SXSW and the Soft Sell
Ny Times reporting on the SXSW startups that are actively representing their new companies at the conference, but they are doing it in a nuanced way.
Start-up companies are aware that in-your-face marketing is a good way to scare off the kinds of people who go to South by Southwest. JagTag, a company based in Princeton, N.J., that incorporates barcodes into marketing campaigns for the benefit of camera-phone users, decided not to attend the conference. Instead, the company sent a single employee loaded with several thousand promotional postcards bearing barcodes. “We didn’t want to do a hard sell,” said Dudley Fitzpatrick, the chief executive. “We just wanted to show it to them.”
This is interestingly taking a page out of the old revlon playbook- give a customer a free sample, and count on a certain buzz and response from those free samples. If there is quality behind the product, this will be a sustainable strategy for acquiring new business. In more competitive fields, however, it may not be a thoughtful one. If there were milk companies giving away samples of their milk, for you to try - unless there was a substantial taste difference - would you really care? There are other differentiation points and marketing opportunities that are essential for moving a product into the mind of that audience (even if you use a soft sell approach).
