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Monday, February 16, 2009

Ignoring new media could mean ignoring new markets

Social media is often about the niche. For a mainstream media outlet to host content that satisfies the interests of a group, that group needs to be large enough to fit the CPM (cost-per-thousand) model. Social media makes it possible to identify and reach groups that fly under mainstream media’s radar.

That’s exactly what Melanie Notkin has done with her online venture, Savvy Auntie.

Melanie candidly explains in a blog post that she is unmarried and has no children of her own (so far). But she adores her siblings’ children (first becoming an aunt in 2001) and lavishes on them the attention most parents devote to their own kids. Melanie also recognized that she isn’t alone. There are, she explains, “cool aunts, great aunts, godmothers and all women who love kids.”

Through her social interactions—on her own site and on Twitter—Melanie has attracted and nurtured a community of this category she calls aunties (along with some uncles, too, I suspect) who look to her and her community for advice on a variety of aunt-related topics, including what to buy for those precious nieces and nephews. Through relationships with companies that sell these products, Melanie has turned Savvy Auntie into a viable business in a short seven months.

Having built a niche community with dollars to spend, however, doesn’t necessarily mean every marketer will recognize the spending power contained within the community.

Take Mattel, for instance. Mattel (in addition to being my former employer; I was a communicator there from 1984 to 1988) is one of the few iconic toy companies, dating back to the 1950s when its Fanner 50 toy gun was a primary sponsor of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. Over the years, Mattel has been behind brands like Hot Wheels and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. But nothing is linked in consumers’ minds to Mattel like Barbie.

Recently, Mattel hosted one of its premium events at New York’s Fashion Week to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 50th anniversary. Mattel has always had a knack for special events. I remember attending American International Toy Fair where, to celebrate Barbie’s 35th anniversary, Andy Warhol unveiled his portrait of the doll at a top-flight cocktail reception. Mattel paid Warhol a quarter of a million dollars for the portrait which, for all I know, is gathering dust in a storage facility.

The Fashion Week event was as natural an event to cover for the Savvy Auntie as MacWorld is for Calli Lewis and her video podcast, “GeekBrief TV.” Melanie includes Barbie products on her merchandise page and includes video content on the Savvy Auntie site, so she started seeking an invitation to cover the event.

Mattel should have been all over the opportunity to reach a target market traditional marketing just isn’t configured to reach. And it’s not like Melanie has no credentials. She is, for instance, (as her bio notes) a regular panelist on the Strategy Room on FoxNews.com.

Still, Melanie ran into a brick wall.

I can’t say I was surprised when I saw Melanie tweet her frustration at Mattel’s rejection. When you manage one of the most successful brands in history, you tend to start believing your own press and think nobody can teach you anything. It isn’t that Mattel isn’t on the lookout for new marketing opportunities. While I worked there, the company was just starting to target divorced parents whose children lived with their ex-spouse and grandparents, who were now living long enough to represent some serious dollars spent on their grandchildren.

Aunties who have formed an online community, though, was evidently just not mainstream enough to warrant Mattel’s attention.

Eventually, though, Melanie reported that she received an email invitation to the event from out of the blue. So she gathered her tools and went, only to be turned away.

She wasn’t alone. It turns out, as she said in a tweet, that hundreds of people got the same invitation. Mothers of young Barbie-loving girls dressed their daughters up and made the trek to the event venue, where they, like Melanie, were told they couldn’t get in. Apparently, more VIPs showed up than expected, leading Mattel to reneg on the invitations.

Turning away little girls—the end consumer of your product—who were promised they could attend is bad PR. Failing to see the opportunity to reach a new market is dumb marketing. As Melanie put it in a tweet, “You’d think they’d want me in there as CEO of the site that reaches all the Aunts who buy Barbie for nieces.”

I’m not picking on Mattel (which later apologized to Melanie), but I am holding them up as another example of companies that have taken some preliminary steps into social media but still haven’t grasped it enough to recognize, as David Meerman Scott would put it, that the rules of marketing have changed. The retailer Target was an earlier example when it issued a statement asserting that it did not respond to queries from bloggers, including mommy bloggers, who have become a new source of influence over purchases made by mothers who increasingly turn to them for advice and recommendations.

Has your company identified new niche markets for its products within the social media space? What’s the niche and how are you tapping into its potential value?