Speaking of how Overthinking Can Kill Advertising, I just saw this Kit Kat ad celebrating the epic 11-hour Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. It’s a brilliant and simple execution that will hit magazines quickly enough that people will completely understand the message, that is if they know about that Wimbledon match.
That’s probably the one flaw with the quick-twitch advertising trend that’s hitting right now. There’s no way of knowing how many people know about a current event like the Wimbledon match. Still, I like the ballsy move. It’s completely aligned with the brand message of “Take a Break” and as long as you place the media in relevant mags like Sports Illustrated and ESPN, the ad should be a hit.
I love work like this, and all signs point to us seeing more of it. My own agency McCann Erickson responded quickly to their Mad Men reference when they posted a “Welcome, Sterling Cooper” message on their site. And big marketers like Unilever have caught as as well, like when Unilver shot multiple versions of their Dove Men+Care ads for the Super Bowl with Colts and Saints players. Luckily, one of those featured Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees that they were able to get on air right after the Saints won the Lombardi trophy.
Do you think this twitch advertising trend is good for brands?
I recently started working in Strategic Planning at McCann Erickson NY after 7 great months of doing much the same work at StrawberryFrog. We analyze consumer behavior, figure out a brand’s stance in the marketplace, consumer perception, and try to figure out where the opportunity is for our clients.
We’re inundated with data; some qualitative and some quantitative, some useful and some useless. Our job is to distill it, to simplify. We have to find that core idea. And it’s hard as hell.
As planners, we are in the know about just about everything happening culturally and our scope of understanding not only has to pass state lines but also international time zones. We have to understand everyone everywhere. I read a book or two a week. I read 3-4 magazines a week. I click tons of distracting links on Twitter and e-mail newsletters every week hour.
All of the best ideas in the history of advertising have been dead simple. Got Milk. The Best Job in the World. Hell, I’m not even going to bother naming all of the ones I know.
Dead simple advertising is inspiring, and I think it’s time to celebrate all of those campaigns that we admire for their utter simplicity and impact. Share your favorites in the comments below.
I was recently catching up with some old issues of Ad Age that I hadn’t gotten around to when I stumbled upon this article about Facebook’s hopes of taking geo-location to the mainstream. I have tons of reservations about geo-location services anyway, but this quote from Seth Goldstein blew my mind (and not trying to knock you Seth, you’re more than welcome to explain your point further in the comments section):
“People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising,” said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. “If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her.”
There seems to be this grand idea amongst some in social media circles that in order to prove the efficacy of the medium they must show how it completely abolishes everything about marketing and advertising that’s every been taught, practiced, and written about.
I personally think it’s counter-productive in getting people to take the field of “social media marketing” seriously. It’s just flat out pompous.
What integrated marketing across various channels provides is a ubiquity of message that in turn creates frequency and exposure at different points in the purchase decision process. The reason frequency is important in marketing is because consumers generally need multiple exposures to a product before trial. Basically, it has to be burned into your memory bank.
To be fair, Seth Goldstein is talking about a form of frequency here too, in that hopefully you’ll see all of your friends “checking in” at Mickey D’s for a Big Mac and be compelled to go get a Big Mac. But, what if Consumer X keeps seeing his friends talking about the new “Bacon Cheddar Chicken McBurger” sandwich but forgets to stop in because there was no billboard on the highway near the McDonalds advertising the sandwich.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested or previously exposed to it, there was just no message at that potential purchase time to remind him. So, yeah, multi-channel communication is still important.
And with geo-location in general, here’s where the math gets messy. Facebook is a social networking tool meant to connect friends and family that the general public understands. But as you get into more niche social services, the understanding and adoption wanes.
Twitter is still used by only about 7% of the population (not that it isn’t powerful in its own way) and Facebook could potentially give the boost to the “check-in” concept that has only been adopted by a couple of million people on services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
And one has to wonder, is the reason for fairly slow adoption for Foursquare because of a lack of awareness or because people just don’t know why they’d want to use it? Foursquare has been installed in everything from giant signs in Vegas to window decals, but use is still relatively low compared to the general population.
This all circles back to one of my core theories about social media. Just because something can be shared doesn’t mean it will be shared. For every 200-million-view YouTube video, there are 27 million videos with only 12 hits. People will share what they find interesting, and if “@SoAndSo checked in at McDonalds” isn’t interesting then it won’t be shared.
