Tick Yes

The 21st century marketplace

Apocalypse, soon!

Is the sky falling for marketers?

Women aren’t buying it

Ad effectiveness is going to continue to decline’, says US trend Meister Sam Hill in his latest book 60 Trends in 60 Minutes.Yes, agrees Australia’s own Kim Boehm, managing director of Clemenger Harvie Edge. ‘In the US and Canada, there’s a lot of talk about whether advertising has reached the point of saturation…today we are facing the almost impossible task of penetrating what the Americans are calling ‘the concrete consumer’…If this is anywhere near the truth, the implications are challenging for agencies and consumers.’

Today’s customer, dubbed the ‘concrete consumer’ by some advertising industry heavy hitters, is becoming increasingly resistant to mass marketing messages. Indeed says Mary Lou Quinlan who runs a strategic consultancy in New York specialising in women, ‘Before my very eyes, women have morphed from interested consumers into vigilante shoppers…’ Sam Hill concurs. ‘Concrete is great stuff. It’s too heavy to move. It’s so hard a sledgehammer just bounces off…Concrete can’t be moved or dented and messages don’t stick. Hmmm. In other words, concrete is just like the modern consumer.’

So does Sam, or any of the other marketing futurists, have a definitive answer to this increasing perplexing situation? They certainly all agree that the concrete consumer is often resistant to mass advertising messages, appears to exhibit irrational decision-making behaviour, is elusive and unpredictable, doesn’t get off on overt brand image or prestige any more and is hard-core marketing-savvy. But do they tell us what’s causing this concrete consumer and give us an idea of what can we do about it? Not so far.

Why is this happening in consumer land?

First, some history. Our modern economic system developed during the Enlightenment period around four hundred years ago with the introduction of capitalism and the invention of the printing machine. Around two hundred and fifty years ago another huge leap in human progress brought us the Industrial Revolution where machines and factories revolutionised the way we lived and traded.

Indeed mass production, mass distribution and mass communication became an overnight sensation. Form was favoured over function and consumers increasingly clamored for the goods they saw on TV, heard about on the radio or saw in newspapers and magazines. Shopping became entertainment and consumers wanted to be amused. Provided we could delight them as a whole with the right product at the right price in the right channel using the right promotional message, they were ours. Until now.

Digital technology and globalisation have changed all that. A new revolution has emerged over recent times, a revolution where the passive consumer has morphed into an active, demanding individual. We call this process The Individual Revolution and it has profound implications for the future of not just marketing communications, but the way companies do business.

Is it all doom and gloom? Absolutely not!

The good news is that the active customer is in the driver’s seat of The Individual Revolution and in order to appeal to them marketers simply need to re-orient their primary focus from their own brand experience to the customer experience. Individuals notice everything but actively pursue very little. It’s only when they come up to buyer level that they get interested in what you have to say. And then they don’t distinguish between a direct marketing campaign, a sales promotion, e-marketing, mainstream advertising, hot packaging, sampling and demonstration, customer relationship software or even an ‘integrated’ campaign from an ‘integrated advertising agency.’ They just want to own something that suits them.

The trick is to find who might be interested in buying our products and to nurture that relationship until that magical moment of purchase arrives. And the paradox is that where digital technology has significantly de-stabilised the consumer-marketer relationship it has also provided us with cost-effective ways of satisfying this increasingly demanding individual. Things like excellent service, reliable communication, genuine one-to-one relationships, a message centred on performance, style and value and, importantly, respect for the identity of your customer are critical to breaking through to the concrete consumer.

International case studies

The Wall Street Journal recently emailed a variety of companies to test their customer responsiveness. They contacted General Electric about a broken cordless phone, they sought Palm’s advice on software for tracking expenses and asked Oral-B for help with an electric toothbrush that was on the blink. Their goal was quick and accurate answers but more often than not they got the runaround. Here’s a quick overview of their results:

The good

Company/problem: Palm re advice on buying Palm software to track expenses.

Response time: To their only email was 7.5 hours.

Answer quality: Supplied web address where consumers could buy the software.

Snafu: Sent them to Windows version though they had asked for Mac. (Mac software was one click away).

Comment: Accurate response that beat the promised turnaround time of 12 hours.

The bad

Company/problem: Oral-B USA regarding two-year old electric toothbrush that wasn’t working.

Response time: To their first email: 20 hours. To their follow-up: 1 day, 8 hours.

Answer quality: advice was tailored for a new toothbrush (theirs was two years old)

Snafu: They entered their ZIP code and got to a page showing…their ZIP code.

Comment: Service rep finally delivered the correct answer on the third try.

The good and the bad

Company/problem: Dell and NEC wanting advice on how to connect NEC flat-screen to a Dell laptop.

Response time: Dell: about one minute. NEC: To their first email, 22 hours. To their follow-up, 19 hours.

Answer quality: Dell’s answer was perfect whereas NEC was vague, eventually giving accurate, if unhelpful, advice about display settings.

Snafu: Dell: Made them reduce their browser’s privacy protection. NEC: Told them to use ‘recommended settings’ without explaining what that meant.

Comment: A victory for artificial intelligence. Dell used an ‘experiential system’ – no humans involved – to answer questions!