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Seth Godin says: Take the New Road

In his speech at the BrandSlam conference in West Palm Beach, Seth asked: Do you want to be American Airlines? Or JetBlue?

This was my first opportunity to see Seth live -- anyone who has seen him knows he is entertaining and has great examples to illustrate his concepts of being remarkable, telling stories, and conducting permission marketing.

But what caught my attention was his phrase "the TV industrial complex", which he described as a cycle with four phases:

1. Spend a lot of money on TV

2. Get more distribution for your products

3. Sell a lot more product

4. Buy more ads

And keep going around and around this cycle.

As we all realize, this model is broken. Seth challenged the audience that we are at a fork in the road, and we must choose whether to "bear down using the old rules or cheat, and come up with new rules." Now here's the airline analogy: "If you're American Airlines, you give passengers fewer peanuts and lay off people. Those are the old rules. If you're JetBlue, you give them more peanuts....and video at every seat...and more free stuff. Which one do you want to be?"

Let me broaden his analogy to the Mass Media Industrial Complex to encompass the full range of the marketing and PR tools we use to influence perception and preferences. The Mass Media Industrial Complex let us push messages through all these various media channels -- in Seth's words, marketers believed "I can interrupt anyone I want anytime I want."

Now, consumers intercept these messages, remix them, and redistribute them. These remixed messages often show up right alongside the "authorized" version when people search for a brand on Google. And these messages may bear little resemblance to the original message by the time other consumers see them.

So the question we face is: do we bear down using the old rules of influencing the market, and keep trying to push messages into an environment that hijacks and detours them? Or do we cheat, and come up with new rules to let go of some of the control we have insisted on, let the media remix culture co-create the message that fits the market, and listen to our customers rather than broadcast at them.

I'll have more thoughts on this next week...

Posted by Jim Nail on June 13, 2006 at 08:01 PM | Email this post Permalink

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Comments

Jim

Of course the answer is that you do both.

You do traditional media as the default, particularly where it works. At the same time you also experiment with social media to see where it works best. Over time, you reach a balance of traditional plus social media.

Just like everything else in life.

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

Posted by: GrahamHill | Jun 14, 2006 5:51:50 AM

Graham,

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Of course you are right. I hope the world understands by now that no medium ever is killed off entirely. It just changes to take advantage of its unique strengths. But marketers also need to learn what are those unique strengths so they use it correctly in their mix -- as well as use it correctly for the way the consumer wants to use it.

Posted by: Jim Nail | Jun 14, 2006 11:27:07 PM

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