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Cool is not a strategy
The gold rush for Internet $ shifts focus to new fads and trends all the time, so is it a surprise that companies jumped on the Second Life bandwagon after a few well placed stories last year? Maybe some of you remember the buzz around Coke and Toyota getting gazillions of impressions of users engaging with their brands. More recently there was coverage of why businesses in virtual worlds fail, and, while the discussion seems like common sense, it’s not surprising to read the unfolding of events.
Virtual worlds often represent small pockets of intensely involved and intensely loyal members. Paying a subscription fee and spending hours in world at a time can polarize people, but it can also make for a valuable marketing and sales niche if you can target them correctly. It turns out that some businesses were doing that, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Many have taken to virtual worlds with a “I need to be there” attitude. Many others are there for the “cool” factor. As much as I like cool, I’ve never seen or heard of a business strategy where being cool was the goal -but that seemed to be the findings discussed in the article.
Leveraging cool celebrities or influencers can be part of a strategy, but not the end goal. It’s no doubt that failure is the the order of the day. On the other hand, the stories of successful businesses, and I even met a few making some $ , are based around serving customer wants and needs. Some are just “selling” fashionable clothes and making enough money to cover rent in the real world.
While there are stories like Wired’s discussion of Madison Avenue wasting dollars there, the stories focus on the “not enough users” problem. Maybe more marketers need to suspend the notion of the land grab of web 1.0, and parallel our real world businesses that deliver value to the customers.
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Good points. I wasn’t a fan of second life like some others here at ReveNews. I agree that it has its uses for certain things, but many things it was used for did actually not provide any or only little value and were done because of the “cool” or “being hip” / “cutting edge” factor.
Some folks got so emerged into this world that they lost a little bit the touch with the real world. I don’t blame them, it happens to the best of us and that well designed virtual worlds have some sort of “addictive” nature is demonstrated nicely by the numerous MMORPG worlds out there.
I just mentioned World of Warcraft or before that Everquest to highlight some of the prime examples.
reality IS negotiated…
There’s a fine line between the reality of perception (for perception is reality fans) vs. the reality of a vocal minority.
I know of several companies that have taken severe hits by not filtering the “vocal minority” properly. The vocal minority is sometimes vocal because their problem isn’t big enough to “move the needle”. In those cases, you will find a staunch group who have a need that is likely to remain unmet due to poor or non-existent ROI. Those people, due to their shared circumstance, often bound through a self-reinforcing shared experience loop, becoming more polarized toward achieving their desired task. The net result is a passionate and vocal minority that can sometimes latch onto and persuade a new entrant or junior marketer to build product for them.
In these special cases, you get companies building product for a select few. The reality is that the noise was disproportionately high to the true market need signal.