Editorial note
Yes, they’re back. The Bogamonics team. We’ve missed them. Today’s post is an excerpt from their forthcoming book, the great Australian novel, Boganomics. Indeed that’s where our high priests of the mortgage belt have been, penning their masterpiece. I’m sure it was not entirely coincidental that when Boganomics departed in June, MB suffered it’s only (however brief) dip in readership.
So, welcome back to MB’s intrepid adventurers into the dark soul of the Australian economy. I’m sure our pre-May readers will cheer. As for the multitude that have discovered us since June, gird your loins!
Maxximising the bogan opportunity
Marketers should never, ever view the bogan as a problem. The bogan is an amazing opportunity. Other market segments marketers deal with are likely to be more discerning, more logical, and more restrained. When faced with the chance to pitch to the bogan, the opportunity needs to be maximised to the power of max.
Bogan marketing: novice level
The basic view of marketing involves making your product stand out amongst competitors, and appealing to the target audience in a way that makes the audience more likely to plump for your product instead of something that isn’t your product. Take, for example, a hungry bogan. One who wishes to plump for its own plumpness.
As portrayed in the above diagram, a marketing strategist for KFC aspires to instruct the bogan that it should not go to the supermarket, nor should it sample fine dining, go to a competitor, or go and do something about its waistline. Instead of any of these things, the bogan is to want a delicious Zinger burger. The easiest way to do this is to apply as many of the X factors as possible from our proprietary X-factor bogan wrangling model.
Bogan marketing: intermediate level
The novice marketer to the bogan may think that he or she has done a wonderful job by convincing the bogan that it should eat a Zinger burger at KFC. In truth, the marketer’s performance has been woeful, considering the opportunity it was presented with. The bogan has little capacity to differentiate its wants from its needs, and its own opinions from those opinions which it is instructed to possess. A higher level of bogan marketer appreciates these facts, and will use them to achieve a higher level of success.
The intermediate level bogan marketing diagram demonstrates the ability to make the bogan choose KFC for its burger, and then inform the bogan that it also needs something else in order for the Zinger burger to be truly satisfying. This can be done by packaging the products together, and calling it “deluxe”, or “value”. The bogan will never evaluate whether the package of products is indeed deluxe or good value, so there is no need to discount or add quality. When packaging the products together, the bogan marketer should consult the X-factor model to ensure that the package comes in a brightly branded carry box. Another highly effective method is informing the bogan that the deluxe value meal, while comprised of three regular menu items, is available for a limited time only.
Bogan marketing: advanced level
The bogan marketer who has achieved the intermediate level of upselling, packaging, or expanding the bogan’s perceptions of its needs has reason to feel proud of their work. A marketer at this level is likely to be promoted to middle management, and go on to forge a solid career assisting the bogan in believing that marketing and advertising is an instrument that helps the bogan, not controls it. If, however, the marketer wishes to progress to the top of the tree, they need to abandon any quaint idea that they work with the bogan, instead embracing a gloriously depraved hegemony over the bogan’s hopes and dreams.
The diagram for the advanced level of bogan marketing shows that the bogan’s hunger should not be acknowledged by the marketer. Hunger for food can generally be satiated for $15 or less, and the bogan has more bucks than that. These bucks are the rightful property of the marketer, and need to be removed from the bogan promptly. The advanced level bogan marketer interprets the bogan’s hunger not as a hunger for food, but as a hunger for consumption. For example, a bogan marketer with multiple clients should include a plug for an iPhone app in its KFC advertisement, an app which would allow the bogan to summon a Zinger burger to its couch with little more than a wave of its finger. Now that the bogan is thinking about the benefits of advanced telephony, it is ripe to be sold a poor value, multi-year phone contract with an overloaded telco. This phone advertisement needs to follow the KFC advertisement swiftly, before the bogan forgets what it has been told it wants.
Stage one complete, the elite bogan marketer will conjure up a nonsensical branding alliance between the phone retailer and the provider of dubious and extremely expensive medical suppliers who promise that they will allow the bogan to have maxtreme sex. The branding alliance does not need to make any sense at all – the bogan is still hungry, confused, and its credit card is warmed from previous swiping. An equally meaningless connection can be then made to a car manufacturer, via a method such as an “everyone wins something” raffle or lottery, where the bogan’s supplied contact details are then used to pepper it with any number of unrelated marketing schemes. The bogan’s hunger has continued to grow, and the idea of a fast car to get it to a feeding venue is likely to be of appeal.
At this point, the bogan’s bucks are likely to be exhausted, along with its various lines of credit. A $15 hunger has been completely ignored by the advanced level marketer, who merely viewed it as the soft underbelly of a cash chamber worth approximately $45,000. The chamber thus emptied, this zen level marketer can choose to retire to the Bahamas. If, however, the marketer has become so hooked on exploiting the bogan that they can derive joy from nothing else, he or she can then sell a 26% interest “Deluxe platinum” credit card to the bogan, because the bogan is still hungry, and Zinger burgers ain’t free.