Aim high or low
One marketing approach is based on mass distribution to get people to sample your offering for free while adding to the hype about it. The other is based on loyalty to a strong brand that has won over fans willing to pay a premium price.
Which one you choose depends on what kind of product you are offering and what your brand position is. As loyalty is only earned over time and through people’s positive experience with products, Apple’s marketing is not usually going to work for a new kid on the block.
ChatGPT takes the low road to success
Understanding that, OpenAI took the tactic of mass distribution on a scale we have not seen before. It launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 and attracted over a million users in the first five days.
In just two months, it hit 100 million monthly active users, which made it “the fastest-growing consumer application in history,” Reuters reported. It now boasts of 1.8 billion visits a month, and many of those visitors are happy to pay the $20 a month subscription for ChatGPTplus, which was introduced in February.
What made ChatGPT take off so rapidly was the build-up of hype that continued to grow as a result of people being able to gain access to generative AI on their own devices simply by registering and logging in. Remove any barriers to entry – like cost or the need for specialized equipment — and you get to enjoy rates of PLG (product-led growth).
In contrast to OpenAI, Apple already has a well-established customer base eager to experience its new offerings. Accordingly, it doesn’t have to offer free access and can seriously expect people to pay $3499 for the Apple Vision Pro that is to become available for sale only in 2024.
Why unveil something a half a year before you can even preorder it? To heighten the anticipation and the satisfaction the early adopters will feel when they are among the first to obtain the latest offering from a brand they love.
Even at this stage, they are all reading the tweets, viewing the videos, and asking questions that show a high level of interest. That level of engagement combined with the reviews from all the tech journalists who got to play with the headset create a type of hype that is more rarified than that surrounding ChatGPT but just as impactful.
Would you buy it?
Apple can price its headset that the average consumer can’t afford because it has millions of fans already who know and love its products. Within those millions are tens of thousands who would not consider the price tag too high for the bragging rights that come with being among the first to have this new offering.
Sure, there will be imitators putting out cheaper versions of the headset. But that’s always been the case for Apple devices. True fans insist that you get what you pay for and you shouldn’t settle for second-best.
On the other hand, OpenAI had the difficult job of rousing interest in something intangible that couldn't be photographed or shown to advantage on video. You could have accounts of individual user experiences, but those don't generally generate the response of "Want!" the way videos do.
What do you do when you’re offering something people haven’t had before from a brand that has yet to establish its reputation? You offer free samples, and that’s just what OpenAI did – very successfully. Once it had enough people hooked and even boasting about making it integral part of their businesses, it rolled out the premium version that most people could afford to pay.
"Know thyself" is the basis of determining your course of action in life and in business. If you’ve established yourself as a premium brand that can trade on exclusivity, you can offer high end products to your fan base. But if you’re an unknown quantity, you have to win over the masses to at least give your offering a try to build up a loyal following.
What’s the tell? How many followers identify themselves as such is one indicator. Notice that even in its current heyday, OpenAI’s 2.3 million Twitter follower are dwarfed by Apple’s CEO’s 14.1 million. (No doubt, Steve Jobs’ numbers would be even higher if he were still alive today).
Most businesses will never attain Apple’s superstar status, but they can still follow the high road of marketing after establishing their brand as a leader in the market. And for those whose offering is not suited for premium pricing, OpenAI’s incredible rate of adoption proves that it is also possible to go from zero to millions in just a few months.
So long as you know what you're about and who makes up your target market, you can adopt the right strategy and follow the high, low, or middle marketing road to success.
For help determining with marketing path to take and what type of content can help you get there visit WriteWayPro and book a free consultation call.
Related: https://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2023/05/did-open-ai-open-pandoras-box.html
Two years ago I wrote a blog entitled Fixing What Ain’t Broken at Target that criticized the proposed change to the retailer's tagline. I remembered it today when I saw that Target is still showing its original tagline in its circulars. Either it read my blog or heard many others echo its sentiments before committing to a marketing mistake.
Forgetting the wisdom of if it's ain't broke, don't fix it, Target is replacing " “Expect More. Pay Less,” the tagline it has been using with great success since 1984 with “What we value most shouldn’t cost more.”
