Some time ago David Ogilvy said that a brand is built from the sticks and stones that you leave for people to pick up and discover.
That's more true than ever in a world of proliferating interactive media. Yet the implications of market penetration in 2010 are considerably more difficult when you consider that 40 years ago just four or five core channels would have reached the majority of your market. To achieve the same coverage today you would need to have a presence across hundreds of core channels.
Marketing channel strategy can no longer be based on the definition of a minimum number of channels that give the maximum coverage. It follows therefore that you need a very large number of sticks and stones to address your market. Or do you?
New research from The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) proposes the idea of Internet Villages, comprising a network of sites that represents most people's home turf.
'There is an intuitive assumption that the internet widens our communities. However, the reality is that people don’t particularly behave like this. Think about how you use websites: do you go to new ones each day? Do you regularly explore the web, or do you stick to the tried and tested sites? Most of us choose to belong to particular ‘villages’, small clusters of people with whom we regularly communicate, and use a small number of websites that we visit frequently.'
A 'village' typically may consist of portals, destination sites and social media. How you engage with consumers needs therefore to vary in tone and execution from street to street; from established forms of advertising and demand generation to short informational forms eg Twitter, to marketing that doesn't feel like marketing and is easily copyable - for word of mouth and viral eg Facebook, myspace.
Understanding the composition of these villages, and tuning in to your prospective customers, is an efficient model to determine where to leave your sticks and stones, as long as you hang around enough to keep listening in, and adapt to the lessons of the feedback loop.
