Marketing revelation from 30 years ago

No matter what industry or company you work in, you will face a problem: the times are changing too fast. A book of prophecy written 30 years ago is actually a marketing revelation in the digital age. So, what are the revelations for marketing from the book "Digital Survival"? Let's take a look at it together in this article.

2016 was a period of new media dividends represented by Weibo and public accounts;

In 2017, the sharing economy and mini programs;

In 2018, short videos, 5G, and domestic mobile phones rose;

In 2019, private domain traffic and marketing technology emerged;

In 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has continued to affect...

Last year, this methodology was admired by everyone, but this year it has fallen behind the game by several versions.

Some people say that when faced with uncertainty, we can only boldly try and make mistakes. However, if the general direction is wrong, all attempts will ultimately be in vain.

If Tang Seng goes north, he will never reach the Western Regions.

Marketing must be able to "foresee the future" and depict an ideal business state in order to try, iterate, and move forward in an orderly manner.

For example, in the 1990s, when personal computers were not yet popular, Nicholas Negroponte accurately predicted which technological hotspots would occur and described the situation 30 years later.

Whether it is new media, short videos, virtual reality, KOL economy, personalized recommendation algorithms, AI painting...

When he compiled these predictions into the book "Digital Being" in 1996, the graphical user interface (GUI) discussed in the book had just become a reality - at that time Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system, and it was also the first time that humans saw the "Start" menu.

Win95 interface, the system carried the initial version of "Legend of Sword and Fairy", the first well-known IP in Chinese game history

The reason why he can foresee the future is due to what is often called "insight" in the marketing field.

For example, why do computers, mobile phones, and APP operating interfaces now make extensive use of icons instead of drop-down menu lists?

"Most of us are relatively capable in two dimensions. Think of the two-dimensional front of your bookshelf. To find any book, you probably just walk up to it. You probably remember its size, color, thickness, and binding. If you put the book there yourself, you will certainly remember all of this more clearly. Even the most cluttered tabletop is well known to the person who uses it, because he or she is the one who created the clutter."

"We half-heartedly tried to use the word glyph to describe these little images, since the dictionary definition of icon wasn't quite right, but the word stuck. These postage-stamp-sized images not only indicated information or function, but each image also had a 'place'.

It’s like finding a book on a shelf; when you want to retrieve something, you can just walk to where it is, remembering its exact location, color, size, and even the sound it might make.”

Based on these insights, Negroponte launched a research project called "Spatial Data Management System", hoping to create a humanized interface for computers that "allows generals, corporate presidents and 6-year-old children to use computers."

This study was conducted in 1976, about half a century ago.

One reason why marketing requires a "liberal arts" mindset is that insight into the meaning of things is far more important than you think.

Let's take another example from this ancient land. Five thousand years ago, someone in Majiayao, Gansu Province, learned to use fire to melt metal and cast a bronze knife. Physically, it is only slightly more practical and more complicated to produce, requiring an individual to master this technology instead of planting or raising livestock.

But in significance, bronze smelting gave rise to professional blacksmiths, which led to the emergence of a large division of labor in society. A primitive tribe called "Shang" began to dominate barter, and merchants, commerce, the Shang Dynasty... China was born as a civilization.

At first it was just a knife, a "tool".

So, what are the insights for marketing from the book "Being Digital"?

1. Combine communication channels

At this moment, a large number of private domain operators are typing away on their keyboards, pushing products to customers through social networks, Moments, membership systems, and other touchpoints. Next to these operators, programmers are writing code, and designers are designing the color and size of buttons.

How would you summarize these people’s goals in one sentence?

Create a personalized interactive interface for customers.

The current challenge is that people no longer stick to a few communication channels such as newspapers and television stations. In different scenarios, customers will choose to watch Xiaohongshu bloggers, Douyin short videos, Bilibili medium and long videos, Weibo gossip or long articles on public accounts.

They each have their own advantages: for example, videos are more intuitive than text, but a 10-minute video with practical content often has less than 2,000 words (refer to this article, which has about 1,500 words so far), and its efficiency in disseminating in-depth content is lower than that of text.

At the same time, when you watch a video, you are “listening to others speak”, while when you read text, it is like “there is a voice reciting silently in your heart”, and the probability of the text opinions being accepted is higher.

There is no “best” communication channel.

In marketing, sometimes customers want to chat with brands in social groups, and sometimes they just need a discount coupon. By combining different communication channels (some people now call them "touchpoints"), with the help of artificial intelligence or worker intelligence, we can communicate with the right customers at the right time and in the right way.

In a narrow sense, it is roughly equivalent to today's user journey.

But if you look closely, Negroponte's expression "interactive interface" has more emotional insights:

"Simply put, 'redundancy is good' . In fact, the best interfaces are those that have many different and coexisting communication channels through which a user can express and extract meaning using a different set of sensory devices (both the user's and the machine's).

Just as importantly, one channel of communication may be able to compensate for the inadequacy of other channels in conveying information. For example, if there are ten people in a room and I ask one of them, "What is your name?" this question has no meaning unless you can see where I am looking when I ask it. That is, the meaning of the adjective 'your' comes from the direction of my eyes."

2. From Push to Pull Content Marketing

Newspapers are made up of atoms, while the digital world is based on bits.

Based on Bitcoin's superior communication efficiency, Negroponte predicted the emergence of KOLs, recommendation algorithms, subscription and reward mechanisms.

