Who owns the customer's data slug trail?

My last post on Volunteered Personal Information only told half the story. It focused on the information individuals could actively volunteer, if they wanted to. The other half is the information we generate automatically, whether we like it or not.

Back in the industrial age, the customer was a stranger. The classic situation went as follows. An anonymous entity (you don’t know their name or address) walks into a shop, buys a product using an anonymising payment mechanism (cash), and walks out again. No information captured. Who this person was, why they did it, what else they did, all remained a mystery. The best you could do to gain any understanding was via statistical sample-based research.

Then, in the late 20th century, a new data gathering revolution began. It’s summed up by the barcode, which captured and crystallised information at the check-out – information that had previously evaporated as soon as it was generated. Then, some bright spark came up with the brilliant idea of connecting name and address information to shopping basket information (retail loyalty cards) and Hey Presto! the customer was no longer a stranger. You knew him and her, and you could talk to them using information you had about their activities and transactions.

For decades, this behavioural and transaction data has been the holy grail of marketing, especially direct marketing. It acts a bit like the silver trail left behind by slugs. Using it, you can track where they have been and what they’ve been up to.

Back then, customer slug trails were new and rare. But as the digital age progressed, they proliferated massively.

Your mobile phone generates its own slug trail: which numbers you called, when, for how long, and now with GPS where you were at the time. Payment mechanisms have become slug trail generators too: how much you spent, with whom, when and where.
Internet service providers know the slug trail of the web sites you visit. Digital media companies can track what you watch, when. Companies analyse the slug trails of the people who visit their web sites for the purposes of behavioural analytics. Wherever we look, new slug trails are being generated, and they’re getting richer and more detailed by the day.

At first glance, this seems to be the precise opposite of everything I’ve been talking about in terms of VPI. Far from being voluntary it’s involuntary, captured whether the customer likes it or not. And the data rests on the organisation’s side, not the individual’s.

But here we are reaching what a physicist would call a phase change, when ‘more of the same’ strangely ends up producing something entirely new and different – just as with more heat water turns into steam, or with more cold it turns into ice.

So what’s the phase change I’m talking about here?

The industrial age generated its own unique attitude towards personal data: that it is just another ‘resource’ like the fish in the sea. If you can catch it, it’s yours to do what you like with. Organisations undertook ‘data gathering’ exercises and customers have little or no control over how the resulting personal data is used. Often lots of personal data was collected, and sold, behind individuals’ backs, without their permission or knowledge. List broking, for example.

This was never a satisfactory arrangement. It generated deep concerns about privacy, which often resulted in legislation which cramped the marketer’s style – and which never really challenged the underlying attitude: that customer data is the organisation’s, not the customer’s. Organisations’ personal data gathering abilities have grown way beyond what most consumers realise – there’s a significant time lag here – but nevertheless, slowly and inexorably people’s awareness of database marketers’ slug trail feeding frenzy is growing. And with it, a new attitude is coalescing: “Hey! This is my data, not yours. Hands off!”.

Take Phorm as an example. Brilliant technology, but passed-its-sell-by-date mindset, embodying the old industrial age attitude towards personal data: basically, a strategy of furtive stalking that is brilliant at doing one thing – undermining trust.

In fact, looking back in retrospect, the industrial age approach was akin to walking up to somebody and slapping them in the face in terms of their privacy and respect for their personal data, and then turning round to them and saying “By the way, I know your name and address and lots more about you, and I want you to love me, be loyal to me and become my advocate.” Not the best way of building a relationship.

So here’s the thing. The richer and more ubiquitous slug trails become, what should have turned into the database marketer’s dream come true is steadily turning into a nightmare instead: an increasingly acrimonious and adversarial battleground over privacy.

The ideal, of course, would be to bring all those slug trails together: the mobile phone slug trail with the payment card slug trail with the internet surfing slug trail with the transaction data slug trail to create a complete, rounded view of the customer. There’s only three problems with this dream, however.

1)    It’s almost certainly illegal (in the UK anyway)

2)    Its Big Brother connotations are truly scary: a recipe for adversarial confrontation over privacy for years to come.

3)    Even if it were possible to merge these slug trails together in one super God-like customer database, it would still end up with disappointing results, mainly because of all the bits of data it still doesn’t reach: such as what I plan to do next, why, and the context of all the other things that are happening in my life – the different types of VPI I talked about in my previous post.

