Post2000

Mute Salesperson?

Can a mute salesperson be efficient? You got the basic idea, but the question refers to marketing and selling at every level. It is just simpler to visualise and exploit the analogy of a door-to-door salesperson.

What if after knocking at a door and having it opened, he or she at last stands before the potential buyer, but is speechless? What other tools would a good seller turn toward? Perhaps a wordless demo would be in order. After all, and according to the old dictum, actions speak louder than words. I'm afraid that in such a predicament our door-to-door salesperson would just have to start vacuuming the stoep.

Have you ever bought anything on the weight of the seller's words alone?

The same salesperson might decide to leave the vacuum cleaner with you - the potential buyer - for a week or two, then return to see if you aren't bowled over enough to spend good money obtaining it. Today this particular strategy is ubiquitous. Any web presence worth the name resorts to it. It is easier and faster to hook the potential customer with freeware, adware, nagware, shareware or demoware. Mind you, freeware isn't necessarily free. It's there either to place something of marketing importance on your computer (a spy, for example), or to convince you to buy a more robust version of the product, or to at least speak of it at the next session of your knitting club.

That would be our salesperson leaving you with a vacuum cleaner that, using hidden sensors, measures the percentage or thickness of dust on your floors against a given standard, then tells the salesperson. "0.35 inches of dust at 12:01 on 14 July 2005!" Or the vacuum cleaner could suck up dust quite well, only to keep telling you each time how many kilos af acarians are living happily on your floors; "0.098 kg of acarians at 3:23 pm on 12 October 2005!" You'd be advised that for a mere $29.95, you could get the Pro Version which of course sucks up acarians as well. Or the vacuum cleaner could suck up both dust and acarians marvelously, but only for the first two weeks, after which it is restrained.

Of course, the poor salesperson would run the risk of your finding and neutralising the hidden switch that either prevents the cleaner from vacuuming acarians, or blocks it after the first two weeks, or does any number of restraining actions. The law would have to get involved. Money would have to be spent tracking vacuum bandits who, apart from tinkering with the machines themselves, are doing their own door-to-door to sell fully unrestricted machines, or "crackz" to unlock cripple-chines, nag-chines, demo-chines, free-chines, ad-chines or spy-chines embedded somewhere in your product. Or worse, giving the dreaded "crackz" away for free!

If the big guns are ready to spend big money hunting down those who sell or give away keys and other openers, is this mode of marketing and advertising worth it? In short, does this kind of marketing and advertising produce results? How much does the maker of such a product actually lose? After all, the product had to be made and in making it time and money had to be spent. Forget the vacuum cleaner. Imagine a carmaker giving you a car that works for two weeks only, before blocking all mechanisms. You wouldn't have a car then, but the carmaker would have lost both the time and the money spent making it.

What if after knocking at a door and having it opened, a salesperson stands before the potential buyer, but is suddenly speechless? What other tools would a good seller turn toward? Perhaps a wordless demo, and nothing else, would be in order. Nothing else. As we said, the dictum is actions speak louder than words, not half-actions speak louder than words. So the door-to-door salesperson vacuums your stoep like a charm and goes on to the next house, if you're not interested. Full-stop. Many software makers are jumping on this bandwagon and following the likes of Macromedia whose star editor, Dreamweaver®, used to be shareware but is today strictly demoware.

Have you ever bought anything on the weight of the product's performance alone?

Viens gamin… gamin ?

Suite à une enquête menée par le MediaGuardian, Universal Records UK a du interrompre une campagne de street marketing, ou plutôt de school marketing. Les enfants étaient enrôlés par la maison de disque pour distribuer des flyers et autres affiches dans les écoles pour promouvoir divers boy’s bands. Les « school chairmen » recevaient en échange des produits promotionnels en fonction de leurs efforts.
Une gamine de 13 ans avait reçu un frisbee et des badges en cadeau.

Pour une fois qu’on leur donnait quelque chose pour leur formidable boulot… En marketing on les appelle la cible tridimensionnelle : acheteur (avec 39 EUR d’argent de poche par mois pour leurs loisirs) / prescripteurs (vis-à-vis de leurs communautés mais surtout vis-à-vis des adultes et parents) / futurs consommateurs (of course). Et en plus, ils ne téléchargent même plus...

Update 30 déc. 2005 :
Sophie me signale l'article qui a déclenché l'enquête : Lessons in hard sell
Par ailleurs deux bons ouvrages sur le sujet :

• Nos enfants otages des grandes marques de Alissa Quart (remarquable), son résumé sur le site de l'Expansion.
• Brandchild de Martin Lindstrom (très pragmatique).

Une Audi dans ma clef USB

L'agence britannique TwoForty a eu la bonne idée d'envoyer des portes-clés USB brandés Audi aux principaux prospects de la nouvelle A4... le paquet contient une jolie clé USB avec la présentation du véhicule, un CD de drivers et un leaflet...

Combien de ports USB sur la nouvelle Audi ?

Le web bientôt en papier

Le dimanche 28 novembre 2004 EBay a distribué 23 millions d’exemplaires de son premier catalogue imprimé (32 pages). Si ce n’est pas une première (Amazon et Yahoo ayant déjà tenté l’opération, ou Pixmania en Europe…) pour conquérir des clients réticents au commerce electronique, la spécificité des produits fait la différence.

EBay a choisi de promouvoir les produits les plus coûteux, qui peuvent nécessiter dans le processus d’achat, une matérialisation au moins sur le papier.

L’opération d’un montant de $500.000 devrait générer 4 fois plus de ventes en ligne.

Quelques liens : sur IHT, sur News.com, le catalogue Ebay.

Bientôt post2000.net dans les kiosques ;)