Frank Catalano: No one should be surprised that Redmond-based photo sharing and greeting company Smilebox is trying something new with advertising and distribution in the --well -- real world.
Earlier this month, Smilebox announced that it would experiment with placing an ad on the lower right corner of the front cover of Scholastic Parent & Child. At the same time, it packaged its Web application into boxes to be sold in such bastions of cinder block as Target, Fry's and Office Max.
Long-time industry observers like me could almost imagine the smirks of the high priests of the Digiterati. It's as though the Web-bred-and-borne company risks failing some kind of secret Internet purity test: a business which was spawned and conducts its business online trying innovative marketing offline? Why waste the time and money with traditional marketing media and distribution channels?
That thinking is so last century. Because we are now in a post-Web world, where smart retailers draw on the best of the physical and the digital. The archaic all-or-nothing mindset belies a reality that more than 15 years of the browser cannot change: consumers continue to live in the analog world, and only visit the digital one.
Those who forget this are likely doomed to fail, especially in a now-challenging economy. One of the highest-profile examples of this kind of misstep was a company which was once the leader in software retailing and is now no more than a fond memory, living on as a domain name for a storefront on Amazon.com: Egghead Discount Software.
Egghead made a number of mistakes ensuring its future as a high-point-value trivia question, but at its peak around 1990 it had more than 200 stores in the U.S. and British Columbia and equal amounts of revenue from retail locations and corporate accounts.
No comments:
Post a Comment