More on Manufacturing Serendipity

Last week I blogged a criticism of manufacturing serendipity. I’m now starting to think that I might have been a bit harsh.

In my post I identify that the success of any effort to manufacture serendipity depends on three things:

1. The number of people you reach
2. The percentage of these people who turn into business within a particular time frame
3. The amount of money made each time

I think I was being harsh because these are the same three things that influence any marketing activity and as marketers it is our job to increase the figures for each section to make the whole program better.

So manufacturing serendipity is just like any other marketing activity. If, as I originally thought, the reach and conversion rate are too low to make this a good choice then a clever marketer will look at ways to increase these numbers.

I have a few (disorganised) ideas on how this can be done:

• Rather than just going to a networking event, give a presentation at one. This means you reach the whole room rather than just the number of people you can talk to one to one in an evening.
• Blogging and writing (particularly if you do it in the right place) can increase your reach further
• Increasing the conversion rate can be done using the catch-all advice of “understand the user/consumer”. Customise the pitch for each person. This will make it harder to scale, but the reach/conversion rate trade off is well known and you’ll hit this problem everywhere

So now (in my head at least) I’ve move from a situation where manufacturing serendipity is both a stupid idea and not very measurable to one where it has potential but is still not very measurable.

Note added 2013-05-23: Is this content marketing?