How many companies in the sailing industry really understand how to use the web to promote their brands, market their products, and grow their businesses?
Oh yeah. They all have websites. Gee - how twentieth century. But do they excite the unwashed masses who are their potential customers? Do they exploit the power of existing social networks on the Internet? Do they take advantage of the existing resources in forums, blogs, news sites, etc. to get out the word about their products? Has any company in the sailing industry successfully used viral marketing to start a wildfire of demand for their boats, sails, services, gadgets or whatever?
3 comments:
Yeah, remember the power boat marketing knucklehead who spammed a bunch of sailing blogs? Not the kind of viral marketing I want to see showing up on mine.
Nowdays, so much information is available that a lot of us can find out much of what we need as needed, on our own, so our attitude toward a lot of the hucksters is more of a "don't call us we'll call you".
But, maybe every once in a while something comes along that's innovative and useful enough to be worth talking about.
I know that Sailing Anarchy isn't the most popular place to sailing bloggers, but check out their Flying Tiger forums. This boat was conceived in the SA forums, a famous designer (Bob Perry) jumped in, took input from the forum, and ultimately has deposits on over 100 boats solely from the Sailing Anarchy forums.
The first 10 or so have been delivered and are sailing in Sydney, San Diego, Seattle, and soon San Francisco.
Great example Edward. I wasn't aware of that one. I can think of two or three examples of creative uses of the web in the sailing industry that are (not yet) as successful as the Flying Tiger - but wonder what other stories other readers know of that would serve as role models for companies in this area.
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