That headline was an example of click bait. It has little or nothing to do with the actual topic under discussion, but is something the writer knows will get clicks. In this case, absolutely no relevance. After you have clicked on the click bait, you are bound to be annoyed. But, I don’t care because your eyeballs have been captured. Do you know how Facebook et al measures ‘engagement’ with its advertising product? The technical term is ‘more than zero’. That is anything more than zero
g more than zero pixels, for more than zero milliseconds. That counts as a view.
And advertisers are charged for those views.
Back in bricks-and-mortar land, we have the same thing.
A really cool ‘brand’. Or a stunning fit-out. Funky music. Posters in the window that make grand lifestyle promises.
The problem starts when people ‘click’ and enter the store – and everything sucks from that point in. No service. Poor assortment. Meaningless pricing. Dodgy product quality. The stuff that really matters is missing and the customer leaves with a sour taste in the mouth.
It is in instances like these that good marketing works against us. We may catch the customer once, maybe twice. But unless we can fulfil the promises with an authentic offer that actually matches the brand, it will become increasingly harder and harder to capture the customer.
Even if we change and fix all of that; it is a matter of twice bitten, once shy.
One of the retail businesses that I admire most in Australia is Lowes Menswear. They have survived and prospered for more than a century – and at the core of that success is perfect congruence between brand promise and execution. They have resisted ‘image drift’ and just kept on executing those fundamentals straight out of the Retail 101 handbook.
In technology, we talk about a WYSIWYG program. In the ‘real’ world, What You See Is What You Get should also apply because that is how you earn (and keep) consumer trust.
And trust is the primary currency of any successful business; dollars are secondary.
You can trust me on that.
Dennis Price is now co-founder at www.yearone.solutions.
