NewsLine Column: There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom

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The rules of marketing are starting to be re-written, claims Jean-Paul Edwards, head of media future at Manning Gottlieb OMD, with marketers now needing to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach and communicate with consumers in a much more bespoke way…

In 1959 the Physicist Richard P Feynman gave a speech entitled ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’. It is held by many to be the starting pistol of the nano-technology age. His postulation was that we should be able to manage matter on such a small scale that we would be able minimise our technology and information storage down to size that had hither to not been imagined. Some of Feynman’s predictions are now starting to come true as nano-technology starts to find industrial and commercial applications. We will see all sorts of wonderful new technologies based on this theory over the next twenty years.

I think we have a lot to learn from Feynman’s ideas. In media and marketing we like to think big. We like big media that deliver mass audiences, the bigger the better. To make any money our products should be number one in terms of market share, our products should be suitable to all. It is far more efficient to sell 1 product to millions of people than millions of products to individuals. These are the principles of 20th century mass production and mass marketing. In the 21st century the rules are starting to be re-written.

It is a demand driven rather than a supply led economy. We are wealthier than ever, we have more choice than ever, we as consumers are more demanding than ever and our demands are particular to our needs. We have so much choice that we do not buy or view or choose because something is merely available but because it is the best for our individual needs.

In a limited choice environment such as a bookstore sales are dominated by the best seller list. As a limited number of titles can be stocked we migrate towards the most popular because they probably don’t have exactly what you want and even if they did you would probably be unaware of it. It is a different story online, half of Amazon.com sales come from outside of not its top 10 but outside of it’s 130,000 titles! This is a staggering statistic. It means that the true value of Amazon lies not in its capability to ship the same product to millions of people but in the ability to ship the most niche of products to those people in a cost efficient manner. A global market place means that even the most thinly spread of needs can now be catered for in an economic manner.

Paid for placement search terms on-line, is another example of the phenomenon. Most of the money made by the search engines is not in the big vague terms like mortgage or car. It is made in the plethora of tiny targeted terms such as ‘plumber in Camberwell’ or specific part numbers. It is no longer good enough to cast ones net wide with a one size fits all message instead we need to anticipate as many needs as possible and communicate in a bespoke way. Technology led solutions are needed to avoid potentially huge inefficiencies.

There is plenty of room at the bottom of communications and markets. A radical shift in terms of our approach, strategies, skills and metrics is needed to take advantage of this opportunity.

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