BlogTippings - July

Happy July BlogTippings!

BlogTippings represent my interpretation of Easton Ellsworth's BlogTipping day! Here goes:

An intense, must-read: David Wolfe's Ageless Marketing blog and his series on "What Marketers Need to Know About Ageing Boomers." There's priceless gold in there that puts marketing into perspective.

I learned about Ageless Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts and Minds of the New Customer Majority and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation while attending the first M2W conference in Chicago on marketing to women in 2005.

Millennials Rising offered an historical perspective on the roles and characteristics of generations, their cyclicality and how generations learn from one another. Ageless Marketing sensitized me to going beyond demographic segmentations and developing universal value-based appeals. Why? Because for the first time ever, our developed societies have more people over the age of 40 than ever before. Over 40s represent a customer majority, and it's a wonderful thing!

Combine with that a population that becomes increasingly female as it ages, and all of a sudden so many marketplace trends make sense. Trading up, experiential marketing, creating memorable retail experiences, web 2.0, the increased interest in communities and authenticity, the search for trustworthiness, delighting the consumer, building relationships.... Consumers are more comfortable than ever before with being who they are, and they look for it in marketing.

Many of the principles of value-based, ageless marketing are at work in the blogosphere - we celebrate how much we learn from one another. We grow as a result of it. We benefit from the wisdom of the communities we belong to. We take part in amazing projects... It is so much greater than the sum of our individual parts!

So, do read David Wolfe's [ongoing] series about What Marketers Need To Know About Ageing Boomers: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part V - continued, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII. I expect part IX to be published any minute now.

An added bonus from David's series: we have something to look forward to in that Pine and Gilmore [remember The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage?] will soon be introducing Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want!

An example of the above-mentioned principles is BrandingWire's first brand project. A posse of top notch marketing pundits, in fact, the best of the best - experience them all on one page at The BrandingWire PageFlakes - offers fascinating individual takes on a small coffee company in need of expert branding advice: BrandingWire All Together Now. I anticipate many stimulating projects out of this group!

Finally, these two bloggers regularly challenge how we perceive consumers. Imagine transforming a lousy experience - in flooring, for example - into a positive simply by figuring out How to be Different - as Ryan Karpeles describes. Or, consider truly looking at the world from your customer's perspective as Becky Carrol illustrates via Customer Lenses. After all, "Customers are always wearing a different “hat”, or looking through a personal prism. I may be a businesswoman and blogger now, but in 30 minutes, I may be picking up the kids with my “mom” hat on my head and trying to decide what is for dinner."

Imagine that. A customer lens might lead us to better appreciate where our customers are coming from and going to - literally and figuratively - to then craft a better marketing experience with them.

Wow! I wonder what a really fun flooring retail experience would look like....

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