Andy's Articles

WHY ARE COMPANIES STILL ADVERTISING TO EVERYONE TO GET TO SOMEONE

It has never made sense to me and never will.

A few years ago, my good friend Jerry Reitman, a former executive vice president at Leo Burnett and now vice chairman of International Data Response Corporation, gave a speech to a group of several hundred retailers at a marketing convention in Baltimore.

He made a truly dramatic statement at that show, which really shook a few people up. He said "Mass marketing was a myth. It not only does not exist today, but probably never did".

Jerry produced this evidence to prove this theory, "Customers have different names, ages, addresses, dialects, education, incomes, ethnic backgrounds, experiences, aspirations, circumstances, family structure, motivations, behaviour patterns, personalities, character traits, physical features, emotional makeups and personal priorities. Consumers are individuals as unique as snowflakes".

His point was absolutely spot-on: People have always been and will always be, individuals. Every one of us is unique, different, separate and apart from anyone else.

Advertising agencies hadn't the faintest idea how to address this, so reliance was placed on mass media which suggested that this was the way to market, advertise and promote your business.

Without anyone coming forward with an alternative, this general approach ruled the roost. And, didn't they get away with murder…(and still are most of the time )

Then, the computer exploded into our lives. Rick Fizdale, Leo Burnett's chairman, said, "The database will prove to be a more powerful marketing tool than television ever was". As Harvey MacKay observes in How to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, "something you know about your customer is much more important than anything you know about your product".

And how right both of them were. Everything in the market today is about smaller and smaller more defined and segmented interest groups, which themselves are continually imploding. The media world is fragmenting and so are audiences.

These days, only contemporary direct marketing techniques and applications can address this challenge.

We now have to market on the differences of people, not their similarities. However, you have to clearly identify the audience first, then entice them with regular benefit-laden communications, provide rewards and, in the process, obtain additional marketing intelligence about them.

This change from a product marketing strategy to a customer marketing strategy is underpinned by the 'written in stone' commandment that it is infinitely more profitable to sell to existing customers than it is to keep finding new customers.

It's ironic really. Now that customers are getting promiscuous, marketers want to go steady. They talk about customer dialogue, relationship marketing and the dreaded CRM, but before they do any of that, they must first learn to listen a bit more. The customer conversation is totally different conceptually from a mass marketing dialogue. It reflects the needs of a sophisticated and confident market in which the customer is now firmly in control.

What's more, that customer knows it.

To be successful in marketing these days, companies must start to communicate to relevant groups of people, one at a time. Whether the audience is a dozen or millions, people do not respond as a target consumer or as profiled sample , but as me, and you, and her and him.

Andy Owen is Managing Director of Andy Owen & Associates, a Strategic Marketing Consultancy, with offices in Birmingham, Dubai, Paris, New York & Los Angeles. He personally visits Dubai every four weeks to work with clients in the area. He can be contacted on 0044 121 778 6640, or by email at andyowen@aol.com en.co.uk