So really, even if Facebook rolls out geo-location, will 300 million people really start using it just because it’s on Facebook or will the general idea still not catch on with them? After all, when I wanted to tell my friends where I was and what I was doing back in the day, I simply typed a status update. But that’s soooo 2008, right?
What’s most startling about the numbers is that most of the big money makers for Sony barely featured any “A-list” stars. Rather than rely on big names, Sony actively used social media to help spread the word about their releases.
District 9’s extensive viral campaign led back to an online experience that was shared by consumers through social media and created early buzz for a “weird” sci-fi movie with a no-name cast and no-name director.
And Sony is convinced that social media had a huge hand in creating its success.
Having a buzzworthy film has also proven to work more in Sony’s favor than most, due to an early presence on Twitter (Sony has more followers than any other movie studio) and an adaptive marketing strategy that keeps conversation around its films active even after the opening weekend.
‘The judgment day comes a lot sooner now. You used to get to opening day or the second day to see whether the audience really liked the movir or not. But when you hype one thing and deliver another, [negative social media chatter] is the immediate penalty these days.’ [Sony Pictures Chairman of Worldwide Marketing] Jeff Blake said.
Universal Studio knows too well about that after they saw box office sales plummet for Bruno following its opening weekend because of how quickly word spread through Twitter from consumers telling friends “not to bother.”
Meanwhile, other studios like Paramount have used social media to push obscure homemade movies like Paranormal Activity to $193 million worldwide. NOTE: There’s an extensive case study about that film that I worked on in the upcoming book microMARKETING by Greg Verdino.
Social media’s impact on sales is getting harder and harder to deny these days, and those of us who continue to study how the medium works are going to be instrumental in creating the marketing campaigns that are necessary in this networked world.
There’s too much boasting among social media marketers. We like to believe we’ve redefined marketing and social media will disrupt every marketing and advertising tactic ever developed…EVER! This attitude reminds me of the creative arts. My heart will always be with writing. As a writer, great stories seem to come from a magical place in our heads and don’t fit any “model.” But every great story that’s been analyzed has been found to follow principles and triggers which ignite a particular reaction in the reader’s mind, and those principles are followed intentionally by some and accidentally by others. Either way, they’re evident in every great story.
Writers, however, have a tendency to believe that their stories reinvent the wheel. But if they pick up one of the volumes that exist on dramaturgy, they would realize that their brilliant solutions to storytelling problems were discovered long before they were born.
Social media marketers also believe they’ve reinvented the wheel. They disregard proven principals, and, frankly, disrespect the old school (and this is coming from a “totally digital” 23-year-old).
I think there’s a lot to learn from the old school way of marketing and advertising. No greater example sticks out to me than when the agency I was working for folded last year and, while searching for employment, I stooped to the level of selling office supplies to small businesses door-to-door.
In door-to-door, you do everything that’s considered ineffective by social media evangelists. It’s cold, impersonal (in that you don’t know the prospect), and heavily sales focused. The tactics seem counter-productive.
So at first, I didn’t follow the system. I didn’t listen to the principles. And I loosely followed the tactics. After a while, I found that even though prospects loved me, they didn’t buy from me. I was really friendly, and I could chat about just about anything with customers.
But I couldn’t close.
When I finally married the sales techniques with the relationship building skills I had mastered, I started selling like a monster. Then I quit. I still hated the “walking door-to-door” aspect of it and dreaded what that would be like during NY winters.
But I learned valuable lessons that are lit ablaze by my social media peeps. I like the industry. I like the theories. I like the people. I dislike the rose-colored glasses. I dislike the echo chamber.
And lately I’ve been feeling that some of my thoughts may brand me as an outcast, like in this Ogilvy quote:
“I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which has been in use for more than two years is ipso facto obsolete.”
Does that mean there are no worthwhile thoughts and tactics being used by social media marketers now? No, but it does mean that a lot of the tactics used to create relationships, build trust, and ultimately drive sales through social media have already been discovered, mastered, and improved upon by door-to-door sales dudes long before we started commenting on the practice of marketing.
If you’re a social media marketer feeling a bit “icky” about hearing these thoughts from another social media marketer, please remember that I’m not telling you to be a huckster. That’s a misconception about door-to-door salespeople. The most successful door-to-door salespeople build relationships and do pretty much everything we advocate. The difference is that they also use persuasion techniques to help drive the prospect toward a desired action, and those techniques hold valuable lessons worth considering in order to get the most out of the relationships we’ve built.
