For a hundred years, marketing has been waging war against customers. It's time for a cease-fire.
The fundamental fact of marketing is that you're trying to get an unwilling customer to do something they don't want to do. That's why customers want to flee when they sense they're being marketed to. But suppose waging war against our customers — "targeting" them via "strategies" "tactics" -- isn't such a good idea? And suppose customers simply won't stand for it any more?
The answer isn't to personalize and do 1:1 marketing. That's like switching from aerial bombardment to sending out hit squads. No, we need to change the basic model of marketing that pits companies against their customers.
The problem goes back to the basics. Traditional marketing views itself as a type of broadcast: a single voice gets to send a message to a mass of people. This made sense when the mass media were one-way. Back then, a company could control its market by selectively releasing information about its products. In fact, markets themselves are defined by this broadcast model, for a market these days is a demographic segment that is likely to respond favorably to a particular message lobbed at it.
But this old way of working has serious disadvantages: customers don't trust messages and generally don't want to listen to them. Now they don't have to. A staggering percentage of the US market has another medium open to it: the Internet. Although the Internet connects masses of people — over 500,000,000 worldwide so far — it is profoundly not a mass medium. It is all about groups of people with passions in common talking to one another in their own voice.
That makes the Internet the anti-broadcast medium: it's not mass, it's not one-way, and it's not controlled by companies that can pay to send out a message. The Internet is, in fact, a conversation among your customers who are discovering that they are a far better source of information about products and services than the companies ever could be.
This is the most fundamental shift in marketing since the creation of mass media. And it affects all marketing, on or off the Web.
The audience learns:
-How the old techniques actually alienate customers who have learned a new set of expectations thanks to their participation in the wired, connected world
-The keys to engaging in the new customer conversations the market expects and demands
-To anticipate the most important change in customer dynamics and in marketing since the invention of mass media 80 years ago