The Marketing Book: a Marketing Plan for Your Business Made Easy via Think Do Measure (2019 Edition) by McDonald Jason

Author:McDonald, Jason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Browse: The Power Of Next To

The “browse” path simply means that the customer “discovers” your product or service when they are looking for something else. In the real world, it can be as simple as when shoppers shop in a mall, browsing from store to store, or from rack to rack only to “discover” something new that they want to purchase. Or at the grocery store, when they’re browsing for diapers and “discover” fragrance-free, eco-friendly baby wipes made from organic bamboo conveniently placed nearby. Browse is your signage in the mall, the “place” your product is discovered and what it’s “next to,” and even your listing on the mall kiosk. It is billboards on a highway, and – online – it’s ads placed next to articles on CNN, and even guest posts in blogs. Browse is getting your message adjacent to what they’re looking at.

THINK: The Adjacent Science of Browse

The word “browse” comes from a late Middle English word from the French, broz, which comes from “shoots” or “buds.” The idea is as cattle graze for food in a field, they are “browsing” for leaves or plants and thus “coming across” new things to eat. In this way, it’s entered the lexicon as a term for shopping as when a salesperson comes up to you and asks, “Can I help you find what you are looking for?” and you just answer, “I’m just browsing.” Notice how in this very common interaction in a store you have, implicitly, two different discovery paths: search (the salesperson is asking you if you need help finding what you are searching for) and browse (no, you’re just looking here and there, not sure exactly what you have in mind, or even if you want to purchase at all).

Words give clues to deeper marketing meanings.

As is often true in marketing, you should flip this concept around in your mind. If customers often “browse,” then how do you get your product or service “next to” the things that they are looking at? Browse in retail is the struggle for “product placement.” The struggle to get your product placed at eye-level, and the struggle to get your product placed in the right category and adjacent to complementary categories. Peanut butter is next to jelly in the supermarket, and that’s by design not accident. Marketers compete to get their peanut butter or their jelly into the most visible spot.

Online the struggle for browse is also about categories and adjacency as well. Take Amazon.com. We often go to Amazon starting with a search intent, such as searching for “books on WordPress,” and then “browsing” the Amazon search results and suggestions, looking for related books. Amazon even encourages this type of online browsing with its “Customers who bought this item also bought” feature that is shown beneath each product page. Or, after you make a purchase, Amazon will send you a push email explaining “Based on your recent visit, we thought you might be interested in these items,” thus combining “interrupt” with “browse.

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