Listening to Your Customers’ Customers is a Great Idea

We know that our Photographic Web Presence Marketing is a great value and helps bring customers into our client’s locations.  Our mission is to help replace the legacy advertising that no longer reaches Millennials and Generation Ys.  I spend a lot of time talking to potential clients about what we do and why we do it.  Needless to say, the younger more technologically savvy clients understand what we are doing much faster than the older less technological “Baby Boomers” do. I commonly use the terminology of, “they get it” to describe the potential clients that completely understand our marketing and why it works.  It is much easier to sell someone who “gets it” rather than a client that you need to convince that this is something that will help them. 

We are in an age of exponential technological change. The world is moving forward so rapidly that it is really hard for people to understand the changes and adapt to them.  Individuals (depending on each situation) adapt to the changes at different rates and adopt the technology that is appropriate for their lives or businesses.  I think of this like a gradient scale from (white), being completely technologically impaired (no cell phone and can’t use a computer) to (black), being totally immersed in technology and the on-line world.  So in the general population and among the individuals I talk to, I see all the shades of this gradient that go from white to different shades of grey to finally black.  The Age of Information and the exponential rate of technological change has created a cusp or a point of transition between the world we knew and understood in the 20^th Century and the world of rapid technological change in the 21^st Century.  So we have throughout our population, people who are still in the 20^th Century when it comes to technology and accessing information, existing alongside a multitude of people with different technology use and information accessing skill levels. 

Most of the businesses that we first worked with as we began to develop our Photographic Web Presence Marketing had for the most part, a 20^th Century understanding (almost what could be called a reaction) to what their marketing problems were. The advertising they were doing or used to do with legacy media (TV, Radio, Newspaper, etc.) was no longer working or it was working very poorly. They knew that they were pretty much wasting their money. These clients usually fell into the grey to turning black areas on my gradient scale for their 21^st Century technological/information prowess.  They used technology because they had to and saw it as a necessary evil which they really didn’t want to have to deal with.

What the business owner and managers didn’t tell us was told to us by the young people that I started talking to. Yes, I started asking any young person who would talk to me about what we did and if it made sense to them.  100% of them loved what we do and told me, “I do everything with my phone; I look up places before I go there and see what they look like.  If they don’t look nice or they don’t look safe, I don’t go there.” 

I almost know immediately how enthusiastic someone will be about our Photographic Web Presence Marketing based on their age.  The younger they are the more they “get it” right away.  It amounts to a real time and instant validation that what we are doing is working and bringing young people into our client’s location.