In the end, I do believe that for the most part we do what salespeople do. The biggest difference is we do it all over a computer rather than while standing in a prospect’s living room or office.
So last week I sat in on eMarketer’s “Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media” webinar and there were some interesting things to take away from it along with my own opinions.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s get pumped. Let’s start with this great video called Socialnomics
According to one study by R2Integrated, the biggest barrier preventing marketers from incorporating social media into their marketing mixes is the lack of analytics and measurement. What’s interesting though is that 50.4% of respondents do feel that social media will generate quantifiable results in 2010, demonstrating a positive sentiment toward social media despite their wariness of current measurement tools.
And, there are studies showing results. Take a look at this slide.
So how do we get from confusion to clarity? How do we try and quantify results like this?
Let me start with a caveat. A lot of this is still conceptual and even the host had a hard time mapping it out. But there’s a lot of food for thought here.
#1. Establish clear marketing goals, and then identify social metrics that directly support those objectives
The biggest problem with establishing ROI metrics is that marketers don’t know what they’re trying to achieve with social media. Are they trying to retain customers? Are they trying to generate leads? Are they trying to make sales? In which case, what can we measure to determine if we’re accomplishing this? Most marketers look to see what impact their presence has on visits to their websites, and how many of those visits convert.
It is possible to track social media results at a very granular level. For instance, I’ve noticed that many brands who control their retail environment have tremendous success in social media by connecting with local customers and converting them into sales.
Domino’s is a big brand right? They’re nationwide, but they’re also franchised. So one franchise owner in Chicago named Ramon De Leon used Twitter to increase business for his local Domino’s restaurant. The results? He had the highest-performing store in the Chicago area and Domino’s had him consult franchise owners around the world on how to use Twitter for their businesses. There will be more detail about Ramon’s story in Greg Verdino’s upcoming book microMARKETING (Full Disclosure: I did research for the book)
There’s also the case of NAKED Pizza on Twitter, whose 1-to-1 connections with local customers generated so much response they actually made “Twitter” a checkout option on their cash registers. They even found that an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion on April 23, 2009, brought in 15% of the day’s business. And of course, there’s Dell and Best Buy’s Twelpforce.
But all those businesses have something in common. They control the retail environment and so their objectives were to connect 1-to-1 with customers online and lead them to their stores mostly by engagement and customer service. But what would you do for a brand like Fuze, whose products sit on shelves in dozens of retailers alongside 10 other competitors? The objectives have to be different because the barrier to measurement is greater.
For brands like Fuze, what you’re ultimately hoping to do is build loyalty, increase engagement and brand exposure, and hope it all translates into more purchases. But how do you measure that? What metrics could you use to determine if your social initiatives are having any effect.
Studies have shown that 34% of social media users search for a brand on Google after being exposed to it through social media. So, you can measure search volume using Google Trends. You can measure the number of brand mentions on Twitter, especially versus competitors.
And of course, there’s more.
#2. Organize your metrics into a logical framework
The image of the slide is missing for this one, but it had three buckets: Exposure, Engagement, and ROI/Outcomes. This was the least defined of the 7 points, but this is the general idea.
Exposure: How many people are seeing my brand through this channel? This is more easily measured on Facebook with their Post Insights, but it represents a similar and familiar metric: impressions.
Engagement: After being exposed to the brand, how many of them engage with the brand? Are they interacting? How are they interacting? What’s their sentiment? What is the % of engagement?
ROI/Outcomes: This wasn’t explained as well, but it’s the idea of how many of those who engaged performed a desired action, such as visiting a website.
The idea is to create this link from exposure to engagement and finally to action. But he didn’t quite explain how to do that and I’m not sure how you would do that either.
#3. Take a long-term outlook with social media interactions and measurements. It’s a commitment, not a campaign.
This idea is simple, and one we all understand. The effect of social media relationship building can only be measured over time. You can do this by measuring the lift in comments and other interactions from month-to-month.
You could also check a competitor’s social presence and hand count their lift in engagement (at least on Facebook). This relates to tracking Google Trends and Twitter mentions, as noted earlier. You could’ve done something similar with Facebook Lexicon, which worked like Google Trends. Unfortunately, Facebook is killing it (and hopefully replacing it with another option).
