Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Marketing Flywheels Work

sparktoro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#41

Post by Jommi »

csallen wrote: post #21
libertine wrote: post #9

I'm not here to criticize the content, just the to vent a frustration as a marketer: Why does this industry keep repacking/renaming concepts just to sound like something new... it's like many get value out of perceived progress, when in reality it's just something that has been done for years. This makes me want to step away from this discipline honestly. Instead of trying to compact knowledge to try to make actual l…

Flywheels aren't a new concept. I first encountered them in Brad Stone's excellent book about Amazon, The Everything Store , which I believe was published in 2014. Stone explained how Bezos and crew discovered their flywheel in 2001 : > Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believe powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More cus…

This is not a fly wheel, this is economies of scale. There are established words for these things. Why do we invent new ones that don't make sense?

Flywheel output less than the input is. Why would we use that word?

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#42

Post by Jommi »

libertine wrote: post #34
gk1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or simply "attribution." I've simply stopped trying to set up multi-touch attribution for my clients because it always, always takes longer to configure than anyone expects, and by the end nobody fully trusts it anyway.

>Or simply "attribution." Yes, I think that's enough lol Just had bad memories of a client trying to have multi channel attribution in place for a campaign (but on the other hand, maybe the agency upper management shoved that in the clients throat and we had to deal with it).

What's hard about multi channel attribution? Would love a primer on this.

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#43

Post by danielharan »

troughway wrote: post #35
rsweeney21 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing flywheels power money printing machines, not electric turbines. This article isn't meant to require an understanding of physics. It's meant to help people not familiar with marketing understand the principal of building momentum in a channel.

So then would it make more sense to call it a windmill?

I'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#44

Post by hyko »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #22
hyko wrote: post #4

The term “Marketing Flywheel” doesn’t really enlighten anyone, because that’s not how flywheels work. Flywheels are a store of energy, not an energy multiplier. In a true marketing flywheel, you’d only ever get out slightly less than you put in. By that definition, I have been involved in many marketing flywheels to date.

Marketing flywheels power money printing machines, not electric turbines. This article isn't meant to require an understanding of physics. It's meant to help people not familiar with marketing understand the principal of building momentum in a channel.

That’s not my argument. What I’m saying is that a flywheel is a poor analogy for what is being described.

If you understand what a flywheel is, and I tell you that there is such a thing as a “marketing flywheel”, you’re no closer to understanding what I’m talking about.

A much better physical analogy would be a chain reaction, or something like compounding if you wanted a mathematical one: i.e. anything where the initial investments fuel outsized returns later on.

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#45

Post by waheoo »

hwerehqrw wrote: post #37
rsweeney21 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing flywheels power money printing machines, not electric turbines. This article isn't meant to require an understanding of physics. It's meant to help people not familiar with marketing understand the principal of building momentum in a channel.

So the hope is to use concepts people aren't familiar with to describe other concepts they also aren't familiar with?

Sounds like a typical HN commenter.

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#46

Post by waheoo »

danielharan wrote: post #43
troughway wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then would it make more sense to call it a windmill?

I'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.

Or just say what it is, compounding growth.

You guys always gotta make stuff more complicated than it is.

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#47

Post by phreeza »

hyko wrote: post #38
gk1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the idea is that a flywheel maintains momentum and makes the rest of the process easier, as opposed to starting cold each time.

That’s not what is being described though: “You put in the same amount of work (or less) each time, and get more and more out of it the more you repeat it.”

I guess that works if the "stuff" you put in is torque, and the effect is the angular velocity?

In linear coordinates, they could have called it the marketing frictionless skateboard - the more you kick the faster it goes!

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#48

Post by gk1 »

waheoo wrote: post #46
danielharan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.

Or just say what it is, compounding growth. You guys always gotta make stuff more complicated than it is.

The English language is full of idioms and metaphors; marketers are hardly the only ones using them.

Actually "snowball" probably makes more intuitive sense to people than "compounding growth."

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#49

Post by redelbee »

Jommi wrote: post #42
libertine wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or simply "attribution." Yes, I think that's enough lol Just had bad memories of a client trying to have multi channel attribution in place for a campaign (but on the other hand, maybe the agency upper management shoved that in the clients throat and we had to deal with it).

What's hard about multi channel attribution? Would love a primer on this.

A consumer goods company operates two brands that sell the same products to different target audiences. The company works from a database that comprises 15 million+ entries for customers/leads/etc. Each brand sends one email a day, mails 6 catalogs throughout the year on different schedules based on seasonal buying patterns, runs search/display/etc ads across Google and Bing every day, runs Facebook/Insta/Messenger/etc ads every day, posts on various social networks every day, works with hundreds of affiliate advertisers that advertise every day, puts time/effort/money into SEO every day, and just started running TikTok campaigns because the founder’s daughter’s friend is an “influencer” on the network.

Some people buy. Some of those people have bought before when they lived in a different state before they were married. Some people see an ad on their phone and purchase by telling their spouse to order from Amazon. Some people wait until their paycheck clears the bank two weeks later then buy, but not before they’ve seen the brand an additional 15 times on various channels.

Multichannel attribution aims to attribute those purchases to the correct channels, usually to determine ROI and help with planning.

Keeping track of all those customers and touch points is non-trivial. Assigning weight to each touch point is non-trivial. Modeling behavior accurately is non-trivial. It’s theoretically 100% possible. Software companies and consultants sell solutions that seem plausible. In practice it feels impossible.

Source: A decade of agency and in-house advertising/marketing work for some of the largest brands in the world

Re: Why Marketing Flywheels Work

#50

Post by yodon »

jsonne wrote: post #32
arkades wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the previous poster but: I've tried picking up things a cut above random pop books about marketing and haven't found any depth there. If you have any links to somewhere I can actually do a deep dive on marketing, I'd appreciate it.

If you want "theory" lookup Bernays and read his books about propaganda. Something more practical is anything David Oglivy has written. For copywriting check out "The Adweek Copywriting Handbook" by Sugarman. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any design specific books as I'm a media buyer and trash at design.

I'd go one step farther from "read anything David Ogilvy has written" to "read everything David Ogilvy has written" starting with Ogilvy on Advertising. It's fun and light and valuable even if some of the ads do feel wonderfully retro (they were not retro, however, they were incredibly disruptive innovations that worked so well they redefined how we think about business communication, and this is where they started). The man did invent the notion of modern quantitatively driven marketing, after all. Yes, some of the things he talks about pertain to an earlier era, but all of them remain relevant today and there is value in thinking about how to translate concepts he discussed for print advertising to online contexts.
Post reply on HN