MARKETING
Idea Marketing
By Joe Nyutu
A
nd today, marketing is all there
is. A company does not win with
better shipping or manufacturing
or accounts payable. They win with idea
marketing, because marketing is about
spreading ideas, and ideas are all you’ve got
left to compete with. The future belongs to
the people who unleash ideas.
What’s idea marketing? It is a big idea
that runs amok across the target audience.
It is a fashionable idea that propagates
through a section of the population,
teaching and changing and influencing
everyone it touches. And in our rapidly
changing world, the art and science of
building, launching and profiting from
ideas is the next frontier.
It took 40 years for radio to have ten
million users. By then, an industry had
grown that could profit from the mass
audience. It took 15 years for TV to have
ten million users. It only took 3 years for
Whatsapp to get to 10 million, and it took
Google and yahoo less than a year.
By aggregating mass audiences to
themselves (and not having to share them
with an entire industry), companies like
Google Netscape and Hotmail are able to
realize huge profits, seemingly overnight.
And they do it by idea marketing.
Word of mouth is not new - it is just
different now. There was always idea
marketing - gossip or ideas or politics
that spread like wildfire from person to
person. Today, though, idea marketing is
more important and more powerful than
ever. Ideas are easier to launch and more
effective.
Ideas are critical because they’re fast,
One of the key elements in launching idea
marketing is concentrating the message.
If just 1% or even 15% of a group is excit-
ed about your idea, it’s not enough. You
only win when you totally dominate and
amaze the group you’ve targeted. That is
why focusing obsessively on a geograph-
ic, demographic, or psychographic group
is a common trait among successful idea
merchants.
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and speed wins and speed kills - brands
and products just do not have the time
to develop the old way. Idea marketing
gives us increasing returns - word of
mouth dies out, but ideas get bigger. And
finally, marketing is the currency of the
future. While ideas are not new, they are
important because we’re obsessed with the
new, and an idea is always about the new.
Fortunately, there are already proven
techniques you can use to identify, launch
and profit from idea marketing that can
be turned into viruses. There is a right and
a wrong way to create them, and more
important, the care and feeding of your
ideas can dramatically affect its potency.
One of the key elements in launching idea
marketing is concentrating the message. If
just 1% or even 15% of a group is excited
about your idea, it’s not enough. You
only win when you totally dominate and
amaze the group you’ve targeted. That is
why focusing obsessively on a geographic,
demographic, or psychographic group is
a common trait among successful idea
merchants.
The climate change also makes life more
difficult for anyone, inside and outside
organizations, who does not add value.
Markets are simply big conversations
where sellers and buyers exchange
information to determine the price
of something. They feed and breed on
information. So, expect more markets
and fewer hierarchies. Already, we are
witnessing this in the financial services
industry with the resurgence of private
equity. The information jungle is less
forgiving than the information desert. Some Trends Also
Influencing Idea Marketing
On any given day, name brands will
appear to beckon you to buy quality and
buy cheap; from Rolex to Armani by way
of Gucci and Burberry, the pirates seem
to offer the impossible: high quality and
low price. On the surface this seems like
a simple story: those who pirate products
are stealing profits from big brand names.
In the old days, the way products were
sold was through interruption marketing.
We had to run ads, interrupt people with
unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant ads
and hope that they would buy something.
And sometimes, it worked. We are seeing the feminization of all
human activity. EVEolution, a word
coined by Faith Popcorn, is transforming
women into an economic and executive
force to reckon with. Visit Las Vegas and
you will see that even the high temple
of kitsch consumerism is bowing in the
face of feminine power. It is awash with
spas, and pamper parlors to lure women
as traditional gambling (men gathered
round a table with smoke rising) is on the
decline.
In traditional interruption marketing,
the marketer talks directly to as
many consumers as possible, with no
intermediary other than the media
company. The goal of the consumer is to
avoid hearing from the advertiser. The goal
of the marketer is to spend money buying
ads that interrupt people who don’t want
to be talked to!
In idea marketing, the advertiser creates
an environment in which the idea can
replicate and spread. It is the idea spread
that does the work, not the marketer.
From politics to business, religion to sport,
women are on the ascendancy. Why? Now,
we work with brains not brawn. Economic
well-being depends on utilizing everyone
in society. Accept no excuses.
Single Households
Look around. Who are your neighbors?
Increasingly they will be single households.
Approaching 50 percent of households
in most major western cities are people
who, for one reason or another, live by
themselves. In Stockholm 64 percent of
households are relishing their single-
dom. In London the figure is 42 percent.
In Africa this is slowly climbing to the
30 percent bracket and this is only the
beginning. Societies are being redefined as
the legal, social, moral, and domestic unit
of analysis changes.
Our senses are working overtime. Looking
for a premium-priced luxury product
for the next decade or longer? Think
simplicity. Picasso drew a dove in eight
seconds with just one line when he was
80. Only a master can simplify.
Think space. In China it does not matter
where you travel, you will see people. In
the urban age, the space to think and move
is a rarity. People yearn for contemplative
solitude. Think silence. iPods, mobile
phones, cars, voices, music. The relentless
cacophony of urban living takes its toll.
The art of escapology will become the art
of survival.
Joe Nyutu is a marketing and
strategy consultant who teaches
marketing on part-time basis at a
local leading university and can
be reached via: Nyutu1kj@yahoo.
com.