How two companies overcome the biggest challenge in marketing (repeatable success stories)

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world, and we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us… no company is.

So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.”  – Steve Jobs describing the biggest problem that marketing squares off against, even today in 1997.

It hasn’t gotten better for marketing departments in the last 13 years — this problem has gotten much worse. The world we live in is far noisier and far more complex with every passing year, and this trend is continuing.

As our society progresses technologically, the amount of things vying for our attention grows exponentially. It gets progressively harder for marketers to get our attention; to tell us the stories about their brand that they want us to remember. Today,consumer attention is currently split across so many places that it’s even harder to do this on any one channel.

This trend works to decrease the value of marketing contact databases across time. People are paying less attention to their inboxes over time, less attention to their feed readers, less attention to ad spaces — so the relationships you build with consumers on any channel decays naturally. Consumers are moving to Facebook, Twitter and Mobile right now, but in time they’ll move on from there too.

Consumer attention is no longer captive — it floats free, between a flotilla of competing locations. Welcome to the Splinternet.

Marketing in the Splinternet era requires making sure your paid and earned media is unified to tell effective stories to your target audience across multiple channels.

Investments will be required in building audience relationships with consumers on multiple channels. Because we’re in the splinternet, each new channel you invest in acts as a hedge against the eventual dwindling attention in pre-existing channels.

I believe in the future of marketing, and embrace opportunities like this every day at Involver for marketing ourselves, developing our products, and educating our customers. In that vein, here are two examples you can emulate from companies who have developed fantastic marketing campaigns that embrace splinternet marketing: Dropbox and the Golden State Warriors.

Case Study:  Dropbox /Free

Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically. The team there has created an amazing product. The marketing campaigns to establish relationships, collect information, and create word of mouth have also been fantastic.

Dropbox just launched /Free a microsite that rewards you with more storage space if you decide to connect your social accounts, follow them on twitter, write down the reason why you love the product, or share that reason with your friends.

This demonstrates a fantastic way to incentivize the creation of new audience relationships or the activation of brand advocates in new channels. Check it out now at www.dropbox.com/free

Case Study:  Golden State Warriors’ New Logo

In a campaign that ended up winning a Markie award, The Golden State Warriors unveiled their new logo in a scavenger hunt format.

Users every day answered a question on one of the team’s social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Flickr account). Correct answers unlocked a new part of the logo image. This campaign lead to a 66% increase in web traffic as well as new relationships across the warriors social outlets. Read more about this and other golden state warrior’s campaigns.