Stop the Bandwagon, I Want to Get Off

Marketing is becoming ever more complicated.  In addition to worrying about demographics, psychographics and the other traditional ways of understanding consumer behavior, we are now faced with understanding the impact of the technology revolution.  In fact, in a seminal book titled Groundswell the authors coined a new term:  technographics.  The point is that different people have different degrees of technology savvy. 

By the way, embracing technology is not perfectly correlated with age.  There are boomers who are tech savvy and boomers who are tech clueless.  There are grandmothers who embrace technology when the use Skype to see the grand-kids or enrich their retirement with Facebook postings.  Even among the "digital natives" (those born since the development of the Internet) there are degrees of tech savvy-ness.  

Marketers have to understand that there is no longer a common denominator when it comes to technology IQ.  Marketing messages probably need to be delivered through different media to reach the variety of technographic groups out there. 

 

 I was recently at a meeting at Hawaii Public Radio where volunteers were being briefed on the upcoming fund drive.  One of the volunteers - a tech savvy digital native - let loose with an indictment of how everything has been done in the fund drive.  She had been invited to the meeting by a snail mail letter.  A letter!  She said "no one reads letters anymore."  She noted that in the on-air drive, the telephones ring with a conventional ring tone.  She said "no phones sound like that anymore."  She went on and on.  Everything that was old technology was anathema and should be dumped. There was general agreement.  "Yes!  We need to change everything." 

But wait a minute.  The speaker's technographic category was very high-tech media savvy.  A lot of the Public Radio audience probably isn't.  So, if Public Radio dumped all of its existing approaches to fundraising, it would be very relevant for a highly engaged technographic group - and puzzling (at best) to technographic neophytes. 

Marketing has become very complicated.  In this instance, Public Radio needs separate strategies for different technographic groups. 

Nobody said this is easy.