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All of the great stuff from Old Spice got me whistling…
A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovations theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Given the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant lagg
ards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
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A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovation theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards[k1] in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards[k2] tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Gven the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant laggards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
HBO’s witty, iconic show, Sex and the City, saw better days on the small screen before it’s second film installment received a caustic lashing from film critics nationwide. Now the single girl empire built by stilettos and Cosmopolitans is accused of being bigoted, offensive, and abysmally juvenile for it’s outlandish portrayal of Middle Eastern sexual politics and irreverent take on marriage, motherhood, and the economic recession.
But while the filmmakers-director, screenwriters, and producers- got the formula wrong, the marketing team had the recipe for empirical success. This sequel “outbrands” its predecessor through product placement on screen (think luxurious Mercedes Maybachs on parade and cameos of glittery Louboutin stilettos) and off (HBO marketing has created bra styles for each of the four characters, cocktail glasses, and a “Carrie” necklace).
From a marketing perspective, the former cable series’ transformation into a big-budget franchise is like hitting pay dirt. American women who are sipping on the hype of sisterhood and “labels or love” will flock to the screen and then to retailers to open their wallets for Sex and the City approved (and applauded) bling. Still, some true blue fans are getting frustrated with the series market expansion, condemning it’s capitalistic embrace. Time will tell whether fans are “Carried” away with the sequel’s product placement or eternally turned off.
Perhaps it was those all long nights during production week which I spent editing articles and designing pages for my high school newspaper that gives me a great appreciation for newspapers. As a journalism major I can’t help but sometimes fear for the future of news and the newspaper as reports of large daily papers downsizing or going completely out of business become more frequent.
However, a report issued by the Newspaper National Network the number of unique visitors to newspapers web sites in the top 25 markets grew 10 percent from March to April, reaching 83.7 million. So while people are not picking up paper copies of their daily newspaper, they are still reading the paper—it just happens to be online. Jason Klein, CEO of the Newspaper National Network, reported that newspaper web sites recorded 2 billion page views in the top 25 markets in April alone.
So the problem for major newspapers is not how to increase traffic to their web sites, but how to make a profit off their online versions. These online trends are promising, especially during a time when advertisers are currently reducing their reliance on print advertising. While online advertising is still considered by many advertisers as ‘uncharted territory,’ national advertisers would be foolish to ignore the data provided by the Newspaper National Network. The increasing trend of unique visitors to online newspaper web sites will hopefully inject more confidence in advertisers who have already taken their ad dollars to the web.
Newspapers and the news industry are guilty of helping create a culture in which people are accustomed to getting their news virtually for free. Large newspapers must work collectively to begin to change the culture of ‘free news’ if they want to remain in business. The New York Times has already started to implement a type of payment plan for frequent viewers, but until other large newspapers begin adopting similar measures people will always have the option of circumventing paying for their news.
While their paper versions might be faltering, online newspapers in top markets are doing well, and they must begin to take advantage of this success by promoting online advertising. The internet has helped sustain and revitalize this old medium, but now it is up to the newspaper industry as a whole to work hard to incorporate advertisers in this new medium and change a culture in which people are used to paying little, if any, for accurate and trustworthy news.
Apple is letting go of their famous “Get a Mac” campaign, which featured Justin Long and John Hodgman in a verbal battle (Mac vs. PC).

I must admit that I always enjoyed the commercials because they were often spot on about the problems that a PC would have, and a Mac didn’t. It was a clever and quiet way of introducing the Mac to ‘regular’ people that doesn’t really know what a Macintosh is all about. People are now speculating about what’s next in the Apple era of advertising. The actual ‘Get a Mac’ campaign and all the TV ads has been removed from the Apple website, and now there’s only facts and reasons about the world of Macs and why you should get one.
So, what’s next? The problem hereafter for Apple will not be to tell people how good they really are – it will be to create a new, successful, interesting and fun campaign that can bring the essence of the brand further into the future. In two weeks Apple and Steve Jobs will open this years ‘Apple Worldwide Developers Conference’ in San Francisco, which will probably reveal many interesting stories. That tells me that we shouldn’t have to wait too long before the new introduction of Mac takes place. The question is; how creative will they be? In the meantime, you can check out this mash-up clip from all the ‘Get a Mac’ videos we’ve been seeing throughout the years. Enjoy!




