B2B Marketer
Issue No. 57 - February/March 2011
Glad I’m not a baby turtle or B2B brand
by Kimon Lycos and Kimon Lycos
You can see those little guys now, pecking away with their fleeting tool of consequence, the egg tooth; a hard protuberance on their beaks. Right from the start the odds are against a sea turtle. Each baby born from the clutch of 100 leathery skinned eggs has to now dig its way out. Fancy that! Buried alive, before you are born – life is a bitch, kid, and gets even narkier.
Once they make it to the surface, the race is on to launch out to sea before a bird, crab or witless documentary team does for you. Fleeing their native beach, they have to use appendages that are meant for water; they may come back to land once in a lifetime.
So there you are, scrambling for all you are worth, with your brothers and sisters in the dark, with limbs that are less useful than a mouthful of raw liver.
Little wonder then that for the sea turtle, just 1 in every 4000 make it to adulthood. Remember that fact, it might be handy one day!
There is actually an upside to this horrible brutality. That once you have avoided all the dangers, from being trampled to death at birth, not getting picked off by a predator, or dying of exhaustion because mum picked a rough beach, you can live to 80 years. So when they make it, they make it big.
You might think it’s pathetic, but while watching a documentary about our flipping friend the sea turtle it struck me that their fight for survival, and indeed their entire life, mimics that of B2B brands.
Both sea turtles and brands have the exact same survivorship curve, namely a concave one. A concave survivorship curve is (if you were bored silly in biology, and did rude things to the Petri dish while this was explained) characteristic of something that produces large numbers of offspring each time they have a go at it.
The interesting part is that the parent or ‘maker’ offers stuff-all parental care, essentially leaving the offspring to make the best of an awful situation. As you would expect, mo...
