David Scott - The New Rules of Marketing and PR

Patch says that if you’re looking to buy a new bike, if you are a hard-core consumer, then there is a great deal of detailed information on the Cervélo site about the bikes’ technology, construction, and specs. “What I really like about this website is how it gives off the aura of legitimacy, being based in fact, not fluff,” he says.

Search engine marketing is important for Cervélo. Because of the keyword-rich cycling content available on the site, Vroomen says, Cervélo gets the same amount of search engine traffic as many sites for bike companies that are 10 times larger. As a result, Cervélo has grown quickly into one of the most important bike companies in the world.

In 2011, Vroomen shifted gears and now spends the majority of his time at Open Cycle, the mountain bike company he co-founded with Andy Kessler and launched in mid-2012. Now OPEN sells via over 100 stores in dozens of countries, its own office/showroom in Basel, and an online store. He took to heart what he learned at Cervélo, making every aspect of the company “open” to customers. Right from the start, OPEN focused on social engagement throughout the site, with community aspects and social networking links. Anyone can comment on anything.

The OPEN site also features a blog. 4What’s interesting is that Vroomen and Kessler had been blogging for a year as they secretly developed the technology for their new bike, but the blog posts went unpublished until launch. “We talk not only about the product but also about how we’re running the company,” Vroomen says. “So a part of that was publishing that blog after we launched, so people could see what we’d been doing the year leading up to us becoming visible.”

Vroomen is committed to having the community of enthusiasts help them, and that’s a big reason why they chose the name Open Cycle. “Every page on the site has a question and answer section at the bottom,” he says. “So it’s very easy, as soon as you’ve read something, to say, ‘Hey, I don’t quite understand this.’ We answer all of those as soon as we can, time zone permitting, but certainly within a day, usually sooner. People see that when they ask something, they actually get a response. But the crazy part is that consumers don’t expect it. So we said, ‘How about if we ask people to talk to us, and we respond?’ That’s the basic premise of OPEN.”

The company’s use of questions and answers on every page of the OPEN site, the comment feature on the OPEN blog, and social networks like Instagram (@opencycle has 40,000+ followers) serves as a terrific way to market the new company. “I don’t think of it as marketing,” Vroomen says. “It feels simply like talking to people. And networks like Facebook, Twitter, et al. have given us some interesting ways to do that. They turn companies such as Open Cycle into the global version of the village baker of yesteryear. You know your customers and they know you, so you want to treat them well. You want to give them good quality, and they tell their neighbors. That’s the opposite of what’s happening at many companies today. And, of course, the flip side is that if you don’t treat them well they’ll tell the rest of the village.”

All signs point to OPEN being on a trajectory to replicate the tremendous success of Cervélo—with the site, the blog, and social networking leading the way forward. And that’s no coincidence. As Vroomen would tell you, the ideas you’ll read about in this book work.

“This is the future for companies like us,” Vroomen says. “You can be very small and occupy a niche and still sell your products all over the world. It’s amazing, when we go into a new country, the amount of name recognition we have. The Internet gives you opportunities you never had before. And it’s not rocket science. It’s pretty easy to figure out.”

The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Some of today’s most successful Internet businesses leverage the long tail to reach underserved customers and satisfy demand for products not found in traditional physical stores. Examples include Amazon, which makes available at the click of a mouse hundreds of thousands of books and other products not stocked in local chain stores; Spotify and other services that legally bring niche music not found in record stores to people who crave artists outside the mainstream; and Netflix, which exploited the long tail of demand for movie rentals beyond the blockbuster hits found at the local DVD rental shop. The business implications of the long tail are profound and illustrate that there’s much money to be made by creating and distributing at the long end of the tail. Yes, big hits are still important. But as these businesses have shown, there’s a huge market beyond the latest Batman movie, U2, Taylor Swift, and Top Gear.

So, what about marketing? While Anderson’s book focuses on product availability and selling models on the web, the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There’s no doubt that there is a long-tail market for web content created by organizations of all kinds—corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals, rock bands—and used for directly reaching buyers—those who buy, donate, join, apply. As consumers search the Internet for answers to their problems, as they browse blogs and chat rooms and websites for ideas, they are searching for what organizations like yours have to offer. Unlike in the days of the old rules of interruption marketing with a mainstream message, today’s consumers are looking for just the right product or service to satisfy their unique desires at the precise moment they are online. People are looking for what you have to offer right now.

Marketers must shift their thinking away from the short head of the demand curve—mainstream marketing to the masses—and toward the long tail—a strategy of targeting vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.

As marketers understand the web as a place to reach millions of micromarkets with precise messages just at the point of consumption, the way they create web content changes dramatically. Instead of a one-size-fits-all website with a mass-market message, we need to create just-right content—each aimed at a narrow target constituency. As marketing case studies, the examples of Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify are also fascinating. The techniques pioneered by the leaders of long-tail retail for reaching customers with niche interests are examples of marketing genius.

Amazon.com has been optimized for browsing. At a broad level, there are just two ways that people interact with web content: They search and they browse. Most organizations optimize sites for searching, which helps people answer their questions but doesn’t encourage them to browse. But people also want a site to tell them something they didn’t think to ask. The marketers at Amazon understand that when people browse the site, they may have a general idea of what they want (in my case, perhaps a book for my daughter about surfing) but not the particular title. So if I start with a search on Amazon for the phrase “surfing for beginners,” I get 99 titles in the search results. With this list as a starting point, I shift into browse mode, which is where Amazon excels. Each title has a customer ranking where I instantly see how other customers rated the book. I see reader-generated reviews, together with reviews from other media. I can see “Customers who bought this item also bought” lists and also rankings of “What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?” I can poke around the contents of the book itself. After I purchase the perfect book for my daughter ( The Girl’s Guide to Surfing ), I might get an email from Amazon weeks or months later, suggesting, based on this purchase, another book that I might find useful. This is brilliant stuff.