Confessions of a Marketer

Marketers’ dirty secret; customers have always talked about us among themselves, and we knew it (but chose to ignore it until recently)!

Is it just me or are there a lot of current authors claiming that marketing as we know it is, if not dead, then definitely ill? Even more than is usual in the Chicken Little world of marketing introspection? For example;

• Joseph Jaffe says ‘Our consumers are departing in droves to the cleaner, clearer, and more meaningful waters of “conversation”.’ 
• Larry Weber (Marketing to the Social Web) says ‘Communication is less about creating controlled messages (as in the old marketing) and more about creating compelling environments to which people are attracted’

It is not just the authors, there seems to be a cottage industry of seminars/webinars telling us we cannot reach customers anymore. I had a client recently say to me, ‘If I hear another agency or consultant tell me that media channels are fragmenting, that customer attention is a dwindling commodity, that consumers are aggressively filtering out marketing messages…without some advice on what to do about it, I will personally prove their point!’

Seems to me much of this comes from the ‘doh’ moment that ‘marketing’ had when we realised customers talk about us behind our backs! We had suspected this for a long time but it was not until they began generating their own content in volumes that challenged ours and then demonstrated a preference for their own stuff that we began to listen in.

What do we do if our product is not conversation worthy; what rules apply in this new Web n.0 world to subjects that are too boring or sensitive for consumer generated content? An example; a government client conducts Social Marketing, the battle to improve the health of citizens by convincing them to exercise, give up smoking, eat healthy food, regularly screen for cancers etc. They have no problem convincing their customers to discuss the need for exercise and wholesome foods; in fact they do a good job of recruiting civic minded ‘Ambassadors’ to spread the messages. But what do they do with anti-HIV messages? Social sensitivities in the target community mean no Facebook or MySpace “ABC” groups (Abstinence, Being Faithful, Condoms) for them. Surely there must be a way to use some vestige of old marketing with the new channels and communities of today?

Then I was reading the Synovate Loyalty newsletter (as one does) on one of the newer TLAs, CEM (Customer Experience Management) quoted Kotler on Marketing and his famous “Marketing Formula”;“R à STP à MM à I à C.” R = research; STP = segmentation, targeting, and positioning; MM = marketing mix (i.e., the famous four Ps of product, price, promotion, and place); I = implementation; and C = control (getting feedback and making adjustments). If this framework represents classical marketing and it can accommodate the new concepts of marketing as a conversation we could be onto something that better matches the multi-dimensional challenges most of us face. Not all is new, not all is exciting.

Over the next few posts I will try to match and incorporate each recent “Marketing Revolution” with this framework, looking for the overlaps and rub-points. I think this will be easier if we do it in roughly historical sequence, starting in the early – mid 1990’s with CRM.

A Marketing Mash-Up.