Game-Changers

The recession has us all thinking about ways to control and lower costs. For marketers this means working with shrinking budgets, shifting spends to higher yielding mediums/properties and sharpening our focus on analytical reporting. Quantifiable results are driving decision-making right now. And in a very real sense, the bottom-line focus has forced client and agency marketers to rethink the whole marketing equation. Suddenly, printing stuff and paying high media placement fees don’t seem so cost-effective. Social media, word-of-mouth marketing, virtual trade-shows – they’re in the spotlight. The perfect storm of a sinking global economy, the mainstream adoption of web 2.0 and the strong desire to hold onto one’s job has even the most conservative marketers looking to get in on organic media. The think conversation, not campaign movement is growing.

Forrester Research recently asked marketers “Assuming that the economy is in recession in the next 6 months, how would you change your investment in social media overall?”

• 53% increase
• 42% stay the same
• 5% decrease

It’s good to hear cooler/informed heads are prevailing in the marketing deprtment. But beyond the shift to lower cost messaging channels there’s another road to beating the recession blues. It’s called new value delivery, innovation or what I’ve been calling brand elasticity – creating new formulations of product/service offerings that broaden the market spectrum for your brand. Here’s a few companies walking boldly where their brand shouldn’t or their competitors just can’t – but it males oh so much business sense:

Wal-Mart is moving into the Digital Health Records System Management business. Seems like a strange business for the low-cost retailer to be in, but as Marcus Osbourne, senior director for health care business development explains to the NY Times, “We’re a high-volume, low-cost company and I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry.” The defensible attribute for the venture is much more sound:

The company’s test bed for the technology it will soon offer physicians has been its own health care clinics, staffed by third-party physicians and nurses. Started in September 2006, 30 such clinics are now in stores in eight states. The clinics use the technology Wal-Mart will offer to physicians.
NY Times

Nintendo is developing it’s own TV channel. Why not? It’s already got millions of kids and adults tethered to the tube through the Wii. As reported by Australian IT, the service will be “viewable by anyone with a Wii games console and an internet connection, the “Wiinoma” channel is expected to deliver a family-oriented blizzard of cartoons, brain-training quizzes, cookery, educational and other lifestyle shows: all of it original content produced exclusively for Nintendo.” The fight to own your living room is on:

The prospect of content deliberately tailored by Nintendo for its audience could cause a deep dent in prime-time viewing figures…
Saturo Iwata, Nintendo president

Facebook extends itself to non-social sites. Leveraging it’s Facebook Connect initiative, the ever-evolving social goliath is encouraging websites to add Comment Box. As reported by Marketing Vox “Comment Box enables clients to add a conversational component to their sites. Additionally, people that also use Facebook can also post those comments on their profiles and share them with friends, enabling the discussion to travel.” Social-selling is the next wave and Facebook wants to lead you to the promised land:

And with 175 million users, bloggers and publishers alike should salivate over the commenting news, since it essentially creates an opportunity for their content to get much more exposure from commenters’ Facebook circle of friends.
Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable

I applaud these brands for attempting to be game-changers. Not content to merely “rebrand”, they’re applying market vision, design-thinking and guts to grow – not just stay in business. During this recession, don’t spend all your time thinking of cost-cutting measures. Someone’s got to keep the innovation torch burning. Might as well be you.

- Keith Gerr

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