#4. If hard ROI metrics are difficult to track directly, consider a range of softer metrics that can be linked back to desired outcomes.
We’ve already covered this concept in previous steps. It’s all about measuring “soft” engagement metrics versus business results. Check out this conceptual graph for an idea of what this means.
But within this are other thoughts from a variety of marketers. I’ll present the ideas as quotes
“Using a variety of hard and soft ROI metrics can absolutely be accomplished. I would offer that volumes of conversation over competitors, sentiment, the level of influence of those interacting with your brand, etc, are but some of the metrics that can be used to construct a dashboard of success.” - Blake Cahill, Visible Technologies
And…
“Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment. A Twittering employee, for example, might develop trust or goodwill among customers but have trouble putting a number on it. “There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything,” says Susan Etinger, senior vice president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy. “Everything needs to monetize within 12 weeks so we can understand that we’re successful. But frequently their measuring is misleading. Why? Because if someone on a blog or social network is trashing your brand, what is it worth to you if one of your passionate brand fans speaks out on your behalf?” - Bloomberg Businessweek, December 2009
Isn’t it more powerful when a brand advocate you’ve developed a relationship with through social media stands up for a brand or speaks highly of that brand? It’s much more powerful for a person to advocate for a brand rather than a brand extolling its own greatness. What is the value of that?
#5. Determine a dollar $ value for customers who choose to opt-in and engage with your brand via social networks.
It’s a great quote from Papa John’s, but hard to understand how they measured the percentage of Facebook fans who convert to customers. Perhaps you could create an arbitrary percentage, and maybe you can potentially tie their Facebook account to the Papa John’s site to measure their frequency of visits when they make an online order.
But semantics aside, ideally you could assign a dollar value to a fan through sentiment or self reporting. For instance, your Facebook fans might say “I buy Product X everyday!” and you could calculate that out. Or you could calculate a number based on sentiment. “I love Product X!” = $5/month.
And you can always invoke other correlated work of social psychologists like Leon Festinger and the dozens of others who came after him, who all studied the theory of cognitive dissonance and how much more likely we are to reassure ourselves of our loyalties. If you buy a Toyota, you’re more likely to gravitate toward news stories about how great Toyota’s are and tell your friends about how great your Toyota is. This manifests itself constantly in the form of customers that some people call fanboys, those people who stick to their purchases through thick and thin.
The general idea has already been somewhat proven within social media.
So is it likely that people who’ve never purchased your brand’s products will sign up for your brand Fan page? No, it’s unlikely unless there’s a strong incentive to do so, typically through a promotion. But it doesn’t mean it’s all a waste. What you’re doing here is constantly communicating, solidifying, and nurturing brand advocates who are key to sustained business and business growth. If those brand advocates can then get their friends to try your product and like it, then, voila… new fans and more advocates.
#6. Listening can save your market research $s
This is another way to look at social media ROI: It can save you money elsewhere. While typical research is more fine-tuned by questioning a wider swath of consumers, social media can help you measure how people are talking about your service.
What aspects of your business are talked about most?
Which are talked about least?
What words are used to describe your products, and how can you mirror that for your own advantage in communications?
What parts of the sales funnel are they missing? For example, I was working with a retailer who had fans on their Facebook page post that they were having a hard time with the online checkout. Some couldn’t even find the checkout! Those fans alerted the brand about an issue that ultimately helped them save lost sales.
And the second image of the HP CMO is particularly interesting. You can view conversations on social media to determine the impact of your traditional ad campaign. Are people responding to it and talking about it on social media? If so, why not? How can that inform future campaigns? If they are talking about it, is your brand getting its desired result?
#7. Build the technological capabilities to measure your customers’ complete digital footprint – in real time.
The host admits that this is the most conceptual and aspirational step. Essentially, it’s about connecting the dots between your multiple digital channels.
How is social media effecting search volume?
Can you alter your search keywords and ad copy based on listening?
How do you measure the social connections? For instance, this person on the Facebook page who posted this great comment has 302 friends. This person wrote a wall post that was commented on by another person who has 212 friends. This brand tweet was retweeted by this guy with 1,200 followers. How far is your reach and sphere of influence?
One Last Thought
He also had some comments about branded vs personal accounts, which is a constant debate among marketers who want to leverage Twitter. But first, we must revisit an earlier slide.
If TRUST (or liking) is the primary “weapon of influence” used in order to succeed in social media, then how can customers trust a talking logo with no accountability?
