Heat-Seeking Missile Marketing
July 19, 2011
The biggest advertising budget doesn’t always take the prize in today’s market. Companies that can afford to blanket the airwaves are losing ground to companies that have never even aired a television commercial. Consider warfare. The world’s super powers aren’t using super bombs. They’re using heat seeking missiles and smart drones. The key to their success is knowing who is where, what they are doing, who they’re doing it with and why.
Marketing isn’t like war, you may be thinking out loud, but internally, you know it is. You’re fighting your competitor, if there is one, for power and territory. The territory is the consumer allegiance. Once you have it, it’s yours unless you abuse your power. At the same time, you are thinking it would be so much easier if your competition were eliminated altogether, which is pretty warlike, even though you really don’t want to hurt anyone; you just want them to leave your territory alone. Nothing personal.
To win this conflict (we won’t call it war) you need to know where your consumers are, what they’re doing, thinking, saying and wishing, and the only way you’re going to know any of that is if they choose to share it with you. Well, why in the world would they do that? They don’t even know you.
So, you think you’ll tell them a little about yourself, how smart you are, what you’ve accomplished, cozy up and earn their trust, because once they know how fantastic you are, they will follow you anywhere. Not so, according to mega-successful companies that have mastered the art of long-tail marketing.
Long tail marketing is the science of selling zillions of different things to zillions of people instead of selling gazillions of one very popular thing. You could say that Sears invented it, selling everything from underwear to houses in their heyday. They would buy the stuff from a manufacturer, then sell it to you. These days, however, it’s far too risky to invest in inventory in the hopes that you can blanket the universe with your marketing message and bring the customer to you. This is where the heat-seeking missile comes in.
Somewhere out there is a big guy who got a sweater for his birthday with the monogram JKP. It’s a beautiful cashmere sweater, but he’s allergic to cashmere and can’t exchange it because it’s monogrammed. What are the odds that he can find someone else his size with the same initials to sell it to? Pretty good, you would think, if he can run TV spots during the Super Bowl, because another JKP is probably watching. Without a Super Bowl budget, JKP is stuck with his sweater, right? Maybe not.
Ebay engineered heat-seeking missile marketing enabling consumers to sell to each other. The intelligence gathering platform profiles buyers and sellers like a matchmaker and is now used by thousands of companies to learn as much as possible about consumers so they can tailor a product or service offering specifically for that individual. That means somewhere out there somebody is wishing for a cashmere sweater monogrammed with JKP, and that wish has been expressed in a public forum. That sweater is a heat-seeking missile and the heat is coming from the consumer who is looking for that sweater. Voila, sold.
Can you make this science work for you? Maybe, if you are willing to re-think your business model from the inside out. Maybe you can’t sell gazillions of different things to drive up your profits, but you can create a heat-seeking missile with the ones you have.