What’s the upshot of all this? That slowly, surely, inexorably it will become accepted – it is already becoming accepted – that the digital slug trail generated by customers in their day-to-day activities is not the organisation’s, it is the customer’s. It is collected by the organisation with the customer’s permission, and increasingly, can only be used for purposes agreed by the customer. The ‘carrot’ bit of this is that if the organisation demonstrates its respect for the customer’s privacy, the customer may add other bits of volunteered data that were previously unavailable to the organisation, such as ‘my future purchasing plans’, or ‘my reasons why’. (If it plays fast and loose, however, it will be excluded from the new data-sharing ecosystem.)

In this way and perhaps counter-intuitively, behavioural and transaction data is on its way to becoming the second pillar of VPI.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

When marketers discover their America

 OK, rant about marketing fads over. The point I’m really trying to make is that online social networking is just one small sub-set of a vast new continent of possibility: Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). It’s the big picture of VPI, not just one small part, that marketers need to get to grips with.

So what territory does VPI cover? Four broad areas.

1) Who I am    

There is a huge spectrum of potential VPI here from absolute basics like name, address and age through to my detailed and intimate life history and current circumstances such as financial situation, state of health etc.

2) What I want   

Again, this is as long as a piece of string, from broad category indicators such as ‘I want to buy a holiday’ to the most detailed specifications of the holiday l intend to buy, what my ideal holiday would look like, my actual priorities (is it the holiday or replace the washing machine?), future plans and intentions (‘sometime in the next six months I intend to buy a new car’), timings (when I want X as opposed to Y). By the way, all these ‘what I want’ dimensions can cover communications and preferred relationship styles as well as products and services.

3) What I want to find out   

This is all the information I need to acquire to arrive at good decisions about all those dimensions of what I want. Once again, the potential spectrum is vast, from a simple search on Google or a visit to a price comparison site, to much more complex questions such as ‘how to?’, ‘what if?’, ‘what are the hidden pitfalls?’, ‘can I trust them?’, ‘do I approve of their ethics?’, and so on. By asking such questions, individuals reveal huge amounts about what matters most to them, when. This becomes particularly rich when it moves beyond external research and is parsed, calibrated and mixed up with Who I am and What I want information.

4) My views and opinions   

Again this ranges from top level product and brand preferences  through complaints and suggestions to my most intimate and deeply held beliefs.

All of this information has always existed … in individuals’ heads. So why start fussing about it now? Because new technologies are making it possible for individuals to share this information with other parties – each other, trusted advisors, digital information service providers, product and service suppliers – if they want to.

If individuals did this, they would provide marketers with The Real Thing – the ultimate raw material of all good marketing: rich, detailed information about demand; who wants what, when. This is the information marketers need to drive all product and service development, sales and marketing, customer service and customer relationship management. It’s information that puts all today’s proxies, statistical representations, predictions, models, guesses and derived data in the shade.

But just because it’s possible for individuals to volunteer this information doesn’t mean they’re going to. The biggest word in the above paragraphs was ‘if’. The question is, why should individuals bother? In what situations and under what circumstances?

Broadly speaking, the answer is, individuals will be prepared to volunteer rich, timely personal information when it’s easy to do, when there is a clear benefit for them, and when there are trusted rules and safeguards in place to make sure their disclosures are not abused.

One sure-fire way of not doing this is to continue on marketing’s old customer information agenda: scrape as much data as you can about consumers (generally behind their backs and without their knowledge), crunch it to create predictive models for the purposes of targeting, and then bombard them with the resulting messages - all the stimulus-response, persuasion paradigm stuff I’ve been raging against.

What’s needed instead is not a faddy ‘social media strategy’ but an all-encompassing ‘VPI strategy’: to build trusted engagement with customers for the purposes of win-win information sharing, across all possible touchpoints. That’s what I’ve been researching for the last six months or so.

For marketing, VPI is a vast new continent waiting to be explored, a bit like the Europeans' discovery of America. Once they started exploring, they would never see the world the same way again.

Alan Mitchell     www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

Are you a social media lemming?

 Thanks to Glen Knowles and John Gallen for supportive comments on my last post. My own conclusion is that marketing’s current obsession with social media has become its own little South Sea Bubble.

South Sea Bubbles (and credit crunches) happen when everyone piles into The Next Big Thing – not because careful analysis of the facts has convinced them of the merits of doing so, but because everyone else is piling in. Therefore, everybody else must know something we don’t, and if we don’t get in quick we might be left behind.

