Reading for 11/12

I really took to the Heath brothers' creation of CHIFF in this chapter of Made to Stick.  To employ the standards of clever, high-quality, innovative, friendly, and fun allows for a much more rigorous, if whimsical, level of quality.  To be clever forces companies to adhere to the unexpected aspect of SUCCESs and ensure that their product be unique and enjoyable.  To be high-quality is pretty self explanatory, forcing the product to be of a standard the company can be proud of and the consumer can respect.  To be innovative also works towards the unexpected by forcing the company to come up with new ideas rather than recycle old ones.  Friendly and fun both make for a more enjoyable product that appeals to a wider consumer pool.  These strategies are all important because they go hand in hand with SUCCESs and with the need to put the consumer first and thus help the idea to stick.

The Heath brothers have a way of conveying their message in ways that makes sense and are easy to remember, and CHIFF helps the reader to do just that.  It's important to remember because this is a helpful strategy for those wanting their idea to be successful.  It's important to have standards and to stick to them, just like the company behind Cranium did.  Without these standards, failure could have been theirs.  But because they stuck to what they'd been doing before and didn't waver from their very precise standards, they continued to be a hugely successful producer of a hugely successful product.  This is example is the perfect way to illustrate the importance of knowing one's market and audience and sticking to the procedures and ideals that led you to them in the first place.  Made to Stick is all about finding out who that audience is and latching on to what they respond to no matter what.

Reading for 11/5

In this chapter Gillin touches on the interesting notion of how traditional marketing doesn't equate to social media marketing.  I found this particularly interesting because of the related discussions we've had in class about the same subject.  It seems that social media marketing is quite different, and almost opposite even, from mainstream marketing.  Tactics that work in one just don't in the other and I find this fascinating.  Where mainstream marketing is all about appealing to the masses and trying to reel in as many people from a giant, muddled pond specific to no demographic, social media marketing is all about finding niche groups of like minded people and appealing to their specific sensibilities.  This makes for two very different strategies when approaching a marketing plan.  For mainstream media the the key is to know what appeals to the majority of a wide range of people where for social media it is to know what appeals to the very specific demographic you're reaching.

I found it so interesting that Gillin mentions this here because I believe it's an extremely important concept for marketers to grasp.  You cannot approach a social media campaign the same way you would approach a mainstream media campaign.  You have to know your audience and what they're looking for, and that is the essential message here.  An effective campaign, no matter what the product, is knowing your audience and adapting your product to that audience's needs.  No strategy can be effective without this at the core of it.  It's all about how you're presenting the product, and that all depends on who you're presenting it to. Gillin touches on the subject only briefly here but I believe it is one worth considering far beyond this discussion.  It is an essential part of the industry to know how to adapt to the consumer, whomever they may be.