This time the pundits have gone completely over the twist.
Gartner (the world’s largest high tech market research firm) recently issued a press release predicting that in the future, sales pros won’t be selling to real people in the real world. Instead, we’ll all be pretending to be cartoon characters selling to other people pretending to be cartoon characters.
I’m not making this up. Here are some excerpts from the press release:
In 10 years, the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experience associated with them, according to Gartner, Inc. By 2015, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple anonymous online personas than marketing and selling offline.
While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of people creating multiple anonymous personas (such as in Second Life or World of Warcraft), blogs, online communities (such as YouTube and Digg), and the sheer power of their influence means that every customer will have multiple online personas driving business relationships with companies.
- Companies should organize their products and services around multiple online personas.
- Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
- Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
- Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy
Seriously, does anybody actually believe this? Does anybody actually believe that people are going to buy “real world” stuff based on the personality of the cartoon character they’re playing in a computer game?
What I find amazing is that there’s so much hype surrounding Web 2.0 that it’s actually possible for a major analyst organization to spout this kind of silliness and not get laughed out of business. (Or at least laughed at to the point where they deep-six the press release.)
Oh, by the way, lots of Marketing groups in the high tech world hire Gartner to provide “market segmentation.” Nice to know where all that money is going, eh?
