These days it's not easy to develop successful e-Commerce & Digital Marketing strategies.
We often have the feeling that we have completely lost sight of our customers. Where are they hiding?
With the hyper-fragmentation of Mass Media, Social Media, the popularity of Gaming's virtual worlds, and relentless changes in consumer habits driven by technology, finding our "targets" is much like the famous childrens' book by Martin Handford, "Where's Waldo?".
The change from the Sender-to-Receiver paradigm in Communication, now obsolete and replaced by the New Paradigm, "Network", makes many advertisers feel dizzy and lost. When we explain to our clients the premise of the "Cluetrain Manifesto", that Markets are Conversations occuring 24/7 in a non-stop "matrix" of interconnected consumers, their eyes tend to glaze over at once.
The "Chaos Theory" comes to Marketing. They feel overwhelmed.
It's for this reason that we have been using the figure of "Wally" (his name in Spain) as a shorthand way to focus our clients' attention on the importance of their most profitable customers. Wally is our way to simplify (and remember) the famous Pareto Principle: that 20% of your customers will cause 80% of your sales.
Of course, that is a generalization: most advertisers have a series of important clusters or target groups.
Still, Wally is an important resource that aids many of them, as well as students who attend Paul's classes and conferences, to focus scarce budgets, resources, time and headcount on precisely those customers who drive the future of a Brand and its company.
Stay tuned: we will be talking much more about our friend Wally in coming posts!
Photo credits: "Waldo", Copyright by his author Martin Handford