I was at the GE Chief Marketing Officer Summit this past week, and Professor Ranjay Gulati gave a great talk on price competition and disruption. He pointed out that most companies ask customers, “what do you like about my product,” as opposed to focussing on their needs or underlying issues. He used one of my favorite examples: salad in a bag, which I have blogged about in the past. Gulati pointed out that the lettuce industry did not come up with bagged salad, a product which sells for 12x the amount of the raw ingredients. The lettuce industry was too busy asking “tell me what you like about my lettuce,” not “what are the issues in your home life,” “tell me about your cooking,” “why don’t you use more lettuce?” Open ended questions.
People don’t use more lettuce because of:
- Time
- People don’t like getting their hands dirty
- People like an assortment in their lettuce that a single head does not provide
Lettuce in a bag solves these problems and is apparently worth 12x.
The other theme of the conference which was of particular interest to our business was the interest of major brands (Dell, GE, Cisco etc.) in promoting their own content. With social already widely accepted as a required marketing strategy, the next frontier is content.
GE’s CMO Beth Comstock opened the event by going so far as to say, that GE has content and data that it wants to share directly with its customers. When a battery technology that GE invented is in the media or is being passed around, GE wants to have its content surfaced and related.
This was an echo I heard from many CMOs. This isn’t easy, but it’s what brands want and that seems to me to be a reasonable request. They not looking to hijack or “own” the content conversation, just be part of it in a clearly labeled fashion, when contextual and relevant. These companies also throw off large volumes of content; it’s there in many cases, it’s just a challenge to properly identify, track, and promote the best of this content when relevant and non-intrusive.
With social firmly routed and brands and companies embedding themselves in on Twitter and Facebook, the next challenge is using these connections to share the right words, images, and videos.
It’s salad in a bag, and we’re working on it by allowing partners to install tracking code on their content (on microsites or anywhere that content lives) and automatically traffic the most viral (shared) pieces of content into places where it can get even more exposure. Using analytics to identify content and social to make it go viral.
Here’s some video of Jonah speaking at the conference:
