Tuesday, April 8, 2008
"No one wants to have their work summed up to be 'crap to the power of suck.'"
For me, this paragraph in an
AdWeek article about Coca-Cola's efforts with social networks and "Marketing 2.0" says it all:
"The Diet Coke-Mentos experience was only one of several missteps Coke made in its forays into the world of social media. Months earlier, its Coke Zero blog was discovered to be a fake (generated not by consumers, but in-house), while the remake of Coke.com into a YouTube-like site for consumer-generated content (dubbed The Coke Show), launched in July 2006, initially provoked brickbats from outsiders and failed to generate much in the way of submissions or traffic. Even Sprite Sips, Coke's first application on Facebook (the brand was a "landmark partner" on the social net's Social Ads platform) fell flat. Currently, it has just 12 daily active users -- and they're not afraid to voice their opinions. On the comment board, one user described Sips as 'crap to the power of suck.'"
Yes, you read that correctly. One of the world's largest and best-known brands is floundering around, tossing money in every which way, trying to figure out how to communicate with specific target markets. Which, as anyone can tell you, is both a powerful and dangerous affair... After all, no one wants to have their work summed up to be "crap to the power of suck."
Many people (including those in Coke's marketing department, no doubt) are giving themselves credit for trying. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat," says Coke's Senior Vice President of Marketing. (Or Theodore Roosevelt; I keep getting those guys confused.)
The truth, however, is probably much simpler:
Give the people what they want. If you find yourself trying to figure out how to communicate with a particular target market or "get more engagement with the 20-somethings," I submit you may be thinking about things from the wrong perspective. You shouldn't be in the business of finding a market for your product. Instead, try creating a product the market wants. Toward the end of this article, there's a great (if not obvious) remark from John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media. Battelle says, "One of the principles crucial to this space is adding value to the conversation. It means oftentimes underwriting content or creating a service people actually want."
Imagine... creating something people actually want.
[
Read the AdWeek article]
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Thanks for linking to my article. I hope it was a useful case study of a major brand's efforts to figure this stuff out, if imperfectly. On the subject of giving people what they want, I wrote a recent story about how interactive design is moving in that direction.
http://tinyurl.com/33jcrn