Who,running,your,organization, marketing Who’s running your organization?

Awhile ago, I got an email from one of the "gurus" I follow and it shocked me. The gist of it was this person wanted to trade services for a household item.To say it floored me would be an understatement.What was worse was a few days later t Automation technologies represent a fundamental aspect of any modern industry. The major types of industrial automation solutions, such as DCS, PLC, SCADA, and MES, are used on a large-scale in process and discrete industries.DCS technologie

Your customers, that’s who! Or should be!So don’t you think that you ought to start a regular dialogue with him or her, as the case may be?The word empowerment is a very overused word. However in the near future the primary strategic marketing communications battle will be to see who goes furthest in empowering their customers.To empower your customers you will have to:1.Provide them with far more information than you currently do.2.Allow them to make decisions about you and your company together with your resources.3.Give them plenty of choice.4.Give them the perception of control!5.Allow them to feel that they are running your organisation!Because anything that tightens your relationships with an existing customer increases the revenue you get from your customer.And the only form of communication that can do all the above so that you do tighten your grip on your customer is…. Interactive communication!Because interactive communication allows you to have an ongoing debate with your customers and your prospects, make regular interactive conversations available where they can debate not only about your products and services but the very soul of your company. Because that will be much more powerful than just putting your advertisement on television (or wherever) or I’m going to sell my goods in Tesco (or wherever).Then, when you get asked, "Who’s running your business?" you can honestly reply, "My customers through genuine interactive programmes!" and earn major brownie points!Because the problems with the current system are manifest. The challenges faced by marketing and advertising stem largely from the institutional dimensions of both. Remove these old models from the equation and many of the existing problems of lack of sales etc will disappear.Nowadays consumers want information that’s relevant, credible and engaging, and they don’t much care where it comes from.The subject of interactive communication has been the focus of innumerable articles in the popular press. Most of these have looked at the phenomenon through a mass-media lens, with "interactivity" reduced to advertising links and "Buy-It" buttons.And certainly not understanding the very important fact that interactivity is the most crucial aspect of all communication. And it is certainly not determined by the expectations of media conglomerates bent on appealing to the lowest common denominator and therefore, by the inexorable and inflexible logic of broadcast, to the largest collection of passive ad receivers.Today consumers don’t like ad infested terrestrial TV what they do like is the opportunity to express an opinion, they like, in other words, voice. So just who is running your organisation?One bit of advice, for God’s sake don’t let your advertising agency have a say in that running…the only running you should be doing in that instance is away… as fast as you can be.Advertising Agencies who constantly keep attuned to their target audience are confronted again and again by the market’s diversity. As a consequence, they assume markets almost always must be segmented with strategies fine-tuned to the needs and wants of each sub-population. Closeness to consumers also leads to recognition that traditional demographic approaches are seldom adequate to capture the rich diversity in target audience’s needs, wants, life-styles, perceptions and preferences. Getting in sync with this massive transformation of marketing is not going to be easy. The problem is that our minds are conditioned by the past, not the future. So we want to keep doing things the way we have always done them, even when the results become ever more disappointing. Every now and then the ground beneath us shifts so dramatically as to make much of what we thought we knew so wrong it becomes clear that we have to forge new beliefs or fail.These are such times in marketing. The behavioural proclivities of consumers as individuals must be the primary determining factor, not exotic maths even though it will obviously continue to be a critical tool – but not the main tool!That is why it essential to fully understand and comprehend the meaning of the word communication…to interact is to communicate all else is a sheer waste of time, energy and money…your money!Let us recall the essential elements of business, and especially Advertising and Marketing-as-usual, in the 20th Century. Mass production and its attendant economies of scales exemplified business for most of the past 100 years.Perhaps the reason for this hanging on to the past way of doing things is the persistence of mass media, which came about as a result of the needs of business as a way of reaching mass markets. Like the management of large corporations, broadcast advertising partakes of the same top-down style of command and control.Customers were told what to do – shop hard – but not asked in any substantive way for their input or opinions!And, sad to say, command and control remains the order of the day. There is much talk today these days about the empowerment of consumers although corporations still communicate their demands by broadcasting them to demographically determined abstractions of whom they know very little about and have no genuine relations with at all. When it comes to change, when it comes to improving methods of ‘talking’ to customers both mainstream media and corporate marketing are blind to these changes inasmuch as they continue to rely on deep seated assumptions attached to Advertising-As-Usual.When we dared to challenge the ‘obvious’ assumptions of Advertising-As-Usual and its unshakeable supremacy of the ‘creative’ solution to Marketing-As-Usual, we were considered, in a word ‘NUTS’.In fact we were regarded as demented, deranged, and certainly totally unaware as to the unassailable supremacy of the Advertising-As-Usual model. What happens when the great masters of the universe, broadcast media and their lackeys, Advertising Agencies, have to confront the fact that they are about to made redundant, superfluous by a far superior technique, interaction.Well these corporations are finally discovering that advertising-as-usual is exorbitantly expensive and that it is a ridiculously inefficient means of trying to reach and form productive relationships with increasingly fragmented array of markets.And, the scary thing for advertising-as-usual is that corporations don’t give one dam about advertising all they want is the best, most efficient way of getting their goods to market and sold. The day of Advertising-As-Usual is over…Thank God!