Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The Market hasn’t changed, just the marketing

I applaud the clear historical summary presented in "The Role of Business in a Market Community" and I agree that the role of marketing is changing as a result of social media, but where I disagree is the premise that the result is that "for the first time…customers…have the means to choose whether or not they want to support you." This choice has always been an inherent part of the marketplace, except in cases of enforced monopolies. It is one of the primary foundations of a market economy. What has changed is not the market, but the way companies are able to relate to that market.

A lot of the buzz around marketing in an age of social media is focused on an online extension of traditional personal referrals as a dynamic marketing engine. Viral and Word of Mouth marketing channels are as old as communication itself. How many of us don't reach out to our own networks of friends and family when we are looking for a dentist or a good bottle of wine. What has changed is that instead of asking two or three friends at work or at a backyard barbeque, we now have the ability to reach out to thousands and millions of "friends" through our online social networks. We rely on their ratings, rankings and testimonials just the way we historically relied on our face to face friends over the water cooler or back fence.

Throughout most of the Twentieth century, marketing has been all about interruption. It interrupts our reading the newspaper, it interrupts our drive down the expressway and most pervasively, it has interrupted our TV experience. It had to interrupt because it wasn't willing to rely solely on our limited networks of friends and families for referrals, especially when it was either introducing something new, or in more cynical circumstances promoting something with dubious value, like cigarettes or boxes of cereal enhanced sugar.

Today, consumers are finding multiple ways to prevent that interruption. I won't go over the entire list, but we all have seen the impact of cable, TiVo and the Web on the relevance, impact and spend on traditional 30 second TV spots. Companies are being forced to strip away some of the sizzle and actually produce good bacon. And when they do, they are finding that individuals still like to do the same thing they've always done, talk about what they like and dislike and tell their friends. The only difference is that their reach can now be global and the distribution is in real time. And that is the challenge for marketers in the future, not to tell people what to think, but to let them us what to make.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To the owner of this blog, how far youve come?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.