Marketers need to create platforms and distribute their brands throughout the community. The days of telling your customers and prospects what your brand means to them are over. You need to invite them to tell you what your brand means. And you need to listen and respond. That's what a platform can do. Break your brands down into their core assets and let consumers piece it back together in a way that's meaningful to them.
You can't possibly anticipate all the needs and nuances of every customer and prospect, but you can anticipate the fundamental needs. For Google, it's making decisions. For Apple, it's being cool. For Doritos, it's self-expression.
But what if you don't have $1 million to give to the person who created your ad - not to mention the millions required to buy 30 seconds of airtime on the Super Bowl? How can you encourage people to adopt your platform? Just as quality is more important than quantity in PageRank, size doesn't always matter when it comes to creating a platform.
Marketing is more than just advertising. Product development can be a powerful arrow in the marketing quiver. And product development is another area in which marketers can learn from Google.
What products can you create that will resonate with your customers and prospects? More importantly, what platforms can you create that will resonate? And, when it comes to advertising those products, what platforms can you create to design ads that will resonate? The truth is, you don't need a proprietary platform. Leverage existing platforms. Leverage Google. Search queries can be an incredibly powerful tool for deciding what products to create and what ads best support them. Google has many other platforms that enable marketers to tap the wisdom of crowds. Create a contest on YouTube for customers to upload testimonials. Create a blog using Blogger to solicit feedback. Create a mash-up with Google Maps or Google Earth to kick off a scavenger hunt.
What are you supposed to do on Google.com? Easy, right? Search. The big search box surrounded by white space beckons you to do one thing and one thing only. Search. When you first told someone else about Google, did you have to explain how to use it? No. How do you think Google became a verb? Simple. There's very little ambiguity. Google means search. Today, this seems like a no-brainer, but in 1998, this was a novel concept. At that time, the most popular Web sites more closely resembled newspapers, covering every inch of the page with content and ads.
What you were supposed to do on these sites was less clear. Read articles. Look at ads. Communicate with friends. There was one common goal, though. These Web sites wanted you to stay - maybe not on that particular page but definitely on that site. Contrast that with Google. Google doesn't want you to stay on its site. It wants you to leave. And what better way to hammer that idea home than to put a big box in the middle of the page with nothing else around it?
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