February 13th, 2010

Fight, Iterative Marketing and 30 Coffees

Iterative Marketing Fight Portland

In the early stages of the 30 Coffees in 30 Days rollout, AdPulp’s David Burn joined the fray and the result was a well-rounded discussion of how Fight approaches Iterative Marketing. David wrote up his thoughts afterwards and posted them to AdPulp. Here’s an extract:

“Dave Allen, a partner in Fight–the strategic marketing firm he launched last year with Justin Spohn and Rob Shields–is holding court. He asked me to join him in order to practice his agency’s pitch. I said yes because I like Dave, he promised me beer(s) and I’m curious about Fight’s strategy-is-all business model.
Allen says he, and his partners, are frustrated by traditional advertising, and undue reliance on the big idea. “Fight is a right idea company,” he says. Allen adds that the big idea is a Hail Mary, every time.
Fight’s response to the rise of the Internet and the profound impact it has had on not only marketing, but culture, is something called “iterative marketing.” Iterative means “steps.” Thus, an iterative marketing strategy is built on many little steps, versus one big idea.”

Read the whole article here.

Related post by Fight partner Rob Shields

Dave Allen
  • charliequirk
    I like this idea of iterative marketing, and the cupcake vs wedding cake analogy is a great one. In a speech last October British planner Mark Earls took aim at the time honored notion of a strategy’s “big idea” as the central organizing principle around which a brand or campaign is built. Earls suggests that this “all or nothing” practice may reap high rewards, but is not particularly prudent, especially when the future success of a strategy is so hard to predict.

    This is what Earls said at last October's 4As event: "It's useful for agencies to produce and deliver against them - but frankly, in a world where social influence reigns, it's less and less relevant... Do more stuff, place more bets, light more fires, give yourself more chances that at least one of your ideas takes off."

    The problem with a static brand proposition is that brands are anything but static. Brands, like people, are evolving entities that live and die by the success of their actions. So this new idea of trying a ton of things and seeing what sticks may not be such a bad idea after all. As they say, success is a poor teacher, if a brand is going to fail; it makes sense for it to “fail forward, fail fast.” But the cupcake analogy allows brands not to bet the farm on a Hail Mary.
  • Hey Charlie - I had not heard of Earls before now, but his point of view sounds very similar to the session I did at Engage a couple weeks ago.

    I posted the deck for it here: http://thisisviolence.net/2010/02/10/introduction-to-iterative-marketing/

    Any way, as you've pointed out, brands are only as static as the market and culture they exist in so treating them that way doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's nice to see other people thinking along the same lines.

    One thing I think gets left out of the conversation a lot though is the critical role of analytics. Throwing out a ton of ideas without specific goals, metrics and analysis is really no better than just hoping on the hail mary. Currently, it seems that agency culture relegates analytics to the end of the process (if at all) when there is little to be done with what you learn, and even then, it's something that's viewed more as an IT thing, seperate from the creative process. I'd really like to see concepts of goals and measurement brought to the beginnings of projects, where points of measurement can be built into a program and then have the results of analysis actually impact program direction.
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