I recently heard Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent Drinks remark that “ninety percent of their marketing strategy is in the bottle”. It does remind me that excellent products and services will often sell without the aid of any advertising or other paid for promotion at all. Google, Microsoft, Body Shop, Innocent and Yahoo! to name but a few built their brands without reliance on traditional advertising. Google went one step further and targeted its initial product diffusion across the academic sector knowing that it would be promoted by academics to students and so into the wider educated community. All all cases, these brands relied on a superior product experience to drive word of mouth promotion.
Some might say, well, they’re the lucky products, but for the rest of us, we have to fight to maintain our position in the market. They’d argue it’s not that their products are bad, it’s just that they have to complete with many similar products in the same market space.
But this is where we get into what Web 2.0 really means for marketers. In the web enabled world everyone can review a product on either online retailer sites or on third party sites that encourage user review content. These sites are the territory where brands reputation will be built and lost. In the world of Web 2.0 and beyond, the product takes centre stage. Promotion will no longer be provided by third party marketing communications alone, but through the distribution of user advocacy based on user experience.
The logical extension of this, and certainly my hope, is that renewed focus on product development will in turn drive the emergence of new and more effective products and services which benefit all whilst, in a Darwinian sense, weaker products and services are gradually marginalised out of consumer markets.
Follow us on Twitter
