After spending quite some time now figuring out where Qwids can fit into the marketplace here in Sweden, I recently happened across an article called: “Social media marketing’ is completely useless – but it could be a lot better”
This article (By Samuel Scott) impacted me greatly and appeared to somewhat reaffirm my personal thoughts around engagement on social media. In the article he repeatedly shows us how people do not have any interest in engaging with brands; providing a comical example in the form of a real life situation.
“imagine yourself entering a supermarket. Ask random people – normal people, not marketers – if they want to “have a relationship” with any of the products in their shopping carts. They’ll probably punch you in the face for being a pervert. (Due credit: Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman’s “Refrigerator Test” was the inspiration for this example.)”
If people do not, and likely will not, engage with brands in the social media sphere then the author recommends his solution is simply to:
“treat social media platforms merely as new, additional channels over which marketers can choose to do traditional marketing activities.”
For me this feels a little ‘one step forward, two steps back’ He sights the Lexus hoverboard commercial as a great example. “That is not ‘social media marketing’ – it is doing brand advertising over social media channels.” he says.
The thing is; being from a skateboarding background myself and being a little tech geeky too, while the video was entertaining and as the author of the article states it had 14m views, how much of that brand advertising converted in to orders for Lexus? and how much of it disappointed viewers when they discovered; as stated in one of the top comments on the youtube video:
“They aren’t marketing the board. It’s never going into mass production. It’s a geek tech advertising for Lexus cars. It’s using superconductor technology that has been around for a century.”
Imagine for a second (as did the author of the article in his supermarket example above) that next time you interacted with a car salesperson at your local car dealer, they navigated you away from the cars and over to a shelf with an extremely beautifully designed quadcopter, the salesperson takes you outside and shows you what it’s capable of by flying it around.
As you stand there watching the car salesperson fly the super cool quadcopter around the skies with great ease and dexterity, at which point are you thinking – i really need that quadcopter, how can i buy one? – and at which point are you thinking – i am sure i came here for a car, what is happening right now?