“We can’t have carefully tailored messages from a brand entity. That’s why brands are putting their own people on social media to respond to consumers and engage. In trying to leverage TRUST, branded accounts have a hard time doing that. Frequently, brands start with a brand account and move to personalities, especially on Twitter.” - the webinar host, Geoff Ramsey (eMarketer CEO)
Your Feedback
This is obviously a big topic among marketers looking to use social media. What are your thoughts on the subject? Are these steps helpful?
Get ready to see a lot more “fun young professionals” stock photography like this in the next decade or two because there’s some very interesting news coming out of Nielsen today describing the consumer of the future. According to the research by Doug Anderson, SVP of Research & Development at The Nielsen Company, growth in business in the next 20 years is unlikely to be coming from households with children.
Here are some quick highlights (or lowlights, depending on which business you’re in) from the Nielsen data.
“Marketers in the developed world will be locked into share wars while those able to compete in the less-developed world could see substantial growth.
Worldwide there is still substantial, though slowing, population growth. By 2030, world population will have grown by around 20%. Only 3.2% of this growth will come from the more developed world. The less-developed regions will grow 31 times faster than the more developed ones. Some of the older countries in Europe as well as Japan will lose population.”
“By the middle 2020s, the share of U.S. households with children under 18 will fall below 30%. ”
“Multi-cultural marketing will be essential when selling to families with children.
The majority of population growth in the U.S. will come from new immigrants and the children they have in this country. Since most immigrants are young, families with children will become more ethnic, more quickly, than the total population. By 2025, the majority of families with children in the U.S. will be multi-cultural (Hispanic, Black, Asian, etc.). Less than half of families with children will be native born non-Hispanic White.“
“Nielsen projections show per household spending on packaged goods will begin to fall after 2020, while the current recession is already impacting spending in the short-term.”
This seems to be following a trend as noted in a report last year by The Census Bureau, which announced that the share of households with children under 18 reached its lowest point in half a century at 46%, a full 16 points below the 30% range predicted in the Nielsen report.
So what does this mean? If you’re a brand in the CPG category, especially with products aimed at mothers, it is time to do some heavy research into that whole “building relationships through social media” hullabaloo that web-oriented marketers such as myself have been talking about endlessly over the past few years.
And if you’re an entrepreneur? Then it’s time to start building products and services aimed toward the professional 20- to 30-somethings with all of that extra income from not having many, if any, children. And don’t forget those older Gen Xers who’s kids have already left the nest. That’s right, it’s time to embrace the DINKS! (Dual Income No Kids)
I have a feeling that a lot of these consumer electronics are going to do really well in the next twenty years, what with no kids in the house breaking those expensive HDTV’s and Blu-Ray players (or, for me, the Boxee Box).
Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the three months ending in September, a significant spike from a relatively shrunken base. The economy had contracted at annual rates of 0.7 percent and 6.4 percent in the second and first quarters of this year, respectively.
Even Cash For Clunkers now has some data to provide support for its campaign, with consumer durable goods up 22.3% compared to -23.3% last quarter.
So in an attempt to skip past some other data because your time is precious and ours is limited – what with all of our client work to finish and all – what does this all mean for marketers? It means the American consumer is making a comeback and just in time for the all-important holiday season. So if you planned to slum it through the holidays, pick up the phone and call Conversation now for some timely holiday campaign work.
While this holiday season won’t be like the prosperous ones of 2006 and 2007, it is apparent that holiday 2009 could at least beat out 2008, if only narrowly. With the economy in a slight upturn, there is no better time to jump into the digital marketing arena, because when 80% of consumers are making purchases online and 80% of their time is spent on social networks, isn’t it about time your brand started reaching those consumers where they are?
The one thing I’ve noticed in my short time working at Conversation, a fairly new social media agency, is that clients still have a hard time understanding the marketing value of social media initiatives. They fully understand the math: hundreds of millions of people are on social networks like Facebook more than any other Web site, but they still do not understand how to utilize the networks to communicate marketing messages. Sadly, attempting to communicate the network effect such an initiative can have seems so foreign from anything they’ve ever studied and experienced that explaining it sometimes raises even more empty, puzzled looks.
I believe, among other reasons, there are two main problems brands have with social media strategy. There are certainly others, but I want to keep this fairly brief especially since I have work to get to.
