Word of the day: Bifurcation
I first became obsessed by the idea of bifurcation a few years ago when I was working on a retail brand and trying to explain why Target and Wal-Mart do well, and Louis Vuitton and Barney’s do well, but Macy’s and JC Penney fail. My coworker Brian and I came up with what we thought was an original idea about how the market actually looks: an evolution from the first drawing below to the second. “Mass” no longer exists, people trade up or trade down in different categories.
As I’m sure everyone knows, this turned out to be an already well-established theory called the dog bone model or bifurcation. And in the US today, once you start looking, you can find that bifurcation explains almost everything. The income gap is just the bifurcation of economy - there is no more middle class. Even more trivial things like health have become bifurcated in America. You’re either really fat, or you’re really in shape. There is very little of what America used to look like in the 70s, or France looks like now … generally slim or slightly round but with no real muscle tone.
Anyway, the point is, I think marketing communications may have become the latest category to fall victim to bifurcation. Why is mass media far less effective than it used to be? TV, with its mass reach and ability to accomplish many things at once, but its failure to really distinguish itself, has fallen into the middle.
On one side are the extreme, PR-driven ideas. Street teams, events, new digital applications, WOM. Showy ideas that are good for the sake of being new and the sake of making people think differently about the brand that created it.
On the other side is a return to the very, very basics of marketing: retail promotions, coupons, and customer service. Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one and sometimes you need to ignore branding and just drive short-term sales for a little while. Or solve a basic distribution or promotion problem rather than trying to reinvent the brand. P&G recently aligned its trade and retail team under its brand managers, acknowledging that its importance in the overall marketing mix is increasing in importance.
Has anyone else noticed this? What are the implications? Are we due for an innovation in retail promotions?
Just read this post by Seth Godin this morning and I think it’s a similar issue. Once we accept the fact that bell curves are not the “normal” distribution we can start to attack problems differently. In the case of Sprint’s recent flare up about “firing customers”, Godin positions it as paying attention to the customers that you can please. I think it’s a strategy that makes a lot of sense.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great article a few years ago called Million Dollar Murray that suggested many issues could be solved by dealing with the extreme cases instead of trying to raise the middle. It’s interesting stuff.
The media bifurcation effect is a great observation and it holds true even more in today’s times when the lines are blurring further.
I think the dogbone model, especially in media targeting is constantly evolving. As marketers and agencies find even more ways to target consumers, I feel quite a few more channels will continuously gravitate towards becoming more mass. For example, online has already drifted to the center today; it could have been plotted closer to the extreme end some ten years ago.
On the other hand today, each of these so called middle mass media are constantly evolving and mutating into different forms. And that plays an interesting role in stretching out the model further. For example, TV is slowly going online, our daily news is preferred podcasted and people are watching tv shows on the go.
Which can only mean one thing. As more mass media get resurrected in other forms, newer ways of targeting will emerge, and these will begin to populate either ends of the model.
Considering that every media within the spectrum is interrelated in some way, the onus will be on the marketers to identify the role for each point in the model within its marketing mix. P&G’s move towards aligning its retail/trade under its brand managers is the first step towards acknowledging these changing dynamics.
I just read this week’s AdAge (cover date 7/16/07), where a cover story is about how to stop people from TiVo’ing through tv ads. Data from TiVo and Neilsen suggest that the best performing ads are at the opposite ends of the spectrum (bifurcated, if you will): “either a bare-bones, direct-response model or the entertaining, high-production-value approach of movie ads.”
http://adage.com/article?article_id=119267