Black Swan Marketing

Seth Godin points out the difference between viral marketing (what he likes to call an “ideavirus”) and word-of-mouth marketing.

The main difference, in his mind, is that viral marketing is a compounding function and word of mouth is a decaying function. So when something being marketed goes viral it infects a small population of people who then infect their own networks. It’s taken completely out of the marketer’s hands, which is what you want. The power of word of mouth, on the other hand, decays after just several people tell someone else they think something is cool.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea about Black Swans is relevant to this compounding/decaying distinction. A Black Swan is a rare, unpredictable event with a major impact. We’re usually totally unprepared for them because either we’re trying to predict the future based on the past or we’re drawing conclusions based on a bell-curve view of the world (i.e., an expectation that situations may deviate beyond what we know, but not by much).

Black Swans can be positive (Google) and negative (9/11), global (fall of the Berlin wall) and personal (Dylan as the “voice of a generation”). The point is you can’t predict them, even if you’re BT’s futurologist.

However, you can prepare for a Black Swan.

You do that by thinking as broadly as you can about ways you don’t want to be negatively affected by big swings of chance (like a stock market crash). (Taleb puts it succinctly: “don’t be a sucker.”) Symmetrically, you can also be hyper-aggressive in areas where you might meet opportunity in the form of a Black Swan. You should spread those kind of bets around liberally, though, and bet small and often until the (positive) Black Swan has you - or your idea - in its clutches.

This is totally applicable to marketing in an attention economy, right?

Eighty or ninety percent of the time go for word-of-mouth marketing. And don’t blow the whole budget trying to force something to happen, hoping it will. Take what the connected consumers will give you, again and again.

But, in parallel, experiment with ways to show-up in the crowd that doesn’t cost you much of anything but is creative or even crazy, novel. Accept invitations. Partner in unexpected ways. Sponsor events, launches, functions that you should - and shouldn’t - be at. In other words, take risks that by themselves won’t hurt you, and do it a lot. Make it part of your strategy.

Seth writes “. . .that viral marketing is like winning the lottery, and if you’ve got a shot at an ideavirus you might as well over-invest and do whatever it takes to create something virus-worthy.”

Yes, an ideavirus (viral marketing) is like winning the lottery; it’s a Black Swan. And we shouldn’t just over-invest in it once we know we have something disruptive, but also get in the habit of constantly injecting ideas into the marketplace, beyond the standard deviation and beyond our control, that every so often might start an epidemic.