We're entering a new era in marketing where marketers must relate to real-time information on their product's popularity and awareness. This story tells a great deal about how marketers who want to leverage Apple's own systems need to be aware of the nuances of selling low-cost applications via the AppStore. Never before have marketers needed to be so in tune - in real time - to the needs of their customers and of pricing sensitivity and to inherent opportunities in the market.
It's as if you need to be ready to change the price of the lemonade at your stand based on the every changing patterns of traffic, weather, size of the glass, temperature, economic outlook, and the whims of your early adopters.
It's a wonderful time to be a marketer - if you realize that everything you were taught is rapidly being supplanted by the real-time information you collect from the customers you actually reach as opposed to the ones you targeted in the first place. Welcome to what my good friend David Meerman Scott calls "word of mouse."
UPDATE: Another study confirms the same. Things are changing quickly in the online app world and marketers need to change as rapidly.
