Marketing needs to extend the notion of value. In the event of adding smaller initiatives to the marketing mix moving customers one step closer to the till, or exploring social media to recruit participants, recognizing that value is much more than the final “sale” is important.

This might seem over evident, but in my experience, it often isn’t .

Patrick reminded me of this in a comment to my last post. Writing that it needs to be a “win win” situation between the brand and the customer.

Companies tend to view value as monetary, the final “sale”, but money is only the end result after several transactions with the customer, each taking her on step further along the snakes and ladders game board. Moving the customers from start to finish. Each of these transactions require communication, and in the event for them to be measurable and effective we need to define a richer set of success metrics.

The nature of Digital makes this especially important:

- As communication becomes a larger set of smaller ideas spread across a wider range of cooperative platforms, it’s important to recognize that each individual initiative is working on it’s separate goal. It is the totality of these initiatives that is working towards the final “sale”, but to measure for the success of the smaller ideas we need to give them different metrics than the final sale.

- Engaging participants through social media or starting a conversation are all parts of loyalty strategies. Getting people to purchase more than once, but the strategy itself is not focused on sale, it’s all about connecting with participants. There needs to be clearly defined wins along this axis to.

It is important to stay patient, to invest in initiatives that hasn’t got “sale” as its end goal, to be honest and measure correctly for we are building to achieve. If marketers aren’t relying on competitors to drive the category for them, then the marketing strategy is getting people from start to finish. This will mean at least 99 steps to make before customers can reach their final goal.

According to the panelists Matt Jones of Dopplr and Jonathan MacDonald of Ogilvy at PSFK’s Good Idea Salon London, mobile is all about a patchwork of situated software solving people’s personal and local desires.

Matt Jones spread the concept of Mobile being all about Place, and place is where culture meets location. The future mobile landscape will be a range of small ideas, small applications all working together to create a global mesh - as in contrast to many of today’s developments, where the focus is on solving massive global solutions.

Jonathan MacDonald added that we need to de-silo mobile and start talking of what it does, not what it is. We need to think about what people do in their lives, it’s about every single one of us.

I couldn’t agree more, and found Matt’s additions to the panel remarkably refreshing, putting a lot of stuff into context. Trying to build it into a more commercial articulation I would say that:

1. Mobile is about people, and they stuff they do, where, and how they do it. It’s not about technology, handsets or applications. As I have personally experienced, it is through being inspired by the customers and participants that the really groundbreaking revelations happen. Not through workshopping with clients or reading quantitative analysis.

2. People care about what’s closest to them, this also goes for the situations products and companies want to be a part of. Massive solutions, solving problems on a global scale, will not be as relevant or as interesting as tailored and local stuff.

The patchwork part is also very interesting but probably not from a conscious consumer point of view. The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

As a result one can say that Mobile will be about combining people and their ideas (culture) with their location. This doesn’t mean serving me coupons when walking past a Starbucks or sending me an SMS telling me to watch a TV program in the evening because some products will be featured. It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

I’ve included this interview with Jonathan MacDonald, by Intruders.TV, for your viewing pleasure. :o)

As participants worlds fragment across a range of platforms, arenas, channels and screens, companies are met with an opportunity to build behind bigger ideas.

This means both the opportunity to move the marketing from messaging, to content to context. But also to explore the Brand Situation. Where the brand fits into the lives of their participants, and facilitates the situation relevant to the product, in order to create value and become invaluable.

This slideshow is a follow-up to my last one, Three Major Changes In Digital Marketing, and it tries to put these three changes into a bigger, relevant context.

I’ve added some voice-over to this one as well, even though it’s not earth shatteringly brilliant :o) It hopefully ads more value to the experience.

Find it on slideshare.net/helgetenno, or below.

Our claim is that brands need to move from channels, where they are law enforcers, to arenas, where they are participants. Brands need to become participants on every arena, in every interface between the brand and the customer. This means on the Internet, mobile, shop, street, product, TV etc.

In short, if you plan a marketing activity are you thinking about how to distribute a message, or are you trying to create brand value through participation?

This sound strange, but mainly because our interpretation of participation is very unimaginative.

By this I mean that our perception of participation is colored by the tools we already are familiar with. But the common web2.0 tools are just rudimentary applications for contribution and connectivity. Real participation is much richer.

“We need to start looking at participation as something richer than getting participants to contribute their preset format content in aserial, one dimensional, string, within a rigid structure for publishing”

The slide at the bottom of the post, which is from the Next Generation Participation slideshow, tries to give a broader perspective on participation. In short we have divided participation into three main categories:

1. Conscious – Deliberate participation initiated by the participant(s). Like Facebook. This is the form of participation we to a large extent are familiar with today. Where the participant actively contributes to the content.

2. Subconscious – Data supplied consciously by the participant creates the mechanics. But the data is collected without the participant actively publishing it. Nike+ is an example, where data is collected when the participant joins the experience – and then automatically updated by the application. The brilliance of Nike+ is how they understood that it was the data from the running experiences that was the value creating object – not people sharing experiences through written narratives.

3. Unconscious – Data is being collected with the participants consent, or not personalized. New York Talk Exchange and Real-Time Rome are examples of this. The point is to collect, creatively combine and present data in a context that will ad value and meaning to participants.

(from here)

When we start exploring the possibilities within true participation we will also start seeing the possibilities. This will happen as soon as we look beyond our stereotypes and preconceived ideas.

The objective still remains: (How) Can brands become participants on every arena.(?)

Two very interesting and important thoughts fitted into one post. Because first of all, they belong together. And secondly, they are the most important “reads” this month :o)

Recombiant
First out is Faris Yakob, and his recombiant thinking. In my own words it is at it’s simplest level thinking about how everything is a new combination of something that has already been thought.

The presentation is full of Faris typical rich insights and articulation, but the best part is his quote from Jeff Bridges in the movie Iron Man:

“Just because you had the idea, doesn’t mean it’s yours”

Herd
Mark Earls and Dr Alex bentley have made their AdMap article “Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread” available on the Herd blog. This is a very important article stating that we need to rethink marketing. People don’t influence each other, they emulate each other.

“Stop thinking about marketing as something you do to people and start thinking about what you can do to help the natural pull mechanism work better.”