The Niche Fulcrum

borrowed relevance...

Josh Bernoff published a report recently here talking about "boring" brands.

It resonated with me - a lot of the brands I work with at Dig for fire are what he'd define as "boring" - healthcare providers, banks, government departments, building supply merchants and educational institutions - brands that certainly aren't going to be adopted by users just because they're "cool" (I'm aware just using the term "cool" - means I'm likely to be anything but...)

As someone at the coal face of always on marketing, tasked with getting these sorts of brands to exist online, I can attest to the fact that a lot of the issues on a day to day level, come down to brands not being comfortable with "borrowing relevance".

Its not about "cool". Its about convincing brands to get involved with what people are actually talking about, as opposed to what the brand would like them to be talking about.

In other words - there is possibly too much getting stuck up on the relevance of the marketing tactic and not enough understanding, that so long as whatever the application or technology employed (the application, viral, widget, newsfeed, weird bit of technology) resonates with the brand essence - in most cases, that's enough to start.....

So long as they're contributing in a positive way, a brand in unfamiliar territory is something users probably take more notice of, at least initially. Removing friends from your facebook account has got precious little to do with eating burgers but it reinforced Burger King's playful, cheeky brand values. On the other end of the scale, Keep Britain Tidy publishing data in RDF format has nothing directly to do with picking up litter, but being seen at the cutting edge of web 3.0 means the brand can have conversations it could never have had, had it stuck rigidly to its push messaging plan and segmentation model.

an apple for the old world...

I'm making an (admittedly long) bet that the next broadside / revolution to hit the "old" economy is virtual businesses, cyber squatting on old skool business models. just like apple did with the record labels..

What do I mean....

Take builders merchants, insurance companies, healthcare providers - in fact pretty much any old world brand who hasn't embraced the web.

What is to stop well funded, agile startups, deploying cutting edge technology to offer the products of old world industries, forcing the brands whose patch they're squatting on, to play ball and supply them?

An agile startup raises a couple of mill and puts together a slick, lightweight site which offers everything the old world merchant does (or more likely just the higher margin stuff).
They take the trouble to integrate an enterprise level CMS, stock management and ecommerce system and then approach every brand in the sector to tell them they've solved their biggest IT headache - an all singing, all dancing online presence - no capital cost - they only want 30% of the net.

Board of old school company, faced with the prospect of their own pedestrian IT department coming up with the goods anytime soon (and in a bid to generate much needed revenues in the short term to help the shareprice and this years bonus...) agree - thinking they'll balance control issues with the upside of owning the offline relationship with their customers and by retaining their "brand values" (which of course mean s**t on the web).

Its happened once – it could happen again….