Getting kids to eat their vegetables is, well, just about as hard as getting consumers to care about something boring. You can do deep discounting and promotions: the marketing equivalent of trying to get the airplane-spoonful to land in the kids mouth. But inevitably that erodes the value of the product. So how do you get a consumer to eat their vegetables and like it?
My first experience with marketing candy vs. vegetables was in college, where, as the President for TiE – an entrepreneurship organization – I poured 15 hours a week into creating and marketing events around entrepreneurship only to get 10-20 attendees to a given event. At the time, I was also the Director of Marketing for Indus, an organization known for events that features singing, dancing and drinking. I remember vividly the uxtaposition of two events: The first was the TiE Conference, which featured a not-yet-famous Peter Theil and garnered just a hundred attendees. A few weeks later, I hosted Indus Culture, show which garnered almost 5000 attendees.
My next experience was at Microsoft, where I worked so, so hard, to get attention, studying social media strategies, creating viral user-generated YouTube videos, word-of-mouth marketing stunts, to almost-no-avail. Sure, we were making billions in revenue, but consumer engagement on social was virtually nonexistent. Compare that to my time as Head of Marketing for Kno, a scrappy tablet-maker, where within a few weeks of putting-up a video we made of a “lego robot’ testing the Kno’s touch-screen we had garnered nearly 30,000 views and been picked up by Gizmodo.
From these experiences, I’ve developed three strategies to get consumers to eat their vegetable:
First, you can’t cover broccoli in cheese. Don’t even try.
After years of noodling on it at Microsoft, I realized that we couldn’t buy love for Office 2007 with Zune giveaways or sweepstakes to win a Vespa (yes, I actually tried both of those). Seth Godin would argue this is the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. Instead Godin argues we want to be in the business of marketing Purple Cows: remarkable products whose value is baked right in.
Second, Employ other Persuasion Strategies Besides Discounting
Discounts certainly do have the potential to erode the value of your product. Consumers can see through tactics like “limited time offer.” Instead, employ some of the other promotional nudges described in Robert Cialdini’s foundational book on the topic such as scarcity and loss aversion. At Microsoft, two years into our campaign to grow Microsoft Office’s market share among college students who were turning to Google Apps, we found success with an end-of-year campaign targeting soon-to-be graduates reminding them this was their last chance to get a student discount on tools they’d need throughout their job search. This campaign proved to have one of the strongest CACs of any we ran in those two years.
Third, niche-down and find a segment, however narrow, that’s deeply passionate about what you do
They say “you can’t choose your family.” Not so with customers. Go find the people who really care about your product already – who already get why it’s worth $120 instead of $60. After leading three back-to-school campaigns in three years at Microsoft, I had given up on me-too campaigns that tried to compete with Apple’s iLife suite head-on by marketing pictures, music, and movies.
For my fourth and most successful back to school initiative, we packaged campaigns not around a student’s lifestyle but around a student’s career success. We did Free Resume Consultations with professionals, we did interview tip battlecards, and did a national sponsorship of the high school organization Future Business Leaders of America and it’s college business fraternity counterpart Phi Beta Lambda.