As I pointed out at the time, while that sentiment is very close to the original brand promise of value for less, it’s actually far weaker. It is neither making a promise for the brand to deliver, nor is it coming up with a clear solution.
I remembered this when I came across the Target virtual circular. I'm happy t to report tht the tagline it shows is still the original rather than the monstrosity suggested in 2021.
Slogans are meant to be short, to the point, and indicative of a call to action.
When Nike declares, “Just do it,” they’re using just three syllables to not only capture a feeling but direct customers to act on it. Apple’s “Think different” did the same thing.
Unoriginal though it may be, the original Target tagline captured its mission statement with a clear CTA to customers in just four short words. It’s now being replaced by something much longer that sounds more like a complaint than a solution.
Related:
"If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door."
In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sale because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works. ... You may think that you're an exception; that your preferences are authentic, and advertising only works on other people. .... But advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can't acknowledge its likely effect on himself is double deceived."
Thiel ads this observation on p. 130: "If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a a bad business -- no matter how good the product."
In case you read the title as a reference to being alone, I have another blog on working alone that goes in a different direction.
 Pandora opening the box that releases harm into the world. Image at: https://nypl.getarchive.net/media/pandora-opens-the-box-ca3915 |
OpenAI not only democratized access to AI but popularized it by inviting people to use it for free. Many of us have opened that box, but some of us have been dismayed at the results that speak as if they are objective truth without any accountability for sources of information or explanation for how ChatGPT arrives at its conclusion.
Relying on AI as an objective source of information ignores the fact that it reflects the bias embedded by its human programmers and can reinforce discriminatory effects. The consequences of that can range from biased beauty standards to reinforcing illegal discriminatory practices.
Now that it just costs $20 a month or can even be available for free at off-peak times, everyone can -- and many are -- make use of ChatGPT instead of doing research in a variety of sources with documentation that offers at least some level of accountability that is essential for explainable AI.
Read more here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/did-open-ai-pandoras-box-write-way-pro/?trackingId=E3yor3MrHAi2B2HwIdqlVQ%3D%3D
Related:
An A/B Test of Generative AI
AI'
s Got Some Explaining to Do
AI's early attempts at screenwriting
The Pros and Cons of Generative AI
AI Informs Personalization for Starbucks
AI Accessibility: The Next Spreadsheet Revolution for Modern Business?
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-original-selection-of-11-ai-quotes.html
One aspect of putting SEO in the picture is thinking about the impact your pictures have on your site core vitals.
All content marketers know that it takes more than text to catch the eye. But those who are also aware of site loading issues realize that pictures can slow down a site.
Slow page loadings harm your core web vitals and your SEO.
So what should you do: give up the pictures or give up the better speed?
The answer is neither. You can have the best of both worlds -- attractively illustrated posts and good loading times when you optimize your pictures for web view.
In the past, I had to do this manually for each image, playing around a bit to find the size that would look good but does slow things down. I don't have to do that now.
I just discovered a great SaaS solution. Imagify optimizes your images for you in a snap.
It enables you to fix all the ones you have on a page without having to upload them one by one. At the free level, you get up 200 images a month, though you have to be sure to download them within 24 hours.
I put it to the test with my site. As the screenshot here shows, it details how much memory space you can save for each compression.
For some of the pictures, the amount of memory gained was rather small, so I opted to skip those and only converted the ones for which the difference was more substantial. Imagify shows the amount of saved for all the compressed versions I selected in place of the original pictures.
While it's easy to use for any site, it's even easier if you use WordPress. You can use the Imagify plugin to automatically optimize the images and ensure that that they are not the cause of slow loading times on your site. Learn more about that by watching the video below.
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I turned to Bard ( see why here) for the answer, which also explains why this term emerged only in the post-internet world. This is what it wrote, and I have to admit being somewhat amused by the somewhat pushy CTA at the end and if the "I" is meant to be the AI itself:
Notice that Bard is very bullish on ICPs, even pushy, I'd venture to say. That turns out to be a bit funny when it fails to recognize the acronym for my next query for a more recent business bible.
Clowns you say?
Knowing that when you work with generative AI you have to try your prompt multiple times, I get it another whirl and wrote out "ideal customer profile" for the query. Now Bard grasped what I was asking and responded: