Mets Kramer and Ron talk about Jargon for the digital world (1 of 3).

I'd like to follow up your recent blog post, which you called Your Audience, Part One Strategic Segmentation. And we've got another couple of parts that are following this. But you used the term audience. Let's maybe start there. With the digital world, what in the heck is the audience?

It's interesting. that the term audience comes on. If we go back 100 years, we didn't have billboards because we didn't have cars. Well, maybe 150. We didn't have radios. We didn't have television. Everything was local. You walked to it. So you knew everybody. It was a relationship world. Yep. As the car came in, and it's kind of interesting when you talk about. automobiles in America is something like 1910. There were 44 miles of road in the United States, period. Then you bring in radio, you know, that's late 20th century or 19th century, late 1800s, early 1900s, televisions in 1950. All of a sudden, the relationship world changed because you, you know, you had to be, you had to own a car to see a billboard. So it's a narrow audience. You had to have a radio or you had to have a television. And I was a young boy when we first saw television. So that's really a relatively recent phenomena. With the internet, your audience is in the ether.

It's everybody and anybody who's got access to a computer and that's worldwide. And that's probably, I think Facebook has 2 billion people that use their product. And so it changes the whole context of marketing, doesn't it?

And it becomes more complicated, too. relationship local walking around 1800s marketing to today with the internet, there's no geographical boundaries anymore. That person who's coming in on the internet, they might be in South America, they might be in Australia, they might be in the Middle East. We don't know. And so all of a sudden, the challenges of territories and territorial assignment in the construction world, I have an area of responsibility. If I'm an equipment dealer, if somebody is coming in and asking for a part or a technical question, they could be coming from way the heck and gone outside my territory.

Yeah. And if we use Amazon as the model and we look at where they started and we transfer that into our approach to the marketplace and the equipment world. You had a local bookshop. You had your clients. They would come to your bookstore. In some cases, you could sit down and read the books. It was an adjunct or an extension of school. And Amazon proved, well, wait a second. I can sell books anywhere. And a lot of the traditional booksellers are no longer in business. Classic example, I guess, is Borders is gone. Barnes & Noble is still here, but Borders is gone in our world. Do you suppose that we're going to have a similar situation with the digital world in the construction space?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to add a third element to that. We've got our current customers. I agree. Our current prospects. I agree. And then the customers that deal with our competitors in the marketplace, people that are outside our reach, because we typically don't pay much attention to them. If I look at the, and let me just use traditional without bringing everybody into it. If I look at the four major construction brands, Caterpillar, Komatsu, John Deere, and Volvo, and I'm going to upset a bunch of people that aren't included in that, the Chinese, but stay with those four. If I'm a Komatsu dealer, typically I've earned the business of that customer because I took them away from one of the other three. Right. Or true in all of those cases. But the salesmen that we have working in our territory don't often go try and get business from somebody that they don't have any of our equipment. So it's kind of a.

an accepted convention that I'm not going to mess with your brand if you stay away from mine, which is no longer valid. Yeah, I don't think it ever was.

Yeah, I used to tease people when I was involved in selling. I don't want all your business, but let me tell you when to stop giving it to them. That's another aspect of the digital world, isn't it?

I remember back in Quebec early on in my career, in the automotive space, I could get from the provincial government license plate information for car owners. So I could see the universe, whether it was my brand of vehicle or not, I saw the universe. And I could make... decisions on where I wanted to invest my money and go after which products. In the digital world, I've got to find a way to attract people to whatever, I'm going to call it a platform for the moment, a platform I put out there so that I can identify them. They know who they are. They're out there in the ether somewhere. But unless they interact with my platform, I don't know who the heck they are. So I add a fourth element to it. It's my My customers, my prospects, my competitors, customers, and then the universe. And the digital dealership audience is that large, isn't it?

I think that's really valid. And I think we also get to the place now where we've done a reasonably good job of setting the table and what the term audience means. I think we might need to get more serious now on the next phase. So let's change the station a little bit.