How to Spend Marketing and Ad Budgets
Listening to: BBC Radio 1
This is an article
on spending money building a community, rather than buying ad space. It is another
one of these thought provoking articles. You might not agree with the extreme end
of what is be advocated, but there are some interesting ideas:
I’ve worked for companies that spent their entire ad and marketing budget on making
their existing users deliriously happy. Let’s say your marketing and/or ad budget
doesn’t have the same legs it used to, or that you’ve just decided to make a change.
Or maybe you don’t even have a marketing budget. Is there something you can do that
might be more creative and, in many cases today, at least–if not more–effective?
I guess one of the things that I like about building a community of users is that
it might be a very effective way of combating counterfeit copies of your
product. If you’re able to build a strong community around something and you’re able
to foster the right attitudes then people are less likely to accept stolen versions
of the product… because entry into the community might require ownership of the
genuine article (I’m thinking of car collectors clubs where kit cars are seen as being
less than the genuine article (the kit cars have their own clubs with their own value
systems… and I don’t consider kit cars as being counterfeits but it’s the closest
analogy I could come up with)).
