“Life caching” is a pertinent idea to connect with today’s upwardly mobile younger consumer. Originally published on iMedia Connection on March 13, 2006
Watching Olympic snowboarding is somewhat analogous to the changing priorities and new technologies shaking up the marketing industry. One only has to watch the performances and subsequent interviews with the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team to understand this is new school, a generation occupying a different mindspace, not to mention a unique vernacular and cadence in their communications.
Lindsey Jacobellis, silver medalist, was caught showboating towards the end of the Snowboard Cross final, ultimately costing her the gold medal. Watching Lindsey catch air was an exhilarating experience but also made me feel nostalgic. Michael Jordan was flamboyant but always made sure he finished the play, whereas Lindsey is a 20-year-old more used to freestyling on her own terms. “Snowboarding is fun,” she said. “I was ahead. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the crowd. I messed up. Oh well, it happens.”
It made me wonder: How would I market to someone like Lindsey or a younger audience increasingly on-demand and very much in control of the marketing conversation? This younger demographic consumes media differently than their predecessors, are early adopters of technology, are known to be cynical towards traditional marketing and could even be considered brand disloyal. One might consider the approach of marketing to them by not marketing to them but rather by providing the tools and platforms necessary to tell their stories, hopefully articulating a positive brand experience in the retelling of their tales. These ironic, commericial/anti-commerical approaches have been tried before, but this approach is not marketing by wink or gimmick, but rather an authentic technique where you cede control to the consumer.
Enter life caching
We consultants hear a lot about emerging media ideas and the plethora of exciting new marketing opportunities available to us. Far too often, however, it feels that we rush to recommendations without much thought to a unifying idea, a clear value exchange, or recontact strategy beyond the immediate message.
Rather than pitching podcasting as the emerging marketing tactic du jour, I was in search of such a unifying principle, when I came across an article on trendwatching.com entitled “Life Caching,” a concept I found to be an incredibly pertinent idea to connect with today’s upwardly mobile younger consumer. Taking advantage of camera phones and other new technologies, cheap storage and a willingness to tell their stories, smart marketers could market to the new class of technology optimists by enabling storytelling (via blogs, communities, podcasts, camera phones), on a multitude of platforms (SMS, web, email, retail environments, IM, video games) in the understanding that the end result is a referral buzz about the brand. The end goal is to foster user-generated content and community where “sharing an experience may become more valuable than the actual experience itself.”
Current applications of life caching are well represented in social networking sites such as MySpace or Flickr and services like Nokia Lifeblog. The second generation of life caching could possibly embrace advances such as Amazon.com’s collaborative filtering, wikis and the implications of mashup/remix culture by enabling the collective intelligence or opinions of the network to help inform intelligent communications.
I recently read a report about how new Helio handsets will enable users to tag postings with geocodes that are activated when they reach a specific location. At a concert, for example, the user would have access to photos and blogs of subscribers who’ve visited the concert hall or seen a particular band before. This could be considered the next generation of life caching platforms– tapping into the collective memories or experience of the masses.
The value exchange: Give something to get something
How do marketers tap into these cultural trends and safely create a platform for personal storytelling through digital channels? Is caching one’s life a good enough value proposition?
Marketers want consumer data and permission to create an ongoing dialogue with the end user. In order to capture that data, it’s not enough to simply incentivize with new content, sneak peaks, exclusive offers, premium customer service, or sweeps and giveaways. The ultimate value exchange for the end user is to respect his time enough to deliver only messaging that is relevant and in context of his personal goals.
Thus, the new value exchange:
- Shifts focus from brand-centric to customer-centric emphasis by communicating relevance and value of brand to consumer
- Creates a 1:1 dialogue portal to gain key segment behavioral and attitudinal data and build deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers.
The new dynamic
As more and more customer touchpoints become digital they can also become direct-response enabled and tailored to the individual. In the user-initiated marketing landscape, where the end user chooses the depth and duration of the marketing experience, we need customer profile data to deliver the right message to the right customer, a process exacerbated by a multitude of new touchpoints. Forrester refers to this as Left Brain Marketing or a “data-driven planning approach that allocates resources based on a holistic picture of the customer across all points in the lifecycle.”
Data-centric communications by way of profile information, preferences data, subscription management and behavioral data surrounded by business rules that control communications across multiple channels is the next wave, moving us from undifferentiated, static experiences to dynamic, personalized narratives.
Such a methodology grounded in marketing memory, behavioral insights and dynamically rendered content can be a winning formula for both consumer and marketer.
What might this data-centric marketing narrative look like in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics? Lindsey crosses the finish line first and (later) uses her Helio phone to capture personal video of the gold medal experience. She immediately shares it with her peer network on MySpace which has filled out extensive profile data that trigger a text message offer to purchase a video of the gold medal race, including behind-the-scenes commentary and extras reported by Lindsey herself. Lindsey’s MySpace page is also updated with other entries by people who’ve experienced that course before, and the content is available to you via the web, email, handset, or other channel of your choosing.
Filed under: Digital Bob | Tagged: Digital Bob
