Martini marketing

Want to reach your audience any time, any place, anywhere? You need to think ‘martini marketing’.

I was at the Online Marketing Show last week, with my friend Suzanne. Some interesting presentations, various people to catch up with and, well, some cocktails to be drunk.

One session that caught my interest, for buzzword value alone, contained the phrase: “a shift from megaphone marketing to martini marketing”. That’s in the sense of any time, any place, anywhere. Obviously you have to be old enough to remember the strapline from those 1970s/80s branded vermouth ads to get the reference.

The presentation, by Richard Edwards, co-founder of Zetab, was entitled ‘Tell it like it is: Pull, don’t Push’. The thesis goes as follows.

People today think in a Googlesque way. They’re choosing how, when and where they want to access content. They want to be in control. They feel like they are in control. The old model was top-down and linear:

content/advertising -> consumer -> action

This was likened in the presentation to ‘Punch and Judy’ marketing – i.e. bashing people over the head long enough and hard enough with your marketing message. People are much more resistant today to that approach. Today’s new marketing model starts with the consumer and is cyclical:

consumer action -> consume content -> brand content -> consumer action

It’s a shift from megaphone marketing to martini marketing.

What does this mean? It means go where your customer is. Consumers today are looking for products, content and information to consume, rather than having these things pushed at them. They are congregating around interest groups and social networks. They have niche interests that you can tap into, so long as your content can be found easily and is of interest to those groups. The content they find and consume contains a brand message, and possibly a call to action or marketing message that leads to further consumer action. And so it goes.

For my money, I like a gin martini, preferably Bombay Sapphire, served with an olive. Just so you know.