Zimpapers Logo

Zach Aldwin Milkshake in the Boardroom
Soccer fever seems to have gripped soccer fans across the globe as the World Cup is now in full swing. With it has come some moments of infamy; the biggest one being Uruguay national team striker Luis Suarez’s biting of Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini.

Within 30 minutes the internet was awash with memes paying homage to the act, many of these depicting the player as a vampire, T-rex or in a straight jacket have spread rapidly throughout the internet.

Memes, for those not in the know, are ideas that spread through a culture from person to person.

The most common of these are pictures, often used in multiple memes, with a short caption to illustrate a point. A classic example would be the ‘‘Keep Calm’’ meme used during the 2012 Olympic Games. Anyway you have the idea. A great meme will go viral online. The more ‘‘Likes’’, ‘‘Shares’’ and copycats you get the more successful you are.

With the rise of social media there has come an increased susceptibility to being influenced by the opinions of others. In an effort to chase a certain quantity of ‘‘likes’’ on say Facebook we fall into the subtle trap of altering our posts or photos to meet the mass, unwritten, social criteria that produce the desired popularity.

From a marketing perspective one may say that is a brilliant ploy; but is it really?

Much has been written to compare two extremes of marketing; mass marketing verses niche marketing.

Mass marketing has being likened to throwing out a big net in the hope that you will catch a few fish, while niche marketing is compared to casting a fishing rod into a specific school of fish.

Niche marketing targets a specific group of people with specific characteristics that make them more susceptible to your product (e.g. diapers adverts to expectant mothers).

The only problem with the term ‘‘niche’’ is that it gives the idea of a very small pool. Sometimes this is the case, but it is still possible to have a large sized niche (think how many children are born every year that would need diapers).

Where the niche grows bigger more mass media is used to get the attention of the market; and the terms mass and niche overlap and become murky.

Rather than the terms mass and niche I would rather have you consider the ideas of blanket and relational.

Blanket marketing targets everyone. Big television adverts, billboards, flyers into everyone’s post-boxes and car windows; those are blanket marketing tools. You are trying to grab everyone’s attention. I choose to make coffee during commercial breaks on television, I close my windows to the flyer people, and I am too focused on driving to bother about the billboards.

The clutter of blanket marketing annoys me and I filter most of it out. The nature of the human mind is that it filters anything that is perceives as superfluous, meaning that in effort to penetrate this barrier you need to flood us with more and more and more adverts.
Relational marketing is more targeted. It is advertising to a specific group of people who already show an interest in your product or who may be interested in your product.

It requires research, thought, and effort. You have to know your market; you have to study your revenue and the people who bring it to you.

You have to know people. It involves building a relationship with a group of people, gaining their trust, by doing so you get permission to market to them.

Changing the ringing tone on every cell phone on a network to an advert, without warning people or telling them how to get rid of it is not permission; that is abuse. It is also incredibly stupid when the majority of people dialling those numbers already use your product.

Know where the money comes from. Let me introduce you to Benson. Benson is probably my most favourite waiter in the world.

He knows my name and he treats me like royalty even though I am not a big spender. He knows the value of my repeat custom.

He also knows that a hundred cups of coffee over the year may add up to more value than one big spend per annum.

When he tells me about a special I listen because, well, he knows me. I have been in too many restaurants where the waiters chase the one off big spenders at the expense of repeat custom. I have been in many businesses like that too.

You need to have systems in place to identify your clients that you can turn into your group to market to.

Then you have to create the systems to develop relationships with them, to keep them satisfied and keep them coming back.

How different would you do things if I told you that you would only have a hundred clients this entire year that would spend money at your establishment, but that if you treated them well they would keep coming back, and more importantly, they would tell all their friends (people who are just like them) about it next year?

How would you keep track of them? How would you reach out to them and market to them? Which brings us back to the meme.

Memes are not mass driven really, they are relational driven.

They appeal to people with similar interests and tastes. My friends send me computer gaming memes because they know I will appreciate them, they don’t send me aeronautical ones because I would have no idea what they are talking about.

• E-mail: [email protected]