Market Brain Storming

CAIRO MARSH is the Senior Partner, Customer Marketing Innovation for RAPP Tokyo. RAPP is a leading direct, digital and CRM advertising agency, headquartered in the U.S. with 50-plus offices around the globe.

You can’t catch lightning in a bottle. But you can try.

If you do, I am pretty sure that one of two things will happen. The first, and most likely, outcome is that you will stand outside in the rain looking awfully foolish while holding an open bottle. You will get utterly soaked from the rainstorm and you might catch pneumonia, but you won’t catch any lightning.

The second thing that could happen, if you are once-in-a-million-lifetimes lucky enough to be at right place at exactly the right time: A few milliseconds after you open the lid a bolt of lightning will race toward you, enter the bottle—along with 500 mega joules of energy and a super heated atmosphere of 20,000 degrees—hence shattering the bottle, causing a brief moment of convulsion and some light charring…before everything goes dark.

Either way you slice it—still no lightning in the bottle.

In my business, today’s lightning in a bottle is the uber-successful social media campaign. If you are in marketing you certainly know the dream: minimum cost/maximum reach. Add a sprinkle of Twitter with a dash of Mixi, swirl it up on YouTube and then watch the money flow in.

But I think most marketers are simply standing in the rain.

The explosion of the social web, the change in the way we see consumers engaging with online platforms like Mixi, Gree, Ameba, Facebook, etc., has taught a lot of us the wrong lesson.

Social media is an indicator, not the issue, nor really the opportunity.

What we are seeing is a shift towards more valuable experiences and content. Digital and social technologies are allowing consumers to sort through content more efficiently and engage, or ignore, information based on the value to them.

Illustration by Phil Couzens

Media is the enabler—but it’s a value-based shift.

You can see this shift in the way people are organizing both online and offline information. For example, in the popularity of iPhone apps like Four Square that allow consumers to pull up user comments about the restaurant that they are in.

Consumers are engaging proactively based on what is valuable to them. But value is a two–way street.

A lot of us have rushed to simply apply old content strategies to new media, setting up Twitter accounts and blogs that are rarely updated and offer little new information.

These efforts, unsurprisingly, do little to drive business. All that happens is that we spend more marketing dollars while creating more content clutter to be ignored.

If the communication has a real cost (cash or sweat equity), but is not a place where a credible or real difference is made to our customers to influence their buying decisions, then it is not the right place to apply resources.

So, before we go running out into the storm with our bottles and blogs, we should filter our communication approaches through a value-based equation (VBE).

Each business has its own VBE, driven by the business model, sales cycle and consumer expectations. But the core variables that drive it should be the same. Doing this right isn’t about capturing lightning in a bottle. It’s about linking Calculation to Creativity. It’s about producing electricity from a generator—where value is in the fuel.