Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Marketing 4.0

Since marketing is around we went through three stages of marketing.

Marketing 1.0
Product-Centric Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
one-to-many transactions

Marketing 2.0
Consumer-orientated Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
One-to-one relationship

Marketing 3.0
Value-driven Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
Many-to-many collaboration

Marketing 3.0 is using social and crowd collaboration to promote products, However the next step is already on the market, which could be defined marketing 4.0

Marketing 4.0 is localized virtual marketing. The goal is to engage the consumer with virtual goods to get their opinion on products before they are ready for market. But at the same time to get the consumer attention in their one little virtual world.
More and more people are escaping the real world to play games like farmville or to be someone else in second life.
Many years the brands ignored the virtual life of consumers, but finally companies like General Mills are taking these worlds more serious.
ThinkEquity is estimating a revenue for virtual goods as high as $2 billion this year. The beauty on virtual goods is micro payments, usually they cost only between $1 and $4, which is small enough for impulse buy, but the real killer is the branding.
Take a game like Tiger Woods golf for the iPhone, why should the user not be able to buy a Nike Square driver for a few bugs to see how good his virtual player is performing with this club. For each fairway hit with the club, the user will get points, and these points will result into discount, if the user want to buy the real Nike Square driver.
This is marketing 4.0. H&M, Volvo, General Mills and others have already discovered this opportunity and spending together on Marketing 4.0 over $50 Million this year.
In the virtual world, users are represent themselves as what they want to be or, play things they have fun, these are the best places to catch the users interests and to sell branded products. Combined with marketing 3.0 and social, we as marketer get the full 360 degrees view of our consumers.
John Doe might play farmville in a cafe close to publix. General Mills could send via farmville coupons for their broccoli at publix.
Polo Ralph Lauren could test new jeans style in second life, to see how the consumer does accept the new style. The new Jeans might go in production when enough people have bought the jeans in the virtual world. This helps branding new products and save a lot of money for production of things people might not buy.


- Posted using My iPad

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