“Through reading The New York Times, I got to know John Markoff, a reporter for the newspaper who specializes in computer and communications industries, and I really admired his articles. In the past, if it weren’t for The New York Times, I might never have seen his articles.

But now it's different. I can easily use the computer network to automatically collect all his latest reports and put them into my " personalized newspaper" or in the " suggested reading" data file. I might be willing to pay Markov "two cents" for each article.

If 0.5% of the total Internet population in 1995 were willing to subscribe to Markov's articles like this, and Markov wrote 100 articles a year (in fact, he wrote about 120 to 140 articles a year), then he could earn a guaranteed $1 million a year, which I dare say is definitely higher than the salary paid to him by the New York Times. "

Following this thread, he also predicted the prevalence of the MCN economy:

“…Once someone has established this territory, the added value of the sender in the digital world will decline. The sending and movement of bits necessarily also involves a process of filtering and selection. Media companies, among other things, play the role of scouts, and their distribution channels become a testing ground for public opinion.”

The following sentence can even summarize the recent love-hate relationship between Li Ziqi and Wei Nian:

"But at a certain point, authors may no longer need this forum. In the digital age, Michael Crichton will definitely make more money selling books directly on the Internet than through publishers."

All these predictions are based on a law that Negroponte has extracted: digitalization will change the nature of mass media. The previous process of "pushing" information to people will be transformed into a process where people "pull" the desired bits.

The premise for changing from push to pull is to provide customers with a personalized interactive interface as mentioned above.

This is especially important for marketing.

Whether it is B2C or B2B, there are countless people who advocate the importance of content marketing. Content is more humanistic and also conforms to the inevitable trend of marketing. However, few people discuss its prerequisites.

First, creators need to create content that conforms to the attributes of the “medium”.

10,000 words is close to the upper limit of WeChat public accounts, after all, readers often read in fragments while slacking off, squatting, or commuting, while a book in a library starts at 100,000 words. Video creation requires the coordination of people, scenery, lighting, and scripts, and caters to the preferences of recommendation algorithms.

However, it is impossible for companies to invest costs regardless of cost and to be meticulous in all media, especially for B2B companies.

Rather than trying to create a “spectacular feast” of images, sounds, and data, create a personalized interface that “ can switch from one medium to another at will. ”

3. The correct approach to developing marketing technology

Changes are always similar, but the postures of resisting change are different.

From what I’ve seen in the field of marketing technology (MarTech), there are usually three extremes:

1. Using some beautiful “ism” to reject technology

Before the epidemic, a well-known milk tea shop chain refused to launch online QR code ordering because the owner believed that direct communication between clerks and customers was more important and could give people a "third space" experience. At the same time, stamping paper points cards could evoke people's childhood memories and had irreplaceable brand value.

The so-called data middle platform, membership system, marketing technology... are nothing but externalities.

Everyone knows what happened three years later.

Apart from the epidemic factor, it is true that some people are very attracted by the cultural atmosphere, but some people really just want to order food in advance, pick it up at the store and run.

Especially for white-collar workers in the workplace, 80% of them just want to efficiently fill their stomachs with sugar and caffeine to prolong their lives.

We're just taking drugs while killing monsters, what's the point of talking about romance?

Fortunately, since B2B marketing has long been neglected and the doctrine is not prevalent, such situations are rare.

2. One-sided understanding of marketing scenarios with a certain “technical thinking”

One company's IT department said that they could realize all the functions provided by external MarTech vendors themselves. Originally, the company needed a two-wheeled bicycle, but after spending a lot of money on self-research, the IT department came up with a wheelchair.

The reasons are:

Although technological products are invented by "science students", MarTech will only be driven to develop if it is delivered to creative talents, widely used, evaluated for needs, and continuously iterated .

Those who put it into practice accurately and over a long period of time are often the second party who make a living from it.

As Negroponte said, "The $15 billion global video game industry is a good example. It is larger than the American movie industry and growing faster. Video game companies are working very hard to get better display technology, making virtual reality a reality at a low cost."

NASA spent $200,000 to develop a similar technology that was barely applicable, but on November 15, 1994, Nintendo launched a virtual reality video game priced at only $199.

The answer is simple: our thirst for new forms of entertainment seems insatiable, and the new real-time, three-dimensional games on which the video game industry depends urgently require this high-speed processing technology and new displays. Applications are the driving force. ”

3. There is another extreme, which is a combination of the above two

On the one hand, these companies adhere to a certain nihilistic "ism", but on the other hand, facing new competitors in the market competition, they have to admit the advantages of digital technology applications. So they decided to "take Chinese learning as the basis and Western learning as the application", and a "Westernization Movement"-style transformation prevailed within the company.

At this point, companies are often unwilling to adjust their corporate culture, organizational structure, upgrade underlying technology systems, or redraft their brands and business processes. Instead, they simply hope to take their existing businesses to the next level through the use of technological tools.

Just like in history, railways were built but used to run horse-drawn carriages.

At the same time, in order to promote the value of new technologies, some media have been demoting classic practices such as ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management). However, without the integration of the basic architecture, no matter how good the scattered "cutting-edge application" data looks, it will ultimately be just a mirage.

Perhaps the most important thing for us in the new year is to take another look at the future.

Author: Swallowtail

Source: WeChat official account "B2B Marketing Technology Research Institute (ID: gh_f7d5a4218cd0)"