When Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13,7 billion, pundits and punters alike weighed in on what drove the acquisition: technology, distribution or as a shareholder value play. I don’t know enough about the business to tell you which of these opinions–or others–comes closest to Amazon’s actual logic.
However, I’d like to speculate on a much simpler organizing thought: enveloping mass-affluent consumers.
Yes, this lot. Again.
Now that our calendars have flipped over to November, we all know what to expect from marketers. Our inboxes will teem with tinseled evergreens. Santa will peek out over seemingly every banner and lightbox. Red and green will dominate Facebook’s purple. Every marketer who racks up big sales for Holiday will open the floodgates.
Many of my esteemed colleagues have great advice for enhancing Holiday emails and other addressable media. However, I’d like to address another group: what do you do when your brand doesn’t celebrate Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or anything else in December? After all, not every brand relies on big Holiday sales to make a living, but they still gotta remain relevant in digital channels somehow.
When we set out to solve marketing problems, we often try modeling, as in “how would another brand solve the problem?” More often than not, I think we use sexy brands–Apple, Nike, Starbucks and so forth–because they usually get their marketing right.
However, I suggest that you stop thinking about what’s sexy. After all, most marketers don’t have the resources of these brands nor can they always take the big risks that those brands have taken.
So, instead of sex, try toilets.
Challenge Accepted!
As in, ask yourself, “what would we do if we were trying to sell toilets instead of our brand/product?” Turning your strategy exercise into an exercise of selling toilets has three key advantages:
1. Toilets have clear use cases.
Collectively, marketers have spilled a lot of ink around content marketing for the past few years. However, a lot of marketers still don’t seem to understand how to use it. For those marketers, I offer a quick analogy: B2B marketers can use content the way B2C marketers use humor.