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These
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a presentation.
What Marketing Can Learn from the Internet
Ending 100 Years of War against Customers
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.
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The audience learns
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How the old techniques
actually alienate customers who have learned a new set of
expectations thanks to their participation in the wired,
connected world
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The keys to engaging
in the new customer conversations the market expects and
demands
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To anticipate the most
important change in customer dynamics and in marketing since
the invention of mass media 80 years ago
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The Hyperlinked Organization:
Business’s New Drivers
Business has been based on a few fundamentals. For example:
The bigger the project, the more management it needs.
Good decisions come from good information.
A business can’t succeed if it isn’t clear in its purpose and if
its people aren’t all on the same page.
Simple. Obvious.
Very very wrong.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Getting them wrong
breaks a company’s most basic relationship with its employees, partners
and customers. And getting them right brings a significant competitive
advantage
But how could business have gone so wrong? There are two factors.
First, the world has changed so what used to be right no longer
is. While companies used to be able to control their employees and
its markets by selectively releasing information, we now live in
a connected world. Customers are talking with customers and employees
are talking with employees…and sometimes customers are even talking
to employees. The company is not longer the best source of information
about itself, so it has lost the method of control that it’s taken
for granted.
Second – and harder for companies to hear – much of what business
believes about itself results not from clear-headed business sense
but from a neurotic need to believe in the magical powers of management.
The world is putting itself together – self-organizing -- in new
ways, and the same inevitably is true of business. More and more
work is being done by “hyperlinked teams” that pull themselves together
across the org chart and then disband when their task is accomplished.
The lines between the business, its supply chain and its customers
are being erased faster than companies can redraw them.
This is a tremendous opportunity for businesses that embrace it.
But most businesses react with fear, uncertainty and denial because
the old ways are comforting and familiar. The change that’s happening
is not optional. It is already underway. It needs to be understood,
not resisted. The hyperlinking of organizations is the new fact.
In this presentation, Dr. Weinberger puts the new fact into perspective,
drawing on examples of companies that have embraced and benefited
from the hyperlinking of their business.
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The audience learns
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The new business drivers
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What companies are
already doing to benefit from the hyperlinking
of their organization
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Life after the Bubble:
Learning the Right Lessons
The bubble popped, but the Internet continues. If the Net seems
less important than it did five years ago that’s only because it’s
insinuated itself into our lives as an integral part of our businesses
and our social existence. Not only is it essential to learn from
the bursting of the bubble, it’s even more important to learn the
right lessons.
The bubble inflated because companies thought the Internet was
a medium to do what they have always done, only cheaper, faster,
and maybe with breezier language. So, company after company built
home pages where they could deliver their marketing message. Internally,
the Internet was a great research tool and an even greater distraction.
Meanwhile, aggressive young dot-coms emerge that got the Internet even wrong-er than did the staid, traditional companies where the average
age was actually over 23.
Here are some of the most common errors that we made and what we
should learn from them:
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“The Internet is a mass medium.” No, although there
are hundreds of millions of people on the Internet, it’s all about
small groups that are joined by shared interests.
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“The Internet is a cheap way to market.” No, at least
not in the traditional sense. It is a great place for real markets
to form: customers who tell one another the truth about your company.
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“Business web sites need to be ‘sticky’.” No, that
flies in the face of the nature of the Web which is hyperlinked,
not sticky.
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“It’s all about brands.” No, it’s all about reputation.
But even reputation is being transformed by the Web. (As Andy Warhol
didn’t say: In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people
on the Web.)
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“We need to monitor our employees’ use of the Internet.”
No, we need to let them be distracted because that’s where the bonds
of loyalty will be forged and that’s how innovation and competitiveness
happen.
The Internet is here to stay. It already more
important than most people think. It is only going to become
more and more important. So, learning the wrong lessons from the
popping of the bubble would be more costly than the popping of the
bubble itself. Businesses are going to have to learn the right lessons.
It might as well be sooner – before your competitors – than later.
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The audience learns
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How to avoid having
your company alienate the customers they are trying to attract
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How to use the Internet
to engage with the most active, vibrant markets in history
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How to unleash the
creativity inherent in their workforce, increase the flow
of ideas, and get more value from every employee
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Also available
The Knowledge Management Oxymoron
Messiness as a Virtue: Information Management
in the Age of the Web
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