:: The Park Paradigm ::

Markets for the Digital Generation

JP pointed me towards a very interesting post by John Sviokla on how the requirements for succesful marketing are changing. It’s a long post but worth the read. At the risk of these nuggets being shorn of a lot of insight and power out of context, these are a few points I found particularly useful:

Product is still vital, but the service wrappers around product, and the ability to have that product be easy to purchase is more critical than ever.

The remix [of the 4P’s of marketing] is from Place to Presence; from Promotion to Persuasion; from Positioning to Preference; from Price (static) to Price (dynamic); and from Product to Personalization. These are the key elements of the new marketing remix.

The question senior managers need to ask themselves is, in this new world, in which information flows freely, and all customers can actively search for my product or service, and compare competitors and substitutes: Are we first in line? Are we in all the places we should be where people are searching for products and services? Do we have a presence in these new marketplaces and marketspaces? Or are we still lashed to offering our marketing and persuasive efforts to customer when they come to our distribution, store, or place of advertising?

When you are selling dematerialized goods (as opposed to physical goods) - such as financial products and services - this framework is probably even more germane.

*Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak 1964 (not sure exactly how to link this in but a great book nonetheless!)

Share This

In today’s FT, John Kay writes an interesting and mostly sensible op/ed piece on carbon market making a more general point about the pitfalls of markets created by legislative fiat. There was however one passage that jarred in my opinion:

[with reference to traded markets in carbon] …So instead of a simple mechanism for transferring credits between businesses, we have an online, real-time market in which the price of carbon fluctuates wildly to the benefit of day traders and the detriment of long-run guidance on investment.

So an ‘online, real-time market’ is a bad thing??? Call me old-fashioned but I thought the whole point of markets as a price discovery mechanism was to encourage the wideness most heterogeneous group of traders possible as the greater the participation, the higher the quality of the price signal over time. Is he suggesting that the oil market should forgo anything but producers selling to end users? This ‘I-am-for-markets-as long-as-I-can-dictate-the-outcome-ahead-of-time’ attitude is baffling to me. Like democracy as long as the electorate picks the ‘right’ candidate. Doesn’t work for me. (Excess) volatility (in the carbon market) is just a symptom of its immaturity and a lack of breadth of participants. And I hardly doubt that any corporate is making (and changing) investment decisions daily on the back of an end-of-day mark to market of their traded inputs (be they carbon, oil, or interest or FX rates, etc.)

Share This

Interesting graph published alongside FT’s commentary on the drought trade yesterday:

Gladwell fans will point to a tipping point having been reached last year, with growth continuing to be exponential this year again.

Share This