Branding in a World Where There is No Free Lunch

Rich Barton (Zillow’s chairman) wrote an article every entrepreneur should read: The New Age of Marketing (Don Draper is making a comeback).

The Don Draper mention is timely for me, given I’ve recently gotten addicted to Mad Men (which I’m sure many of you reading have already watched). Don Draper is the creative genius behind the ad agency Sterling Cooper and later at the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Eyes on brand, and capturing someone’s attention and imagination. That’s the name of the game.

There’s no more free lunch, or even snacks, in terms of user acquisition. You used to be able to throw up a website, optimize for SEO, build a few backlinks — and get traffic.

No longer.

Whenever I hear a startup saying their user acquisition strategy is SEO, I have a hard time not laughing. That ship sailed at least 5 years ago.

There’s now a user acquisition tax. Today’s world is one in which established behemoths have a significant advantage. Their existing business allows them to pay to play in a way an early stage startup never will be.

(It’s no secret a huge percentage of VC investments are allocated to marketing)

How are you hacking your marketing plan? What’s your distribution strategy? How is your product truly different? Why should someone pay attention to you?

As one small example of a scrappy approach, I noticed this Medium article a couple weeks ago. It’s a company competing against OpenTable, who put up OpenTableSaurus.com to poke fun at how ancient their competitor’s technology was. After getting a cease and desist, they’ve since put up http://ift.tt/2nDEaGP. It’s certainly lacking on the execution side, but it shows there are at least a few creative juices flowing inside the company to try something.

How are you getting eyes on brand in 2017?

[Photo via Wikipedia]

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