When marketing can be like putting lipstick on a pig
Remember Iridium? That magical mesh of satellites strung across the heavens, just waiting for our calls ? to Gran, or to that Amazonian Indian you just happened to want to call while sitting in Antarctica? Really.
Apparently it worked a treat if you were on an oil-rig in the North Sea, but not if you were in a building in downtown anywhere.
I loved the ads. They seemed so full of promise and, and, and - capability - or something - didn't matter. Great looking. Everywhere. Must have spent a bomb. They did: launching with a $US140M global advertising campaign in the two months before the phones were ready for sale.
In total Motorola et al spent some $US5billion getting 66 satellites off the ground. By Feb 1999 they had attracted only 6,000 subscribers, compared with the business plan which called for fifty-two thousand by that time. About 10 months after launching, Iridium filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
What went wrong? Smarter minds than mine have pointed the finger at departments other than marketing, and the message to take from this story is the obvious one, that even an enormous ad budget can't save a hopeless case.
The reverse is also true: even with a miniscule budget, if the product is right, you have a chance. (Cue Skype and Google stories?)
Yes, both Skype and Google (and YouTube and Myspace and, locally, TradeMe and even finda, I'm told) have found business nirvana on the back of a budget that Iridium would have soaked up in a second.
"We have done virtually nothing to market the brand," said Google's head of marketing, Cindy McCaffrey, in an interview with Tech Live's Becky Worley a few years back.
"We have done no consumer marketing, advertising, big brand awareness advertising of any kind. It is something we considered early on but decided that what we really should do is invest in innovating the technology itself. And again, that's all about staying very, very focused on the user and delivering an experience that was unparalleled on the Internet."
McCaffrey said Google's marketing strategy is focused on word of mouth. "When people find something exceptionally useful, they tell others." Pretty simple, really.
PS. If you Google Iridium you'll find that the service is up and running again. And here's an ironic aside: apparently Iridium was named so because originally 77 birds were to have flown, and 77 is the atomic number of the element Iridium. Natch. But only 66 satellites made it into orbit. The element with atomic number 66 turns out to be Dysprosium, from a Greek word, meaning: "hard to get at".
