Growth & Branding

Caution: This could be a very nerdy post.

I started this blog in early September with this post. Through word of mouth and some aggressive marketing (me begging people to read), blog readership is at an all-time high (20+ readers). Who knew this blog would have such a far-reaching audience? But with this blog touching all parts of the blogosphere, some issues obviously arise.

When you look at the corporate world, such rapid growth can lead to multiple problems. One is expanding so quickly that you build too much capacity. Then, when the industry retrenches, you have a lot of costly idle capacity. Fortunately, blogging is very scalable, so we don't have that problem.

The second issue is developing your market. Do you want to be a producer for the masses, or do you pick a niche and try to service that group extremely well? If you try to be a producer for the masses and be all things to all people, it's very possible that you serve none of them very well. You end up being in a low-margin business with high fixed costs. And when the market changes, you can't be very nimble. On the other hand, if you want to be a niche player, you have to do at least one thing better than all your competitors for one specific segment of the market. There can be high margins. But such high margins quickly attract competitors. And if you're entire business is dependent upon one small market, bad things can happen quickly if you lose that market, or the market shrinks, or whatever.

So, maybe you can see my quandary. I can either continue aggressively marketing this blog to all. In the short-term, I will likely gain more readers. But there's a good chance many of them won't like it, and they will spread bad word of mouth to other potential readers, thus diluting the brand. Or, I can be very selective in choosing prospects, discussing the blog only at the right time and only with the right people, and hopefully building up an audience that is smaller but more loyal (and creating great brand awareness and recognition).

The question is how I want this blog to be seen by (potential) readers. Do I want a select few to really love it, or do I want the masses to just like it? Obviously, this is an issue that someone in marketing should be able to solve. So I asked Kristin Pagano (Associate Brand Manager of Guitar Hero at Activision, and also my wife) what she thought about these branding issues, and she said "You're a dork." So this problem isn't going to be solved by a professional.

Oh well, all that for nothing. I guess I'll just keep doing what I've been doing. Never mind this post.