Thoughts on Mass Media and Audience Driven Markets…
I have always looked at businesses as living breathing entities. Just like the people who own them and the people who frequent them; businesses are affected by time and the changes time brings.
My years in the adverting industry during the mid 1960’s through the early 2000’s were dominated by traditional retailing and B to B activities. At first new technology and computers changed the creative side of advertising and marketing campaign elements. As computerization took over the creative side; it wasn’t long till changes influenced the production side. These changes were focused on the way advertisers and marketers produced campaigns. Until the end of the 20th century the way retailers went to market remained static. The early 2000’s brought the beginning of the onslaught we are dealing with today.
The growth of the internet, acceptance of smart phones, smart technology and other social media and economic changes have made the market place much broader and the avail abilities for completing the sale more diverse. Black Friday gave birth to Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday was an outgrowth of traditional retail marketing and advertising.
In 2015 Amazon created what I believe is to date the most significant audience based e-tail event. Amazon “Prime Day” created a unique internet customer based event; separating itself totally from traditional retailing and fulfillment. E-commerce now has its own benchmark to anniversary and for retailers to deal with. In 3 years starting with 2015 Amazon took its targeted 24 hour event to a 30 hour event capturing what is estimated to be 70% of all e-commerce that day in 2016 and surpassing cyber Monday and Black Friday sales in 2017.
The key drivers of retail were print, radio and Television. In the beginning internet advertising was sold as an ancillary media to boost response rates. The success of prime days establishes this targeted customer only e-commerce promotion as a totally independent sales channel. This sales channel can operate undetected through social media on its own schedule through its own drivers. We are moving away from mass marketing towards audience based markets. The days of 2% response rates based on mass marketing are giving up consumers to the higher returns of audience based promotions.
Today it is even more important to understand the ebbs and flow of your individual business and what affects it. “Amazon Prime Day” I am sure will lead to many other similar events. Marketing plans should take the new audience targeted events into consideration. One important point is to consider how to capture part of the wave these new events create or how to attract the rest of the market not addressed.
Over the past 35 or more years adverting and marketing has created many promotional time lines. Marketers jumped on and built around these opportunities, this hasn’t changed however; the way these events are deployed and the ultimate recipient have. As an example recently I was involved in planning an event to coincide with “Amazon Prime Days” this event boosted sales over 500% and our base Monthly comp numbers were not affected. This event focused on our customer list and social media. We ran concurrent with the larger event. Cow Performance Company
is a niche E-tail RC Hobby Marketer with its own private branded products. We rode the wave created by the larger more widely promoted event and established a new entry in our promotional time line.
I wrote this article as a thought provoking starting point; please contact me with your comments or further discussion.
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