Thursday, September 17, 2009

It's go time, buddy!

When I was a kid I thought it was cool to have dice hanging from your rear view mirror. I also thought Charles in Charge was non-fiction and Kimmy Gibler was the best character on Full House (bar none). But I digress. It may have been the moment that the Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire rolled up to the house in the cab that had dice in the mirror that I began to correlate mirror dice with the dream lifestyle. Ignore the fact that it was a cab and concentrate on the bigtime arrival onto the SoCal scene... ok enough with the ramblings.

I want some dice.

I've recently taken over the responsibilities of marketing strategy and planning for LimbGear, a nascent player in the action-apparel market. Specifically they are the creators of the Performance Technapparel category, which eventually will be an ever-present category. Performance Technapparel is an intersection of performance apparel (think UnderArmour) and technology (think iPod or any mobile device you might take on the go)... the place where the athlete, casual or professional, might go where he needs to get in a run but needs to stay connected. LimbGear makes it convenient for people to take and manipulate their digital devices with them while they are on-the-go.

www.limbgear.com

So, as I'm mapping out my strategic plans for the 09/10 year, I'm aligning my goals (sell sell sell) with my budget (ouch ouch ouch). I've been a marketer and sales person since college. For the vast majority of time I've sold technology. So I have a firm understanding of marketing fundamentals. And for the previous 3 years I co-managed the operations at LimbGear, which gave me some keen insights into the apparel and consumer goods universe... which, by comparison to tech, is like (i'd envision) a Vietnamese yard sale.

We've toyed with traditional marketing in the past, including some expensive ad space in a popular outdoor magazine and a failed commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIqni6iRFjc . I thought it was genius and hysterical... viral waiting to happen. The video ad was directly tied to a print ad/online media which had a discount offer to go at the website. No cha-ching. We targeted the right audience (college kids on one campus) with the right message and product at the right time (x-mas). So what didn't work? It's my belief after months of research that we didn't engage them enough. Would our ads have worked in 1995? I think so. 2005? Maybe. Today? Not a chance.

So, it's go time. I know you know where I'm headed, where everyone is headed. To the door that reads 'Social Media Marketing Campaign'.

For the next year you'll get a week by week breakdown of strategy creation, tactics and results from a startup marketer whose betting the farm on a Social Media Marketing strategy. I'm working with an agency, Speak Advertising http://www.speakadvertising.com/ to build a strategy and execute against it to reach our goal of conversing with our consumers to launch and grow our brand.

So please stay tuned as I lay it on the table (for god sake you already saw the director of operations in a Santa outfit) blemishes and all. We have no shame. Please jump in to the fray and we'll make it conversational.

Thanks and talk soon.

jb


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