Remember the book by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm? Published in 1999, the book focused on marketing and selling high-tech products to mainstream customers. It deals with the chasm between the early adopters and the early majority on the product adoption curve. Smart companies are able to get the innovators and early adopters behind their products first. Those early adopters heavily influence the consumption of the early majority who are key in making a product profitable.
Now, marketing is getting behind this concept as we seek to find the most effective, efficient and authentic way to influence consumers in today's social media-centered world. Mark Earls introduced the idea of Herd Behavior while Seth Godin just introduced his version with the book Tribes. Both operate off the same basic concept that Geoffrey Moore wrote about: Engage the innovators and early adopters with your product marketing, allowing them to morph and change it as they see fit, so they will influence and lay groundwork for wider adoption among the majority.
Advertisers want consumers to listen to their message, but what they really need to do is to get consumers to adopt their idea. To do that, propagation is needed, not just messaging. Marketers need to look at everything as a launch. Whether its a campaign launch or a product launch, we all need to plan for early adopter engagement before mass audience engagement. With the increasing pressure on advertising ROI, it makes sense.
OMMA magazine published an article detailing how the HBO series True Blood was able to propagate their content and message before the launch of the show. I'll dissect that in greater detail in a future post. For more on planning for propagation, visit Griffin Farley's blog: propagationplanning.com. He's a terrific student of it and has gathered some great commentary and examples.
