to the second page.vi So encouraging customers to your site becomes harder if it isn’t a site they already recognise or trust – if it’s not in their “village”.
There are several insights to draw from this. First, it indicates that the consolidation of digital-only suppliers will continue – one dominant player, such as Amazon, quickly ousts all the competition. It is likely that travel sites and hotel sites will soon follow this model, as smaller ones get swallowed up or superseded by the main player.
Second, for companies considering whether to set up their own social networking site or to use an existing platform, the existing platform will win every time. As Chris Dadd, head of mobile CRM at RBS, points out: “Customers ignore most messages that don’t come from brands they use already. Even then, they don’t automatically trust them.”vii
Companies need to inhabit the spaces their customers already inhabit, such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, BBC and iPhone apps. It’s far easier to reach customers where they already are, than to drive them towards your own site; and they trust these sites, because they already use them and are comfortable with them being in the village.
Third, it indicates that the idea of something being within easy reach because it is only “a click of a button away” is an unhelpful cliché. Mike Reddy, senior lecturer in computing at Newport Business School, says: “The barrier to entry is much smaller, given the potential audience, but there is also the fact that individuals can be swamped.”
Reddy cites the iTunes App Store for iPhone applications as being “one individual making several million dollars a year, while thousands sink into obscurity because their apps are never seen by purchasers”.viii The challenge, then, for marketers is to identify with this “new village” mentality and find ways of persuading customers to continue visiting their companies online.
The digital marketer is replacing the shopkeeper in these self-selecting villages: “You liked this DVD? Here’s another film you will like. We also know what kind of music you enjoy, so your radio will start playing it automatically. And as you’ve been to Cyprus recently, have you thought about going to Crete or Egypt? Click here and we can do you a deal on hotels and taxis.” Some of these ideas (guessing which music you’ll like, playing it to you automatically, and learning from you if you indicate you don’t like it after all) are radical, yet we’ve quickly become used to taking such services for granted, and we don’t find them as alien as we did a few years ago.
This insight indicates a lot of potential for digital marketing: satnav systems could remember your favoured journeys and whether you prefer the fastest route or the easiest; and text-based reminder systems could identify which customers will most need the reminders (patients who consistently miss appointments, for instance) and amend the communications accordingly. Knowing who doesn’t want to be contacted is also part of this insight.
However, there is an invisible line where innovations become unwanted. Self-ordering fridges, for example, haven’t caught on because there is something indefinably creepy, rather than helpful, about them. Arthur C Clarke’s contemporary, Isaac Asimov, wrote about this kind of “robophobia”.ix Indeed, today’s robot manufacturers know there are some cardinal “do nots” that any future home robots will need to overcome if we are to ever seriously have robot helpers in our homes. (Do not walk up to a human and address them without making eye contact, for example.) Whenever an innovation crosses the line to seem like control, rather than a service, it doesn’t work. This is the case for marketers working over the next decade or so, but it is interesting to ask whether a cognitive shift will take place in a generation growing up at home with interactive technology.
How can companies “inhabit the spaces” where their customers already reside? Consider how Sainsbury’s used Yahoo! Answers to post recipe suggestions, in a thread that was designed for individuals rather than companies. In this instance, customers enjoyed the contributions and found them useful. There was no sense of intrusion and the brand building, while not measurable, was valuable. However, when American Apparel opened stores in Second Life, the reaction was very different: it was perceived as an invasion of space, and the Second Life Liberation Army appeared, destroyed virtual stores and shot anyone wearing AA clothing.
The difference between success and failure depends on understanding how customers see their personal spaces. The issue in the future will be whether or not the company trying to use the platform understands the village etiquette or not.
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