This is the first post in a series for a blog panel I’m participating in with Meredith Eaton, John Sidline, and Frank Strong. Over the next few days, all four of us will blog on the same topic on the same day. This first post is on the biggest lesson we learned this year for PR and marketing.
I believe we'll remember 2009 as the year marketers lost control. The idea of control – that you can engineer a brand and message, and make people accept that brand and message – is at the heart of most people's definition of marketing. If that idea isn't dead already, it's clearly not long for this world.
How much influence did we ever really have? Maybe less than we thought. Years ago I worked for a market research company that put on focus groups. I would sit with the clients on the other side of the one-way mirror as they listened to the customers and the moderator. The focus group audiences were recruited to fit cleanly into a certain type – Young Suburban Moms, Small Business Decision Makers, or whatever. The clients were product managers or brand managers in big companies. They would sit in small, eager clusters, reacting to what they heard either with satisfaction or frustration. Mostly frustration.
"That concept is SIMPLY NOT resonating." "Let's dial up the first message in the next group." And sometimes: "Did you see what that last woman was wearing? Were those sweatpants?"
The guiding philosophy of the marketing focus group could be summed up as, We Need to Find What Works With These Damn People. If we could find just the right message – the magic brand statement, or product tagline – and deliver it in just the right way, we win the customer. This idea puts the marketer firmly in control, and it's one we've been living with for a long time. Ever since the concept of brand first surfaced in the fifties, if you were in the business of persuading customers to care about your product or company, you had to:
- find the right target customers
- deliver a compelling message
- repeat to build brand equity.
These simple-sounding tasks, of course, have never been simple. From the rudimentary beginnings of advertising and branding in the fifties and sixties, we progressed all the way to the current age of database marketing, one-on-one marketing, and sophisticated mega-brands. Branding and marketing became equal parts art and science, using advanced quantitative measures to track and measure customer perceptions. But as far as we'd come, the game was still: find them, tell them, tell them again.
In 2009, this stopped being enough. This was the year two related trends finally collided: customers' increased ability to interact and exchange information, and diminished tolerance for traditional push marketing. These have combined to drive a massive, and in my opinion permanent, shift in influence away from paid media and towards earned media. Technologies and social spaces will change and evolve, but this shift will endure, because it satisfies something fundamental to human beings: a craving for connection and authenticity.
You can think of paid media as what we say about ourselves, and earned media as what others say about us. A good measure of how far the balance has swung towards towards earned media: just in terms of sheer volume online, brand-generated content is now dwarfed by data feeds and social feeds about our brands… by a ratio of a least 500:1. The voice of the marketer has been drowned out by the voice of the community.
Where do we go from here? The truth is that most brands simply don't have much to say that is compelling in this new, more social age. Traditional marketing has betrayed us – our carefully crafted messaging statements and brand concepts are exactly the wrong thing here. Most brands today are flat and two-dimensional, bereft of any real personality or human interest. Even worse, many companies have entire teams – the so-called "brand cops" – dedicated to keeping these brands as sterile and uninteresting as possible.
What's ahead for us all: to be effective in social spaces, companies will have to change completely the way they think not just about their brand, but about the very act of persuasion and influence that underlies the entire marketing concept. And it will start by recognizing the obvious: we are no longer in control.
Check out the other panelists:
- Meredith L. Eaton, Blog Panel – Part 1: 2009’s Biggest PR Lessons Learned
- Frank Strong, Blog Panel Part I: Biggest Lesson of 2009
- John Sidline, Back to Basics: The PR Biggest Lesson Learned During a Tumultuous 2009
[...] Krim Stephenson: http://arlingtonmillgroup.com/blog/2009/12/blog-panel-the-biggest-lesson-of-2009/ [...]
A very insightful post Krim and I agree to a large degree that marketing has lost control, though not all control. For example, in an interpersonal sense, people have always formed perceptions on the way you dress, speak and act among other things. So too will it be with brands. Up until recently, most perceptions of brands were shaped by what a brand said, either in written form or in visual appearance. To a lesser degree, brands were judged on how they acted, except in perhaps situations of greater awareness like crisis communication type scenarios. Now, everything is transparent: customers can see through it all and words will have to match actions. Looking forward to reading your next post!
[...] Plan « Blog Panel: The Biggest Lesson of 2009 [...]
[...] and Frank Strong. All four of us are blogging on the same topics on the same day. My first post was on the biggest lesson of 2009, and my second post on how I see marketers reacting to that [...]