Today, I am traveling to Michigan to meet a customer, passing through Detroit on the way. You can’t think about Detroit without thinking of the car business, and it made me think about how the roots of some of these “new” techniques we’ve “pioneered” in Internet marketing are nothing more than warmed-over ideas that great marketers already know.
I think Alfred Sloan might have been a great Internet marketer. Sloan was the architect of the GM business model who ushered the company into its heyday. (I’m honestly not sure what a “heyday” is, but maybe it is so named because people pass you on the street and say, “Hey, wasn’t that Alfred Sloan?”)
Sloan’s insight was that a single company could have multiple brands that each targeted a discrete market segment. So, Chevrolet could be pitched to the “value” consumer looking for a solid car at a good price. Pontiacs, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles likewise had their segments of higher-priced, higher-fashion models that appealed to more prosperous consumers. And Cadillac was, well, the Cadillac of cars, back when that meant top-of-the-line luxury.
Sloan’s brand marketers could draw you a picture of the kind of buyers they expected for each brand. Chrysler and Ford did the same thing, on a more modest scale, with the Dodge and Ford brands competing with Chevrolet and others (such as Plymouth and Mercury) that went after more upscale buyers. Procter & Gamble pioneered similar ideas for consumer packaged goods.
So, what does all this have to do with Internet marketing? (I was hoping you’d ask.) Well, these elaborate descriptions of target customers for specific products sound a whole lot like personas. Web experts tell you to create personas, describing each kind of visitor who comes to your Web site, even going so far as to give each one a name that you can use as a shorthand for that type. If you select carefully, you can design your site around those personas and appeal much more deeply to your customers.
Personas make a great deal of sense, and they do take the concept of target marketing deeper than simple demographics, focusing on needs and attititudes and testing how your Web site pays off for each distinct type. But personas are really just logical extensions of target market segments. That’s not to denigrate any of the excellent work that has been done on personas—rather, I just want to point out to marketers that they already know a lot about Internet marketing.
They just don’t know they know it.
