When you hand brand control to your users, know what's ahead and how best to handle the results. iCrossing's VP of corporate strategy explains.
"If you want loyalty, get a dog." In uttering these words at Forrester Research's first-ever Marketing Forum, held last week in Miami, Randy Susan Wagner, Orbitz' chief marketing officer, invoked a problem that all of us in the marketing community now face. The socialization of media (and not in the political sense of the word) has everyone in an uproar. Overall, however, the Forrester conference revealed that the marketer has anything but a dog's life these days.
Social media and loyalty
A highlight of the show was listening to Lester Wunderman, one of the titans of old-school direct marketing, talk about the ways in which social media can help marketers establish if not loyalty, then at least build and deepen relationships with their customers. Mr. Wunderman spent a good portion of his presentation talking about his own blog and how word of mouth has helped boost the business of a nearby clothing retailer. In so doing, and by his own rather personal example, he made a good case that the industry as we know it has started to turn upside down. Of course, that was precisely the theme of the conference, how to turn marketing on its head and make it more customer-centric.
The mantra we've been hearing for several years, ever since the early rise of the internet in fact, is that "the consumer is in control." Evidence of this is everywhere, from the consumer-generated ads that some brands have embraced and benefited from (Sony and Frito-Lay's Doritos are two that come to mind) to the ever-expanding universe of blogs that can, intentionally and not, have a dramatic impact (positive and negative) on brands, products and businesses, much in the way Mr. Wunderman's has. If Mr. Wunderman's fellow pioneer in direct marketing, David Ogilvy, were still alive today, he'd be witness to a similar transformation taking place in the agency that bears his name. Ogilvy is hurtling headlong into digital, striking unique deals with the likes of Technorati to bring "conversational marketing" to Ogilvy's roster of clients.
Understandably, truly ceding control of brands to consumers makes a lot of marketers nervous. General Motors, for example, has received a lot of praise for bringing an executive voice and perspective to its customers with the FastLane blog on the one hand, and on the other, was virtually tarred and feathered by customers when it allowed them to create their own ads for the Chevrolet Tahoe last year.
It's tempting to be glib and say that when you hand over the keys to the kingdom, you'll win some and you'll lose some, although of course that's true. Still, it's one thing to let customers play around or even manipulate your brand on a limited or trial basis and quite another to reorganize your company and the messages you generate about your products and services around the seeming whims of these same unpredictable customers. A transformation of this order of magnitude requires new metrics, new means of measuring and new ways of acting upon results.
Innovations ahead
So it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that most companies have not yet completed this transformation, and also probably fair to say that most have not adjusted their media mix to best meet the challenge. That was my takeaway from more than one session at the Forrester event. Analyst Shar VanBoskirk asserted (gratifyingly, for those of us in the search business) that marketers have not fully tapped into what search can do for their businesses, while Brian Haven noted that with emerging channels like blogs, social networks, podcasts, RSS feeds and consumer-generated content, many are still sitting on the sidelines waiting for their peers to make the first move.
As all media become increasingly digitized and devices and software give even the technophobe the tools to unleash his or her creative edge with relative ease, all media will become social, and all consumers potential producers (as well as consumers of what fellow consumers produce). Should pet stores expect an onslaught of marketers rushing to find a substitute for their no-longer loyal customers? No, but it does mean we have to learn to listen better and start to communicate in a language that we don't necessarily own. As we do, we would do well to remember Lester Wunderman's point that we should embrace these conversations, and embrace the technology that helps us to improve our delivery of them, because in the end, the dialogue helps strengthens relationships, which a goal we can all agree upon, no matter what generation of marketing we belong to.
Noah Elkin, Ph.D., is vice president of corporate strategy at iCrossing. Read full bio.