The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

We talk a lot about finding ways to convince our clients to take advantage of the “new world” of marketing; underscored by brand ownership by the customers, and the urgency to provide WOM tools, or at least participation.

In his upcoming book, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World (which I’m adding immediately to my seemingly endless Amazon Wish List)
Nielsen Online’s Pete Blackshaw examines the limitations of community participation to enhance and enliven a brand… when the company represented by the brand doesn’t follow up with genuine internal betterment.

He provides a sneak peek in a recent ClickZ column, Adapting to Consumer-Controlled Surveillance:

I often worry that in our sometime irrational exuberance over the benefits and wonders of conversation, brands are blind to what it truly means for consumers — our coveted buyers and lifetime revenue streams — to be constantly watching, monitoring, evaluating, and talking about us.

[…]

You can put Dove Evolution, Dove Onslaught, every Doritos consumer-created Super Bowl ad, and dozens of hugely popular user-generated ad spots into a blender, and they still won’t come close to filling the Olympic-sized pool of negative media in the conversational airwaves implicating bad customer service.

A business strategy that embraces conversation (as we’re seemingly contractually obligated to do) must be seen as more than a marketing activity. In a digital landscape populated with The Consumerist, Epinions, Get Satisfaction and Buzzillions (among many many others), the veil has been lifted:

In a surveillance culture, consumers see three levels deeper into the brand. What they see has less to do with the message’s polish and more with the brand experience’s foundational drivers.

[…]

At some point, it’s just not going to work to have PR firms, advertising firms, digital agencies, and other supplier groups messaging against or with these new currents. We can’t have eight different groups managing and interpreting influencers. We probably need to refashion and recast what we mean by holistic communication.

If this is starting to sound uncomfortably familiar… if you suspect that your toe-dipping in the consumer-generated, consumer-dominated space is hindered by the lack of a compelling business proposition, differentiator, or narrative, please get in touch with us — it’s what the Next Engine’s here for.

By the way,
Campbell-Ewald’s Social Media discipline (headed up by Dave Linabury) should feel pretty good about one of Blackshaw’s prescriptions:

Marketers must shift from a paid-media marketing model to a listening-centered marketing model wherein all early signals, whether extreme or ostensibly insignificant, are absorbed and internalized across the brand franchise.

Tags: agency, brand, cgm, links, marketer, risk