club catalyst. Going for the Big Buy

Et tu Brutus.

Do you remember that irresistibly cute girl in the metro you coyly eyed last week? And that mink coat (animal rights activists, pardon!) you promised to indulge yourself with?

Surely, you bought that home theatre that you had planned to pick up from the mall last weekend.

Sorry, did you just say you can’t remember anything?

Me neither!

Honey, we shrunk the text Ladies, gents – welcome to a world of hyper multi-taskers. We multi-chat, multi-text and multi-friend, so much so that it is indeed rare that we do only one thing at a time. But that’s not all.

Add generous portions of other chronic symptoms of modern life – time and attention-deficit, a virtual tsunami of confounding choices plus a desire for instant gratification and what you end up with is a new-age customer that is highly impatient, whimsical and capricious.

Twitter was the first to decode these new-age customers and understand their racing pulse. Which is why it asked an innocuous, frugal and innocent question – “What’s happening?” – but dared us to answer in 140 characters or less. The rest, as they say, is history. Suddenly our world was abridged. Shakespeare would roll in his grave, as literary prose and sound argument were sacrificed at Twitter’s twin altars of speed and brevity.

But Twitter’s short-message format worked marvels of instant gratification.

Tweets rang around the world, were shared, mentioned and re-tweeted millions of times trending globally across continents. To the select few, Twitter even offered a higher order of instant gratification in the form of crowning 15 minutes of fame, instant acclaim and celebrity-hood.

A dinosaur in my mirror! Caught unawares and flummoxed by the changed behaviour of their audience most traditional marketers are being forced to introspect as they can see a dinosaur staring back when they peek into the mirror.

Simply put, their once-loyal audience is no longer turned on by the classic marketing drip model and funnel theory of AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Instead, new-age customers believe in fast-forwarding their digital journeys from awareness to acquisition in the same breath, without even a whistlestop tour of elements such as interest, desire or its brethren, consideration and preference. In between they indulge and busy themselves with posting a range of content in the form of comments, tweets and posts in social media thus influencing choices made by other customers down the line.

Buy or bye-bye! Fishing is a great benchmark for marketing to emulate. A fisherman “reels the fish in on a single tug of the line” rather than asking his catch if she is “interested” and if she has “considered” options or has various competing “preferences”.

It seems that inspired by fishing, Twitter is turning the wheels on another revolution. It has decided to deep-seed a ‘Buy’ button within tweets. Through this calibrated move, Twitter is reaching out to define a large role for itself in the business ecosystem. By doing so, it is shifting forward and taking a giant leap from cheap “Likes/Shares” to worthy “buys”.

After all, what is the point of a like and its surrounding buzz if it fails to translate into a business transaction? And this is where we are starting to see a bevy of new-age brands with a digital heritage question the staus quo of traditional marketing and walk-a-new-talk confidently.

These brands believe in a progressive journey where they put conscious effort behind moving a customer from watching and liking stuff to getting the customer to say the three magic words: I love you. Only, the difference here is that the customer’s proclamation is in a binary format coded in 16-digit credit-card statements!

But what a wonderful, exciting, socially addictive experience potentially lies ahead with Twitter and the fraternity of likeminded brands aiming to extend a friendly conversation over social media smoothly into an e-commerce sale!

This will be a win-win as customers who would have bounced off now have an opportunity to “buy what they Like” without bothering to revisit, recall (that didn’t work!) or repeat the purchase journey all over again before we end up with, “Sorry, did you just say you can’t remember anything?”

Last word Businesses that are no longer content with merely stimulating customers but insist on going on to close the purchase steps will thrive as they will create pools of revenue where none existed previously. As for the rest, they may well decay in years to come. For they will discover that a customer who did not buy said bye bye!

So, the new brief to social media should be to action its Likes. What next, you ask? Want to move the needle from instant sales to rapid order fulfilment?

Enter: Drones laden with your order now buzzing on a window near you ...

This changes everything. Again.

(DIRECTOR AND CMO, MAX LIFE INSURANCE)

COMMENT NOW