Mark Ritson - BRW

Why are prices in Australia so much higher than elsewhere?

The answer, alas, lies with us.

The lack of foreign competition in Australia and the cosy oligopolies that formed here as a result, enabled brands here to charge relatively high prices and consumers got used to it.

But there is hope on the horizon.  The high demand for brands in Australia multiplied by the huge disparities between the price we have to pay versus the prices in other markets mean the grey market is increasingly active here.

Salvation will come not from legislation or pressure from suppliers, it will come from the market itself. The colour of our salvation is grey.

I was channel surfing late at night and I caught this keynote address from DNA://13 on ABC’s Big Ideas. 

Andrew Bleeker was a digital media strategist with both of the Obama campaigns.  He discusses tactics used, lessons learned and how these can be applied to marketing brands and products.

Some of the key things I took away from this:

• Much of the value of marketing via social media lies in the public’s distrust in companies and institutions.  People are likely to place more value on the views of friends or acquaintances with little expertise than an expert who is on the payroll.
• Explaining complicated ideas:  Lead with compelling facts that tell a story then provide the data to back it up.  Always provide dates and independent sources for your data.
• Capitalise on moments:  People engage out of excitement, humour, anger…  not when they are bored.
• Put less spin on the ball:  Most marketing communications are over the top.  If you pull back a bit, your message is more likely to be believed.

Carmen Nobel, HBS

Many companies choose either the sequential naming approach (Sony’s successive PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3 video game consoles, for example) or the complete name change approach (Nintendo’s Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii). Professors from Harvard and London Business Schools conducted a series of experiments to determine when and why each approach made the most sense:

1.  Brand name continuation vs name change

“With a name change, participants tended to expect features that were distinctly different or new,” Ofek says. “With a name continuation, they just expected improved performance on existing features.”

2.  Risk vs reward

“The perception is that if it’s a brand name continuation, it’ll be somewhat better than the previous model, but it won’t be buggy and there won’t be a learning curve,” Gourville says. “With a brand name change, you infer that there may be a steep learning curve, and it may work differently from your previous camera.”

3.  Creative sequences

A brand name change also comes with the risk of disappointing consumers who expect more from the product than they otherwise would have.

“If you’re really just tweaking the previous generation of your product, it’s probably much better to use brand name continuation than brand name change,” Gourville says. “Otherwise people will be led to believe that there are massively new features in there, and you’ll just lead them to disappointment.”

Is it interesting because it happened…

or because it happened to you?

If George Clooney sits next to you at a restaurant, that’s interesting to you, no doubt, but only interesting to your friends because you’re so excited. I mean, he had to sit next to someone!

Should we read your press release or come to your gallery opening or take a sales meeting because it’s important, or because it’s important to you?

Marketing is the art of seeing (and then creating) what might be interesting to more than our friends.

There’s a circle of friends in our lives that care a lot about what we care about. The rest of the world? They mostly don’t.

Seth Godin