The snowball model of marketing

I have been very inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s thinking around the creation of businesses which act as platforms for other businesses to prosper. The ultimate example is Google whose advertising platform benefits individual sites and blogs who earn money for themselves (and Google) by attracting an audience. This revenue creates an incentive to deliver more content and attract a greater audience, which provides the site (and of course Google) with further revenues – a truly virtuous circle.

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(Image from Dave Gray via Flickr)

This approach to business got me thinking about snowballs. Google provides the mountain and the initial push (its platform) but the gravity and momentum which perpetuate the motion of the snowball and cause it to grow are provided by individual sites which profit from the platform that Google has created. The snowball continues to grow as it travels down this never-ending slope and all the time Google makes money without having to do anything except ensure that the slope is steep enough to maintain the snowball’s descent (ie. by continuing to provide access to the platform). The platform continues to grow because Google has millions of snowballs hurtling down virtual mountains all the time and a constant supply of new ones ready to roll off the summit.

Whether or not you’re a ‘platform business’, the ‘snowball’ theory can also be applied to marketing with our client Best Buy’s Twelpforce a great example of this approach in action. The objective is to commuicate to consumers that Best Buy’s Blueshirts are both helpful and knowledgeable – able to answer any technology question you can throw at them. One approach to this challenge would be to create an advertising campaign where friendly Blueshirts answer customers’ queries leaving the viewer at home with the impression that if they too had a technology question (and happened to be near the store), an equally helpful Blueshirt would do the same for them.

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But creating advertising campaigns is costly and time consuming as well as finite (once it’s been on air, the campaign must be refreshed with another campaign which is equally costly and time-consuming to produce). Twelpforce is a smarter solution to the challenge because it is a marketing platform. An ever-growing ‘snowball’ of content is created by the interactions between customers and Blueshirts and every such interaction (preserved on the Twelpforce feed) acts to further reinforce the message that the Blueshirts know their stuff. The other benefit is that rather than creating an advertising conceit which must grab the attention of a disinterested viewer and be suitably convincing to overcome any cynicism they may have as to the expertise of the Blueshirts, Twelpforce is a useful service which allows them to experience Blueshirt expertise firsthand rather than take Best Buy’s word for it. This level of audience participation causes the snowball to grow as people who use the service and find it useful, use it again and recommend it to their friends, creating self-perpetuating content tangibly demonstrating Blueshirt service credentials.

Other examples of self-perpetuating, ‘snowballing’ marketing content includes MyStarbucksIdea (Starbucks is made to look like it values its customer’s opinions as well as receiving handy innovation tips thanks to content created by its customers) and The Best Job in the world (Toursim Queensland created the platform in the form of the competition but the snowball of publicity for them was generated by the eager participants).

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  1. ideamagpie-blog posted this