gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Stores are poor places to deal with supposedly informative displays (of which there are precisely none for most brands of wine in the States where I'm from). If you're lucky enough to have an enthusiastic and informed seller (which I am), you can learn much. Since most people buy their wine at winesellers, it would seem that some form of assistance from the winery's website is in order, like printable info sheets or something. Or a winery would be careful to ensure their website renders correctly and legibly in mobile devices, so that shoppers with access to the web via their mobile devices could view helpful info from the winery's website while browsing.

You say, "Throwing a Hail Mary".

McKinsey says, "Marketers should invest 20 to 25 percent of spending in well-structured experiments"

Lawrence Lessig says, "I hate most marketing; I hate the models of most marketing; I think we should be encouraging experiments in spreading a message, and learning what's heard."

I say that the marketing industry used the same product for 50 years. No other industry could get away with so little innovation. Imagine if we were driving the cars desinged in 1955.

How can I say this without making you hate me?

Deep breath, here goes: I always thought that Seth Godin's entire output could be summarised in one or two sentences, just like you've done above.

We have by now reached a state of such proficiency in industrial manufacturing that a product is pretty much a product, is a product. Washing machines? Any make will clean your laundry with minimum fuss. Cars? Last for years and will get you from a to b in comfort and safety. Microvaves will heat your food, TVs will show you pretty pictures. All, regardless of the logo stuck to them, assembled from the same components, manufactured by the same factory polluting some river in China.

What I am saying is that most products we use in everyday life are commodotised to a level where it is not only very hard to create a purple cow, the second you do so (assuming it turns out to be a good idea) is the second your competitors will add a similar feature to their own products.

And what is driving this commodotisation? Consumer demand. As long as there is a Walmart, as long as people make their buying decision simply on a bang for buck basis this will carry on.

So, what's left? If it getting harder and harder to differentiate products by their features or even on price, where do we go? The answer is simple: Emotion. Feeling. Tribalism. You drive a Subaru if you want to be seen as an outdoor person. You drive a Saab if you want to be seen an urban intellectual. You drive a BWM if you want to be perceived as an up and coming real estate broker. Are these cars in any perceivable way different from each other? Of course not.

Does being remarkable guarantee success? We all know that it doesn't. Take the portable mp3 player as an example. Apple's iPod is the market leader, with a 75% share of the market. But was Apple the first company to make portable mp3 players? Of course not. Is the iPod the most feature rich player with the best battery life? Not by a long shot. The companies that pioneered the technology are being left behind or are abandoning the market altogether, despite having created a purple cow if ever there was one. Their mistake? Not communicating that fact effectively. Not becoming part off popular culture.

So what's responsible for the success if the iPod if it's neither price, nor features? In a word: Marketing. Advertising. Creating an emotional attachement. People choose the products they buy - apart from price - for three reasons, how they see themselves, how they want to see themselves or how they want to be seen.

Successful advertising, in all it's incarnations, including blogs, including WOM, is all about creating an emotional attachment. It's about becoming a part of who the customer is, or wants to be, or wants to be seen as. It's really that simple.

way to go mate!! I fully agree with you. Marketing strategies are really important.....I have used this very successuflly for my business