Active Seeding
To accelerate the word of a product spreads, smart companies seed their products at strategic points in many different clusters with seed units. A seed unit is an actual product or a representative sample of the product the company is trying to promote.
The logistics vary: The seed product can be offered at a full price, at a discount or for free. You can use sampling programs, touring programs, or demo programs but the principle is always the same.
The company gives people in multiple clusters a direct experience with the product. By doing so you plant a discussion simultaneously in multiple networks. By seeding the product, the company is accelerating the adoption process. Instead of waiting for the natural transfer of information, the company takes the initiative and ensures that this transfer occurs.
There are two levels that a seeding campaign generally targets two levels: Media and Grassroots. The grass root level has been highly underutilized.
The biggest potential pitfall in seeding is redundancy. Seeding twenty products in a large organization can mean different things depending upon the distribution of the products.
If these units are spread in different departments then the company is making good use of the money. However if they are concentrated it might not be effective utilization of resources. Of course if visibility in a particular department is especially high the allocation of resources might be justified.
Seeding should be an ongoing effort. A dead network or an inactive network should be identified as it indicates that competitors’ brands are spreading in that network. To identify dead networks , traditional methods of information used in market intelligence can be used such as sales data, marketing research and your own observations.
The focus is on answering a question: To what extent are people talking about my product in a particular network? A company can rapidly expand its audience and sales by seeding inactive networks instead of focusing all efforts on the existing active ones.
To accelerate the word of a product spreads, smart companies seed their products at strategic points in many different clusters with seed units. A seed unit is an actual product or a representative sample of the product the company is trying to promote.
The logistics vary: The seed product can be offered at a full price, at a discount or for free. You can use sampling programs, touring programs, or demo programs but the principle is always the same.
The company gives people in multiple clusters a direct experience with the product. By doing so you plant a discussion simultaneously in multiple networks. By seeding the product, the company is accelerating the adoption process. Instead of waiting for the natural transfer of information, the company takes the initiative and ensures that this transfer occurs.
There are two levels that a seeding campaign generally targets two levels: Media and Grassroots. The grass root level has been highly underutilized.
The biggest potential pitfall in seeding is redundancy. Seeding twenty products in a large organization can mean different things depending upon the distribution of the products.
If these units are spread in different departments then the company is making good use of the money. However if they are concentrated it might not be effective utilization of resources. Of course if visibility in a particular department is especially high the allocation of resources might be justified.
Seeding should be an ongoing effort. A dead network or an inactive network should be identified as it indicates that competitors’ brands are spreading in that network. To identify dead networks , traditional methods of information used in market intelligence can be used such as sales data, marketing research and your own observations.
The focus is on answering a question: To what extent are people talking about my product in a particular network? A company can rapidly expand its audience and sales by seeding inactive networks instead of focusing all efforts on the existing active ones.