Dumb Idea Now, Smart Idea Tomorrow?
If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably already heard about The HBR List, Harvard Business Review’s list of breakthrough ideas for 2007. And there are some great ideas there. But snuck in amongst the stunners is an astoundingly dumb idea. Today.
It’s called “Harry Potter Marketing,” and the gist is this: your brand matures with your customers. Instead of targeting your product at “women aged 25-35,” you target it at “Women born between 1970 and 1980.” The product, product messaging, and media mix all change to age with your target audience.
Now, if you’ve spent more than, say, a nanosecond in real-world marketing, you should have alarm bells jangling already. “Wait a minute, how the heck do I manage multiple age cohorts–maybe dozens or hundreds of them–over, say, a few decades?” you might say. Or you might be imagining the first meeting where your new CMO asks, “So let me get this straight–you’re actually moving the product AWAY from our current customer base?”
But wait. Let’s look at this dispassionately. Change can be a very, very good thing. The idea behind Harry Potter Marketing is that keeping customers is easier than finding new ones. And that’s a solid idea.
But.
And here’s the but. Have you ever worked in a marketing organization that is set up to execute 20-year plans? Let alone one with the management methodology, infrastructure, and discipline to evolve products based on assumptions, research, and feedback about what a current customer base needs as it ages?
Maybe this should be the model that we all shoot for, but in the age of the connected consumer, the conversation, the forum and the blog, I think that this model is a very, very tall order. One that is vulnerable the second a new CMO shows up and begins asking questions.
But but.
Tomorrow. Not too many years from now, human-equivalent computers will sit on desktops. Computers many hundreds of times more powerful than human minds will run corporate back-end systems. And at that point, Harry Potter Marketing may be manageable. Develop sophisticated aging algorithms into your plan, run it on the master marketing system, sit back and profit.
That is assuming, of course, this highly sophisticated software can anticipate the additional change that’ll be happening at the same time.
And that’s assuming we will be smart enough to listen.
