It’s all over #SxSW: if you had not noticed: humans become more connected than ever. Humans look at their smart phone more than 150 times a day. Gary Vaynerchuck sees mobile tech as an extension of the human body, and the phone gateway to the web as an extension to the human brain.
Still, it looks like brands have the outermost difficulties in reaching their consumers on those handheld devices.
Bonin Bough from Oreo (yes, the cookies) told me in the excellent Paypal Bloggerlounge that it had to do with the fact that brands still play the classical media game. They’re still pushing the message, 1998 style. He sees the stunning success of Oreo and Cadbury (two brands he steers) in the fact that the whole strategy is aimed at reaching the consumer on his favorite platform, and on his mobile. “We’re done with offline and online strategies. There is only one strategy: reach to the consumer with a relevant and engaging message, regardless of the platform, regardless of the medium, regardless whether it is on- or offline.”
Guy Kawasaki believes that brands should interact more with their consumers, than flatly market to them. The author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions is a notorious evangelist of Google+, and not a huge fan of Facebook’s recent “pay to reach your own fans” strategy: “lot of brands have a sore feeling now looking at massive budgets to reach their own fellowship.”
Bonin Bough agrees: “While we have one of the biggest deals with Facebook, Facebook is not our strategy, nor our platform. It is part of a vital ecosystem, aimed at interaction. We need to be able to understand exactly what makes our costumers tick. Provide them with content that they care about, and start an engagement. A conversation. A liaison. We need data to find out what it is that will make the person convinced to trying our cookie. Mind you, once a person tastes… the game is played. They will love it. There is no use converting through engagement if you have a crappy product. The taste of our product is half the work.”