I was finally convinced of this yesterday in a conversation with a senior marketer from a Very Big Brand currently doing the rounds because he’s been told he has to develop a ‘social media strategy’.

I may be completely lacking in imagination, but I can’t for the life of me see how or why this particular brand needs a ‘social media strategy’ (whatever that is). This guy’s not doing it because he’s identified the need for one, but suddenly it’s not kosher not to have one. Bad sign of lemming activity.

Most of us probably agree that marketing needs reinventing. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) this reinvention is much, much bigger than what passes today as ‘social media strategy’. Social media Tulip Mania is not reinvention. Sure, marketers have to adapt to online social networking. But for most brands, most of the time, the current obsession is mere displacement activity.

 
Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

Is online social networking a wild goose chase?

From my research into Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) I think it is, for most marketers, most of the time.

I wrote about VPI in Marketing Magazine last week. The underlying observation is that individuals are increasingly using digital/Internet devices to manage/support all aspects of their lives. Before, the information individuals used and created when doing these things evaporated immediately, just like the information relating to a cash transaction at a shop where no recordwas kept. But now this information is being crystallised into digital data of huge potential commercial value.

Technically, it may be possible for organisations to ‘scrape’ this data behind individuals’ backs and use it for their own purposes. But all that does is create a privacy backlash. Just look at Phorm.

Instead, what will happen over the coming years – after lots of toing and froing, wailing and gnashing of teeth – is that it will be generally accepted and recognised that this data is the individual’s. VPI happens when individuals ‘volunteer’ such information in exchange for value.

What has this got to do with online social networking?

Well, if we draw a Venn diagram, the two circles of VPI and social networking overlap. But they are not coterminous.

VPI is all the information individuals volunteer, or could volunteer, relating to their interactions, transactions and relationships with organisations. It’s about the exchange of value between individuals and organisations. Both its content and purpose are commercial.

Online social networking on the other hand, is a peer-to-peer activity whose purposes are primarily non-commercial.

Of course, there are times when individuals talk about brands, products, services, companies and so on as part of their natural conversation. Brands need to monitor and take part in these conversations. No problem with that. But most online conversations – gossip, jokes, making arrangements, expressing opinions, etc are about life generally. They are not commercial, and nor do people want them to be. The more marketers to try to push their way into these conversations, the more intrusive they become, and the more resistance they generate.

For these two reasons – the intrinsic nature of online conversations, and marketers’ tenuous connection to them – the marketing potential of online social networking of the Facebook/Twitter variety is limited. Social networking is just one small sub-set of the much bigger phenomenon of VPI, and needs to be seen as such.

That doesn’t mean marketers shouldn’t use online social networking for what it’s good at it: monitoring product/brand reputation; responding fast to complaints; seeding word of mouth recommendations when appropriate, and so on.

But it does mean that the scale and scope of this opportunity is much smaller than many people are currently making it out to be. Online word of mouth campaigns are appropriate on far fewer occasions than you might think, for example.

In contrast, when you look at all the sorts of information that constitute VPI, its commercially-relevant scope and scale is breathtakingly vast.

So why is social networking currently being bigged up way beyond its conceivable marketing potential?

Two reasons, I think.

First, online social networking is happening here and now; many of the most valuable forms and mechanisms of VPI are still emerging.

Second, too many marketers are mesmerised by social networking because they see it through the lens of the messaging mindset.

The messaging mindset equates marketing with messaging, and regards anything that’s not messaging as not important. (VPI falls into this category because it’s got hardly anything to do with messaging, even though it has everything to do with value).

According to the messaging mindset, if consumers are looking at a screen they are ‘consuming’ ‘media’ which, by definition, is ‘an opportunity to see’ a brand message. Ergo, if consumers are ‘consuming’ a new ‘media’ then they should be being exposed to brand messages. If not, we risk losing ‘share of voice’ to competing sources of information which may not be ‘on message’.

If, on the other hand, there are ways to use this ‘new media’ to place our messages in front of new eyeballs in new ways, then the problem turns into an opportunity. Hence the current bandwagon.

The reason why so many marketers (especially marketing communications agencies) are so obsessed with online social networking then, is not because they are being innovative and revolutionary, but because they are being deeply, deeply conservative. They are viewing a new phenomenon through the lens and agenda of 20th century mass advertising.

 
So here’s my take on online social networking. As a social/technological phenomenon it’s very important. It’s part of the once-in-a-century sea-change in information flows that I talked about in my article, and it’s changing individuals’ information management habits and expectations along the way. Absolutely, these are trends marketers need to get to grips with. Looking forward, the tools and habits of online networking will be absorbed into virtually everything we do, as an expected part of the whole.

