ThoughtSpurs

The PriceSpy model takes a new twist - research widely, purchase as cheaply as possible. Dixon's, a price discounting retailer sends out an only marginally tongue in cheek message to customers. Of course Dixon's will have been affected by the web themselves. The challenge for retailers who sell at full margin is to close the deal before the customer has a chance to go elsewhere. What kind of mechanisms and strategies are available to them? Make it personal. In the good old days customers were known by name to vendors. Of course that's not always practical in the 21st century, but it would be possible to harness technology and strategies to make customers feel they are indeed valued by the retailer. An old favourite amongst restaurateurs is to greet guests with 'Nice to see you again…" (even if they have never been to the place before), it elevates the customer's feeling of being special. Not being one to advocate disingenuity, I only use the example to make th

This ad for Toyota is an excellent argument for making commercials that will create momentum - where people will do some of the marketer's work for them. There was a time when people who bought LandCruisers would have talked up their choice (post purchase dissonance), but now people like me (I don't have a Toyota Landcruiser) will happily embed the commercial on my blog - see above and then point people to it through Twitter - and a host of other social platforms. It may cause a renaissance in advertising creativity, the sort of messages that were more common in the 70's and 80's, such as the classic Benson & Hedges ads (I'm not encouraging anyone to smoke) or John Smith's bitter. The commercials that people would discuss around the proverbial water cooler. The Toyota commercial also demonstrates that advertisers are beginning to understand that 'viral' messages don't have to be low budget emulations of You Tube user's style of presentation (

Great video presentation about social media. Did you know that if Facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest in the world?

I’m told that the cover of the first edition of the newly relaunched New Zealand Marketing magazine had a cover personalised to its recipient. From what I can gather the extent of the customisation was simply to say something like ‘Hello David…’. I didn’t feel I had missed much. Mail-merged salutation is little more than a 90’s party trick in the era of web 2.0. It reminded me of Saul Wurman’s comments about customisation in Information Anxiety 2 “There is a tendency to go overboard towards customising when you try to give people only what you think they want.” Wurman thinks customisation is a worthless idea – in the context of customised marketing, web experiences, newspapers and so forth because ‘people often buy what they didn’t know they wanted in what they didn’t know they were looking for’ – a serendipitous effect. If you only get what you thought you wanted, he argues, you don’t get much. He brings the discussion round to the subject of creativity – the observation of patterns.