Self Awareness And The Long Tail.


The diagram comes from Seth Godin's blogpost about the long tail which he illustrated with movie examples. It's a nice device but he missed out the classic example, Snakes On A Plane.

If this had been a foreign language horror movie, it would have had very little but cult appeal and been buried in the low profit anonymity of pocket 3 where the aggregators hang out. But it wasn't. It was clearly a genre movie destined for the profitable, popular cult status of pocket 2.

However, this very fact and the noise that potential fans made on the internet caused its producers/distributers to conclude that it was, in fact, a mainstream movie with the industry holy grail of pocket 1 at its mercy. It wasn't and, as I've written before, this led to bad reactions from the first view mainstream audience, arguably a lesser box-office performance and cetainly a less profitable one in light of the increased marketing spend that was wasted.

The lessons are as follows.

1) Know and be what you are and act consistently and coherently in relation to that.

2) Don't be what you're not because you'll be found out quickly and negative word of mouth will follow.

3) Let the customers decide what you are to them. They may decide you're more than you initially thought and that will be a nice surprise.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thinking about creating a blog (Part 2)...

If you are thinking about creating a blog for your organization, there is one thing I cannot stress enough: make sure those who will be contributing content have bought into your idea! I have created a couple of blogs for different organizations, and I must say that I have learned this the hard way. Don't get me wrong. I think that blogging is very effective if done right, but that is a really big IF. Many organizations launch blogs and don't do it right, and when the blog fails they blame it on the ineffectiveness of the technology. Readers of a blog don't want to get hit with your marketing messages! If you try a hard sell technique with every blog, of course your readers are going to start tuning out your blog. You need to offer your readers a reason to read your blog, and a way to do that is to offer exclusive content that they can't get anywhere else. This is the reason that while at Virginia Stage Company, I started to post video clips of rehearsal and "behin...
Read more

Marketing Awareness.

Modern marketers tend to get very excited by ideas of conversation and engagement with customers. Given that they are aware how many images and messages each of us receive every day, they have become less impressed by the more basic aim of generating awareness. This, I think, is why this pun-based campaign has received such criticism from within the advertising world. Some complain that the imitation of Morgan Freeman is a deceitful hijacking of the actor's gravitas while others just deem it trite, shouty advertising disguised as something else. But that is to overlook context. It's an ad for insurance. Insurance stubbornly remains a commodity business where price trumps service because we buy it before we need it. The engagement with the product/service occurs at a time of distress and not at a time of purchase. In a commodity business, awareness is key. You want your customer to have your name come to mind when they consider the purchase. It's brutally simple. A differen...
Read more

Thinking Inside The Box.

Image
A combination self-help and business book, Michael Port's Beyond Booked Solid focusses on scalability issues and how to expand a small enterprise. It is filled with pragmatic tools and techniques designed to grow a business via innovation and leveraged income, but the key message is that of developing a mind-set that works on your rather than in your business. To some extent that's just a reframing of the old adage of keeping one's eye on the big picture, but it's something that can't be repeated too often. Constantly reminding yourself and your colleagues of why you're in business (and specifically what customer needs you meet by doing something better than anyone else) is crucial to evaluating everything that you do day to day. If your marketing tactic du jour, your latest product development or your inter-departmental meeting isn't centred on that, they're not worth your time and resources.
Read more