Some people have been through push marketing (broadcasting whatever you see fit about your product or company) in to pull marketing (allowing your audience to determine how they interact with you). But many haven’t made that leap yet; I am sure you could take the FTSE 500 and find more than 50% who still see the push marketing world as the Holy Grail.
As a brand you need to be working with your advocates & influencers to infect your wider audience, using emotional communication based on a value exchange. Because as the market flounders trying to move from push to pull, consumers have moved on another stage and are now looking for an exchange.
There is a new rule of 'why are we here and why should anyone care enough to want to get involved in that value exchange
Consumers have become oblivious to average products, average marketing and average service. How do we know this? Because we are all now oblivious to it. It is so easy to find out everything about a product, a brand, a company or even the people that work there. From digital, to actual interaction we are all forming opinions of companies, products and industries on a minute-by-minute basis.
The digital world has opened up access to all of us to comment, research, share and form opinions quicker and more easily, all with a little bit of peer pressure thrown in. Status updates are flippant to most of us, but that is information to others. That tweet about the crap audio system in your VW or the undercooked burger at BK is nothing to you, but it is information to others and they use it, whether consciously or not, to make a decision the next time they are faced with a relative choice. What about that conversation at the conference, in the street or down the pub?
This is what marketing has been doing for years; creating emotional relationships with products, brands, companies and people. That emotional connection has just exploded with the advent of the ’social human’. I am not talking about social media; check my last post for views on that. I am talking about the exponential acceleration of humans as social beings, the acceleration in people as influencers and the ability for us all to be vehicles of marketing.
We have all grown up very quickly; the change from consumers with no power to consumer with all the power has been short, roughly around 36 months for mass adoption of this new state of mind. We are all now looking for more from the brands we engage with, we want to know more about the reason they exist, who the people are and why we should care. When we know that we want to know how we can get involved, how we can become more immersed in the brand, how we can become the influencer to our friends on the brands we really care about.
What do we call that? It’s a value exchange, you give me what I want and I will give you what you want. You could call it the rule of’ ‘you scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours’.
This doesn’t really change your marketing communications approach; the channels haven’t changed. What has changed is going back to focus on who you are, what you make and focusing on the new questions being asked by your target: ’why are we here and why should anyone care enough to want to get involved in that value exchange?’
