stevenclark.com.au

Web designers might not all have marketing degrees but we need to be able to appreciate the marketing component of what we do when creating design solutions for our clients’ business problems. Let’s face it, the way we sell ourselves and the way we stitch together solutions has everything to do with how the marketplace accepts or rejects the ideas we’re putting out there. Is it about selling ice to Innuit? No. It’s about realising that marketing has changed and accepting that our business models have to accomodate the contemporary world in which we operate.

The first thing to realise is that people are so bombarded now with email spam, television ad spam, junk mail in the letterbox spam, that we’re becoming deaf to the incessant noise. The bang for your buck of a television advertisement is just not out there anymore.

Further, the idea that we aim for the mass market is probably not going to be adequate either. Why sell average consumer goods in a world where mass advertising is ineffective? Our goal is to target the niche market at the ends of the wave rather than competing in the body of it.

What we need are what Seth Godin (yes these are his ideas) calls a Purple Cow. We need something remarkable in the sense that it’s something that will be remarked on. We need to create authentic stories around our products and services.

We need to understand the power of permission marketing as opposed to the idea that we’ll just push this spam advertising out to everyone in the hope that a miniscule number will become customers. The noisier that space becomes the less effective that old paradigm becomes – we need to cut through the noise. We need to release ourselves from the idea that people are ignorant sheep and start to learn how humans really work. Seth Godin’s recent book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us is exactly about that.

My point isn’t necessarily to sell you into the sect of Seth Godin, by any means. But it’s to get you to think again about what a web designer or web developer might be, and to get you to consider the business aspects of the solutions. Are you taking advantage of smarter marketing or simply creating a shop and expecting everyone will come? Are you condoning your client’s old school mental model that spamming in various forms is legitimate advertising?

Consider this paradigm instead. Your solution might be about creating relationships with customers, or to become a leader of a tribe, or to provide an experience not found anywhere else. You might sell the most ordinary coffee in the most extraordinary way that leaves the customer feeling so special they bring their friends and they in turn continue the pattern

I’m not saying the old way will not work for you. I am saying it will work less effectively than it used to work for your predecessors. How many trees die every week so I can screw up twenty or so sales brochures? How many people turn down or totally ignore television advertising? Yelling is no longer the way to effectively be heard. It’s noisy. Too noisy. Too many products, people, popstars and cons. Too many websites. Too many messages.

If you really really want to succeed it’s time to realise that we’re marketers. Or we need to be marketers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.