Cradle to Grave Consumers – and Beyond

Classify this post under “I’m surprised – but we should have seen it coming”.

If you think you are a dedicated sports fan or Trekkie – what better way to demonstrate this dedication by displaying this brand with your journey to the “Final” frontier.

For a currently undisclosed price – Eternal Image will sell you a Star Trek Themed Casket or Urn.

But it is not just dedicated Gene Roddenberry fans that are getting in on the action – Major League Baseball has agreed to license team logos for the same line of products.

So should we interested in this? Should this type of product licensing even be encouraged or is it exploiting and commercially branding one of, if not the, most spiritual events in any family or social group. Other examples of this trend can be found at MIT’s Ad Labs blog under the following post: Brands on Tombstones.

Separating out the ethical questions around such a product – and just focusing on the brand implications, these examples reveal a moment where branding has either overlapped or overtaken religious symbols and icons.

Could this potentially happen with any brand with high emotional involvement? Should brands even aspire to have this strong a connection with a consumer where it literally becomes a proxy for religion?

Digital Marketing Mash-up

I think that a lot of marketers and businesses large and small know that social networking is a trend and not a fad – but still struggle to see how these online communities can exist to enhance a consumer experience beyond narrowing and targeting advertising.

A post on Digital Hive (who we will add to this sites blogroll), supported by an article from the Wall Street Journal gives a great case study (And who doing their MBA doesn’t like a case study?) of the web-company called Etsy that is effectively using social networking to bring together buyers and sellers of hand-crafted goods.

The post talks about bringing together “really crucial interactive consumer behaviours: shopping for and buying stuff, social networking and e-commerce”

Probably one of the more interesting uses of this site is the “Alchemy” section – where potential customers can post what products they would like from the community that currently aren’t available. Next to the hypothetical product – the request also includes an “Ideal Price”.

“Buyers can post requests for custom handmade items, and then sellers bin on the opportunity to make the goods.”

So there is a lot going on with this site: community building, customization, brokering, branding, brand loyalty & entrepreneurship.

We at the SMA wonder if there might be lessons that bigger firms could take from this growing web-business?

Zombie Guerrilas

As cool as it would be to have walking undead monkeys as part of anyone’s marketing mix, this post is slightly more conventional in marketing topics.

The New York Times reported this weekend about Sony BMG’s Guerrila marketing campaign to get people talking about the 25th Anniversary of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” being re-released.

Dance groups from London to Copenhagen have been asked to break into a full choreographed homage to the 15-minute dance in the original music video in public spaces – and then disband as soon as they are formed.

Needless to say – clips of the “spontaneous” dance breakouts have been posted to what is becoming an increasingly important battleground for viral and guerrila marketers: YouTube.

It isn’t exactly clear if Sony is commissioning these dancers, or if the dancers are approaching Sony who is supporting the performances.

Sony IS making it clear they are involved in these events. This is an often overlooked component of other guerilla marketing which have done more to alienate consumers who feel duped.

John Ingrassia, the Sony BMG commercial music group president says that campaigns like this are about “Engaging Consumers.”

I wonder what the SMA community feels like about these marketing tactics – and specifically in this case – where a non-traditional campaign might actually serve the brand better (and be easier to execute) than trying to involve the original artist.

OMG! MMOG !

MMOG – Massively Multiplayer online games are not just games – they are full economies and destinations. They really behave no differently than countries or cities in the real world – so why should marketing behave any differently in these worlds?

Second Life already has embassies of real countries, real business that have set up virtual location and a land developer that has “second-life-ed (?)” enough to make herself $1,000,000 in real dollars. Expanding into these platforms is more similar to expanding into a new country rather than another component of your marketing plan.

How is this for a job description? Virtual World Marketing Consultant. The Electric Sheep is a firm dedicated solely to improving the virtual world experience for business. Along with creating platforms for your avatar to have a brand experience, they help build strategies for companies to want to increase their presence in various virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com.

How much of your company’s marketing plan include a budget for “virtual” media buys ?

Thinking out-loud, there are a lot of upsides to being a consumer in the virtual world that marketers are starting to be aware of. People are spending a lot of time in these worlds and we all like buying stuff – so does it not make sense that we are going to be looking to these worlds as another location of consumption? Do you know how much more efficient I would be at getting through my shopping list if I could teleport and not have to waste time parking? What kind of impact could this have on supply-chain management if you could create the benefit of a retail experience (virtual) while still maintaining the cost-savings of a direct-supplier model (real)? You would never run out of inventory. If I were in sales forecasting – i might start getting a little nervous.

Of course there are downsides. Involvement right now is somewhat limited. There is no way you are confusing a virtual consumer experience for a real one when you still have to use a mouse and keyboard. In some services, going there IS the product (The Grand Canyon is not quite the same on a 13 inch laptop monitor) and that cannot be substituted for online, no matter how large the bandwidth.

Searching for Meaning

A topic that seems to be popping up a lot these days in the off-line marketing community is creating “Meaningful Consumer Experiences.”

Isn’t it great when an emerging trend has the right combination of words that sound different enough that it could be considered breaking the “status quo” while vague enough that it allows snarky online critics the ability question if it means anything at all? Sometimes I feel like whoever creates these phrases does it on purpose. (Maybe it is the same guy/girl that came up with “synergies”)

Before we dive into what exactly “Meaningful”…well…means – let’s first isolate and dissect a consumer experiences. Do consumer experiences happen only at the point-of-sale or do they go beyond that simple interaction and branch into the pre and post-purchase behaviour? If you buy something and are dissatisfied, it is hard to argue that the return process isn’t part of the consumer experience. If you are still enchanted by a product or brand 15 years after you bought it (retro-chic anyone?) isn’t that still part of the experience?

My first challenge to the community is to question if consumer experiences can really be managed by marketing? They can encompass so much and are different for each individual that can extend well past the life of a product that it makes you wonder if this is something that is ever in the control of the marketer.

Now – we move onto our quest for meaning. How could a company create meaning for an individual whom they have never met? Even if market research was sophisticated enough to start asking about what is meaningful to consumers, the context in which an experience takes place may hold different levels of meaning for even the same individual. We are starting to get into some very tricky territory for a brand to enter – but the alternative is that it can be a very powerful connection that goes beyond functional and emotional brand equity.

One potential example that I found was Method Cleaning Products (taken from PeachPit Book Review) :

Co-founders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry started by taking an ordinary experience—cleaning the house—and making it more meaningful. As Ryan says, “Our goal was to make chores less of a chore. We thought we could do this by creating experiences that expressed our consumers’ love for their home and tying that to our products. If people don’t have to look at cleaning as killing germs, but as doing something positive for their home, the power of the experience goes deeper than the activity. It’s touching something primal.”

So is Method onto something new with pursuing a strategy for a meaningful consumer relationship? Is this just a rehash of positioning? Are there examples of other companies that are trying to use this strategy? Are the succeeding?

Please Share examples and comments about what value Meaningful Consumer Experiences can add to marketing – or if you think it is just another group of buzz-words that are having their moment in the sun.

Link to book on the subject: Make Meaning by Steven Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea