Marketing2.0: One size does not fit all and stop the noise

I've been thinking and rethinking the whole marketing in the post-Cluetrain era stuff. As I look around the world of businesses trying to get customers, I wonder more and more if the 'new ways' of marketing are just adding to the problem of A.D.D. and a general inability to make informed decisions for ourselves when purchasing.

Thinking back to Barry Schwartz's 'Paradox of Choice', I recall my acute sense of awareness around the issue of too much noise in the marketplace. Reading Barry gave me a huge 'A-HA' moment. Why did I find myself sweating any major purchases, and, why afterwards was I left feeling disatisfied, no matter how much research and thought I put into my decision?

Added to the 'Paradox of Choice' - the shear number of choices we have to make when wanting to buy something even simple like jam [as Barry says, choice is good, too much choice is deafening] - is the marketing messages surrounding us to make specific choices. A clear and accurate message from each of the products in the decision bank would be useful, but hundreds of messages from the various players, most of which are more spin than anything make the decision even more painstaking. If we ignore the messages altogether, we may miss something. If we listen to them all, we may fall victim to hype. It seems to be a lose-lose situation.

Yet, businesses have to get the word out and, if they don't, they may be buried by their competition. And, as every business owner knows, their product is the best choice because of A., B. and C. and not informing the world of this is an injustice.

So, merrily I market along into the 'Post Cluetrain Era' as I put it, but we have really only begun to see the results of the peer 2 peer and C2C take off, so, the post I refer to is really only referring to the fact that this was a text written in 1999. 7 years later, we need to seek out practical applications and think about it a little more acutely.

How acutely?

Well, like any new fangled marketing tool, conversation [as in markets are conversations] can be beaten to a pulp and rendered useless. If done poorly or insincerely, conversation will likely become as laughable as telemarketing. I may be untrusting, but I don't believe that giant corporations can switch gears easily enough to really, truly have these conversations with their customers. By encouraging a McDonald's or a L'Oreal or a Smirnoff to get into the online conversations market, we water down our own voices in this space. You see, these corporate blogs' versions of conversations is them talking, you listening. Is that the model we really want to proliferate?

And, yes, they could learn and just blog naturally, allowing comments and linking outwards and reading other blogs, etc., but, really, do they belong in the space at all? I, personally, don't think so. I like seeing Stormhoek in the blogosphere - a small vineyard who chose to come out into the blogosphere and market strictly to bloggers - but I wouldn't want to see Robert Mondavi enter that space. In general, wine is not really that bloggable. Wine conniosseurs, yes. Wine travelers, yes. Even smaller vineyards who discuss their learning process would be interesting (like Stormhoek). But what happens is that companies driven towards the 'bottom line' aren't going to have the patience to see relationships grow. It takes time for readers. It takes writing stuff that people actually want to read. It takes a dedication to posting regularly and interacting with the sites in your space (that means you read other blogs, y'know).

Besides, these companies have big big marketing budgets and they aren't going to stop posting to billboards, designing elaborate POS campaigns and courting wine critics anytime soon.

The fact is that there are oodles of marketing tools available now and not every single one of these tools is right for every single campaign. One size does not fit all. I would argue that, beyond not being suitable, using certain tools for certain campaigns could be downright damaging.

For instance:

A. A Web 2.0 company decides to launch a national advertising campaign, spending millions on billboards, radio and television ads. The blogosphere cries hype, while the general population wonders what the heck "social software" means. VCs become suspicious that their funding is being squandered...

B. The Gap launches a blog to announce their new lines of Khakis, Jeans and cotton t-shirts. Nobody really cares, but the blogosphere talks about it and drives some traffic their way. However, The Gap sees no immediate increase in the sales of their Khakis, Jeans and cotton t-shirts, so another corporate blog is abandoned. Blogging is written off as 'a fad'. The Gap looks bad for not getting it. The result doesn't bode well for anyone.

Word of mouth and other guerilla-type [low cost, high energy, niche focused] campaigns are really meant for niche marketing. If you need a national presence, go for national media. If your ultimate goal is national presence, but you have a small budget, start at the niche and, when you see some real success, go national media. Some niche markets will cry 'sell out' (like they did for Doc Martens, et al), but you'll have your national presence. It all depends on your goal.

A marketing campaign can't have all it both ways. One either has connections to a niche (and, hence, a certain cool factor) or mass distribution. Watch...even Apple will hit the mass market (currently, they sit at 4% of market share, from what I last heard) and be watered down to the point that their original zealots cry "unfair!". Does Apple want to make more money? Sure they do. Do they want to keep their current customers happy? Yep. But something has to be sacrificed on one end or the other to achieve each goal.

This being said...there is nothing wrong with leveraging guerilla efforts to seed into more niches. It is a viable 'middle ground' for any business who wants to increase sales/sign ups while staying true to its roots. Getting to know more communities and foster relationships within them can pay off in a big way, as there will most likely be trickling outwards as well as cross-over effects to the multi-niche seeding. You may not become the next L'Oreal, but you could be the next Kiehl's, a well-respected and world-renowned skincare product that, I'm certain, makes more than enough profits every year and sticks to their niches. (but heed that L'Oreal, already achieving mass distribution needn't duplicate it's efforts in this area - it won't work well for them)

My point is that amongst the thousands of marketing tools available to companies, it doesn't help anyone for everyone to adopt them all. It just pollutes our attention streams even more than they already are. The more we pollute, the louder we have to yell, and the louder we yell, the deafer the world gets.

Let's work together as marketing professionals to cut down on that noise. Believe me, everyone will get a chance to speak.

technorati tags: marketing, marketing101, marketing2.0, marketing, cluetrain, paradoxofchoice, nichemarketing, guerillamarketing