How does “communicating” in a “two-way conversation” with customers translate to sales and how do I measure that ROI?
I recently found data that suggests 55% of Twitter accounts are inactive. Not only do I not understand this platform, but it seems as though I won’t be speaking with any real prospects.
Let’s address each one at a time.
1. Communicating in a two-way conversation with customers is fundamentally not a “direct response” initiative, so why are we expected to measure its effectiveness by those metrics? Communicating on social media platforms is branding with the opportunity for sales, not sales with the opportunity of branding. I would argue that conversations can result in brand loyalty and sales, while marketers could argue that conversations could result in just conversations without sales.
Multi-million dollar TV ad campaigns with the intention of branding that could result in a lift in sales gets green-lighted without much of a problem. Whatever happened to the 80/20 principle, where 80 percent of business comes from 20 percent of your customers? What better way is there to constantly communicate in a friendly, helpful way with that 20 percent than through social media. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
Imagine the power your brand can have with the streamlined manufacturing and distribution power of the current corporate marketplace along with the loyalty and customer satisfaction engendered by Mom-and-Pop shops.
2. Now, some may argue that I should discuss Facebook here, but I’ll take on the challenge of explaining Twitter in a mere two paragraphs. First, the basics: Twitter is a platform where a person can “tweet” about anything they find interesting, whether it be “Am I stupid or is quisitive really NOT a word?” or “Wow, check out this cool video: www.video.com.” All of these tweets are archived and searchable, and if another person finds value in what another person is tweeting they can “follow” them and subscribe to their updates so they can keep track of what’s interesting to that other person, who’s often a complete stranger unlike the connections on Facebook.
Now, for the problem of activity. Sure, there are a lot of dead accounts on Twitter and I believe that will always be the case. But check out this information from yesterday’s USA Today by Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
Much of the work by Christakis and Fowler is based on research using the Framingham Heart Study, a key group of 5,124 adults within a larger network of 12,067 people in Framingham, Mass. Each had an average of 10.4 ties to others — totaling 53,228 ties.
Now for the following example, when I say “reach X% of connections,” I mean the connection has actually read and taken note of the message. If you reach only that one person out of that offline group of 10 with a valuable enough message, and they in turn repeat your message on Twitter and Facebook and it reaches 10 percent of their connections (169 total), then your message has now reached 17 other people.
Now let’s say 20 percent of those people (3 people) distribute the message to their network of a combined 507 connections and again reach a conservative 10 percent of their connections, now the message has reached a total of 67 other people. And so on and so forth.
And we haven’t even taken into account how online messages don’t live in a bubble online, and can be spread offline by people who were reached online. In other words, a valuable promotion can spread by word of mouth easier than ever before, and messages live on all media online and offline.
There are still many areas we haven’t touched on, including the fact that you can see what people are saying about your brand in real-time, and have the opportunity to not make the mistakes of, say, Kryptonite bike locks.
That’s the (truncated) true value of social media for marketers.
Considering my motto is “Blogging A Branded World,” it seems only fitting that I blog about this disturbing image from Stephen Von Worley of Weather Sealed. It’s a heat map (click for full size) of the United States visualized by the distances of nearest Mickey D’s.
Some people may be blown away while others may find the sparse Western area surprising. Having lived in Colorado, it isn’t. Per capita, McDonalds is just as abundant out West as out East, but people are spread out more in the West. When I lived in Pueblo, CO, two hours south of Denver, there was a lot of open space between cities. The closest city north was Colorado Springs (2,000 feet higher in elevation than the much ballyhooed Mile High City), and it took a drive of 35 to 40 minutes through a vast wasteland to get there. Plus, don’t get me started on the emptiest state I’ve come across: Kansas.
McDonalds is the lifeblood and DNA of America, while, at the same time, a remnant of an era from which we’re now transitioning. That’s not to say McDonald’s isn’t as prosperous and ever-present today as it was 10 years ago, but that I do subscribe to the idea of The Long Tail, which asserts the position that we’re fragmenting into specific interests and creating smaller niche markets that, when combined, equal the former dominance of the mainstream. McDonalds is a relic which reminds us that in some industries, however, that movement hasn’t taken place.
, which asserts the position that we’re fragmenting into specific interests and creating smaller niche markets that, when combined, equal the former dominance of the mainstream. McDonalds is a relic which reminds us that in some industries, however, that movement hasn’t taken place.
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