Innovation in Software

”I don’t really think, I just walk.” – Paris Hilton

It’s been knocked around the web a little bit now, but here is one take on why Paris Hilton is Marketing 2.0 compared to Madonna’s Marketing 1.0 (or whatever).

I have to say, I get the point. I don’t really know who Paris Hilton is, what she does, or why I should care about her. But I recognise the name. And now I know why. Actually, no, not true, I heard her name when that video was all over the web and in every spam inbox you could imagine, but I didn’t know if she was meant to be important or something.

The idea of trading attention is of course, the reason why the blogosphere works. If I point to chartreuse there in that link up top, that blog gets attention. If a story I post gets voted up on reddit, I get attention. As a result, we have all become keen to harness attention and make the most of it. I use it to help develop my reputation as a… well, whatever it is I am… other people use it because they want to make money, other people do it because they’re lonely. What Hilton has done is turn this into a real-World business game where designers and hairdressers and car manufacturers want her attention because like an A-list blogger, she can divert our attention to whatever she is talking about. It’s a brilliant business model, and she’s either very, very smart or the people using her are.

There are, as ever, drawbacks to all this though, ones that are pertinent for us web application developers and engineerscraftsman. As the article above points out, Paris has become a platform for marketing and therefore can never really market herself. She can sell designer clothes, she can sell cars, probably even burgers. But she can never sell herself (unless there’s another video I don’t want to see out there… ). She is trapped in a corner of audience expectation. If she were now to attempt to host a game show, say, it would fail. The audience doesn’t want her there. Nor, if you’re thinking of using her as a marketing vehicle, do they really want her on your video site because they have expectations of you as well as her.

Sometimes, this can be known as ‘captured by customer expectation’ and refers to the fact that when you’re successful for something, it is virtually impossible to transfer that success to something else. Think how hard it would be for McDonald’s to transfer their success into say, high-street banking, for Apple to buy out Wal-Mart or for your web development company to transfer success into the field of say, farming.

When you are a product/service company, you can always have a fall-back if you’re careful: facebook will always have college kids even if high school kids and corporate bods hate them; McDonald’s will always have the Bic Mac even if their next venture fails; you will always have the desire to move onto the next project if this one doesn’t pan out.

When you’re known for one thing and you can only have the resources to handle one market at a time though, things can fly back in your face. Whilst the article above is astute and funny, the ultimate truth about marketing like Paris Hilton is that when she fails she’ll fail for the same reasons we might: ignoring audience expectation because we want ‘growth’. And we will all make that mistake eventually as it will become a very miserable existence to be thought of as nothing else other than that person who makes other people famous.