Signal Oriented Marketing
First rule of Fight Club (or Marketing in this case) is to have a catchy label.
So I propose Signal Oriented Marketing. It is actually close to the innovation of Object Oriented Programming. The key innovation was the message passing between objects, as much as the objects themselves.
Looking at marketing from a perspective of signal can be extraordinary useful.
Take Market Research. One of the criticisms is that segmentation is often done using attributes that can be gotten at rather than segmentation by care abouts. It is segmentation by demographics rather than by job to be done.
I am proposing a third way: you look at how you are going to signal the attributes of your offering and you segment by that. If you can devise an honest signal to a subset of potential consumers that is what you should use as your segment. If you can not, don’t add the feature set.
Specialized language is often a good avenue. If I say “ay, there’s the rub” in a discussion, you hone in on it as the crucible of the problem. We have established that we are both fairly well educated outside the domain at hand.
What does this imply? Don’t shy away from specialized language in advertising. Using plain well understood language is for losers.
Red Bull used this signaling approach in establishing themselves. They deliberately sought out honest signals. Like limiting their product to certain clubs and bartenders that “saw” the benefits. They had the product delivered via special carriers, like FedEx 12 cans sent overnight to a club, etc. Things that are expensive and hard to fake.
The result was that people believed the signal and as such, bought into the benefit of Red Bull. It obvious has an element of the scarcity phenomena as per Cialdini’s Influence, but there is more to it and analyzing this from a perspective of signaling is a better approach.