Just keep giving them doughnuts! (Suppliers of Building Materials, to architects)

I urged you in my previous posts to develop clever digital libraries that architects and other specifiers could use in their models.

The development part is easy – depending on your budget you (you = building product supplier) can outsource the development of digital representations of your products for one or multiple platforms.

Distribution is OK –– just use your existing channels.

Getting the specifiers use the libraries is a bit harder, and unless you figured out the ‘management’ within the process - you are wasting your money;

Let me rephrase this: you can put your marketing money into just about anything (dining and wining architects and their wives or gifting calico bags, pencils or doughnuts for morning teas with your logos embossed on them) – any of these will bring you more benefits than a digital library that has no management in place will ever do.

And trust me, you’ll find this task hard to tackle. You will fail in the ‘critical mass’ challenge.

No matter how big or BIG you are – you will not be able to gain momentum in this area unless you create a critical mass, big enough to cause a tipping point.

This insurmountable looking challenge puts most companies off– though it is remarkable how easily it could be done.

Unfortunately, the parties that know this will never let you on the secret.