one little cog

Am I talking about marketing ideas, or marketing ideas?

Technically … both.

In my previous post, I mentioned that marketing in its basic and most noble form is the ability to freely changing ideas with an audience. Here are what I feel are exceptional examples of marketing ideas (and marketing ideas!).

Within each of these examples, there is a purpose, there is a story to tell in some form or fashion, and they ultimately leave the consumer (of information) the choice to embrace or reject the idea of change without annoying them.

Here they are in no particular order:

Seth Godin - Only Two Years Left

Seth Godin poses a great question to his readers:
“Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?”

Simon Collison - The Saga of the Interwebs

Simon creatively retells the coming of age story of the World Wide Web and its many issues revolving around technical standards:
“Everybody wanted a role in the unraveling saga. Barely a day went by without a new group of experts forming to place a flag in a methodology and claim it as their own for improvement. The Styling Sheet Discussion Group, The Working Group Task Force, The XHTML2 Book Club, The HTML5 Bandits, The Fantastic Four, Spiderpig and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all met in their own imaginations to procrastinate about whether or not ginger biscuits should replace custard creams during the refreshment break, or if skiffle musician Paul of Kintyre had really died in 1967.”

Chris Garrett - The 80/20 Rule of Effort

Chris reminds people of the Pareto Principle in his own words:
“This 80-20 rule, or Pareto Principle, suggests that a small percentage of your effort brings most of your results, while a much smaller part of your achievement comes from where most of your time goes. Homing in on the time-draining aspects versus those productive tasks could be a quick and easy fix. It is identifying the correct targets for promotion or deletion that is the tricky part.”

Joshua Porter - Five Principles to Design By

Joshua writes an excellent article on design and their impact on us as human beings and users:
“Design, on the other hand, is about use. The designer needs someone to use (not only appreciate) what they create. Design doesn’t serve its purpose without people to use it. Design helps solve human problems. The highest accolade we can bestow on a design is not that it is beautiful, as we do in Art, but that it is well-used.”

Rands - The Nerd Handbook

I’ve posted this already before because it affirms my role as a nerd in this world but Rands puts it so much more eloquently and really explains why and how people can understand the nerds that they are associated to:
“At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.”

apophenia - Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?

I am confident that marketers and the whole consortium of people focused on advertising over the world wide web are very keenly interested in what apophenia’s article has to say on the demographics of who really clicks on those online ads:
“Of course, while the ad world is obsessed with clicks because they can measure those, ad receptivity is more than just clicks. While people dream of adding clicks to TV, TV ads have been tremendously successful without the clicking option. Brand recognition, for example, is an acceptable outcome from the POV of many marketers. But the web lets us measure clicks so advertisers tend to care about clicks.”

Not all of the examples are through words of course …

Go Around twice if you’re happy (via ebin)

Great visual example on how ideas can be embraced, missed or ignored.

Monique Trottier - Better Books Conversation

I work in the book industry so this discussion dives right into the issues revolving around the Canadian book market. Monique and Dan did a great job of going through the different topics affecting book publishing and selling. Dan poses a question:
“But what if we’re publishing too many books that people don’t actually want? Then the whole problem looks a little different, and digitisation and better marketing can only help so much.”

Dan Ackerman Greenberg (via TechCrunch) - The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

While I may not be fond of the ideas that Dan Ackerman Greenberg posted via TechCrunch, the enormous response demonstrated by the community and even people outside of the community revealed how people regard particular marketing tactics — they either embrace the idea or reject it.

CNN - The Screening Room’s Top 10 Life-Affirming Movie Moments

My last example is the only one coming from a large media company’s website. I use this because it really hit home how marketing ideas (or marketing ideas) really works. In this case, it’s affirmation of our human values or individual principles. I don’t necessarily think that all of those movies deserve to be at the top, but that’s how marketing works. My own favourite movie-moment comes from a scene in Secondhand Lions:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in. — Hub

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