High Altitude Marketeering

A great example of content as marketing. This news and sundries stall in the San Francisco Ferry Building marketplace doesn’t have a lot to offer: magazines, maps and some kitchy souveneirs. What they do have is a great location: the main intersection in a major food, tourist and transit destination. And they know how to work with what they’ve got.

Look at where they sank their visual merchandising dollars. Not on fixtures, displays or signage but on an oversize clock and three large flat screen displays. The displays show transit schedules. Never mind that this is a small retailer in no way connected with any Bay Area transit agency. They have access, as we all do, to published transit schedules. And they’re repurposing that information as marketing content.

Thousands of people walk by their stall. Many, especially the tourists who no doubt make up the core of their customer base, will pause, interpreting the clock and schedule data as signifiers of transit information. Many will stop. Some will ask questions. A few will make use of the information on the monitors. But everyone who pauses, momentarily tricked into thinking the stall a source of travel information, will end up casting an eye across the display. And some of those passers by, now converted to traffic, will be converted to sales. All because the retailer understood what kind of content was relavant to its target customers and how to deliver it.

Bicycling magazine does a pretty good job of catching my attention. Daily (or nearly daily) email newsletters tease content on the website and in newsstand editions. For the most part, they are well targeted and well presented, leaning heavily on reviews and training tips to generate click-throughs to their site—exactly what one would hope for from a magazine publisher. (Brand marketers take note: real content generates real interest. Promotional messages, P.R. drivel and the umpteenth athlete profile generate yawns.)

But what really caught my attention this week was the header that ran above a review of 2010 bikes. In the banner above the reviews, a navigational area lists the bike categories under which the various reviews are classified. There are twenty-six of them. Twenty-six categories of bicycle, eleven flavors of mountain bikes alone. Read the rest of this entry »