But that’s not the same as seeing online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as the next big marketing tool/environment. For marketing purposes online social networking is inherently limited if only because, when real people socialise about things that matter in their lives, the last thing they want is marketers intruding into their conversations.

Seen from this perspective, online social networking risks becoming as big a wild goose chase for marketers as ‘loyalty’ was in the late 20th century.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl.shift.co.uk

A tipping point for marketing

 When I was writing my Marketing Magazine article on Volunteered Personal Information I tried as hard as I could to avoid the dreaded ‘P’ word – ‘paradigm’.

But in the end I couldn’t because, ultimately, that’s what we are talking about: a paradigm change.

Look at any marketing theory or any marketing practice that’s mainstream today and you’ll find that somewhere, somehow, it’s built on the assumption of top down messaging – that a vital if not central job of the marketer is to craft and send persuasive messages to target audiences.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the importance of messaging. I’m not suggesting that somehow, it’s going to disappear. In fact, I think it’s going to grow in volume over the coming in years. But what I am suggesting is that at the same time, it’s also losing its pivotal role in marketing.

The emergence of mass scale ‘bottom up’ flows of information from individuals to organisations (and each other) is a once-in-a-century sea-change in the commercial/ marketing environment and as a result, nothing will be the same again.

Organisations are going to have to adapt to this sea-change, whether they like it or not. The question is, how?

Alan Mitchell      www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

Why the music industry is where it is

 To see why the music industry is where it is, you just have to look at this chart.

Notice anything missing?

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

What is, and isn't, changing

When we say making and implementing decisions is the epicentre of consumer value, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. This is not – definitely not – a claim that somehow ‘consumers are changing’ in some fundamental, revolutionary way.

 
Quite the opposite. There’s nothing new here at all. It was ever thus. It was as true in the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s as it is today. People have always wanted to make better decisions and to implement them better.

So what is changing? Well, first, like the telescope and microscope before them, new technologies are making the previously invisible visible – and overturning misconceptions as they do so. Word of mouth was always the biggest external influence on consumer purchasing decisions. Social networking is simply making this visible for all to see. People have always searched for information to inform their decisions. Google has simply expressed this desire in a new way.

In an era when all visible flows of information took the form of top down messaging, it looked as if every consumer action was a ‘response’ to an external marketing ‘stimulus’. Now we can see this was just an illusion generated by the technologies of the time.

New digital technologies are also ushering in some other changes, however.

1)  decision-making is an information-intensive activity and in the industrial age information was expensive to acquire and handle. (That’s why only big organisations indulged in deliberate, organised decision-making.)

One of the effects of new internet services such as search, social networking and price comparison is that they reduce the cost of researching and making better decisions. This is triggering sometimes far-reaching processes in how people make decisions.

2)  in the industrial age, the focus of value creation was better products and services because that’s where available technologies could deliver the biggest value-add. Today it’s increasingly possible to use information-based services to address individuals’ decision-making needs directly. This is a new source of consumer value with potentially far-reaching effects of its own.

3) In the process of using these and other information-based services, individuals generate huge amounts of new information – about who they are (e.g. profiles), what they want, when.

The combined effect of these three changes is revolutionary. It’s where the volunteered personal information I talked about in my Marketing Magazine article comes into its own.

 

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

What consumers really want

OK, I’m jumping ahead now, but I need to address the question asked in my last post. If individuals only really buy marketing that adds value from their point of view, can we define this value?

If we shake off industrial age assumptions (that value is what companies embed into their products and services and sell to consumers), we quickly arrive at a very simple answer. Generally speaking, what people want is to make better decisions, and to implement these decisions better.

There are three things to note about this.

1)    Recognising that the epicentre of value for individuals lies in making and implementing better decisions doesn’t deny the value of the better products and services. But it does question their centrality. If you can make a better decision, it will lead you to the better product or service as a matter of course – that’s part of the definition of a better decision, after all. So in the hierarchy of value, ‘better decisions’ trump, and come before, ‘better products/services’.

2)    In this context ‘better’ does not mean ‘rational’ as in the economists’ pink elephant ‘rational’. This raises lots of questions as to what ‘better decisions’ actually look like. For example, if I decide I want to waste a lot of money on a frivolous purchase just for fun, then anything that helps me do this is part of making and implementing a better decision. Lots of new territory to explore here. (I’ll return to this in detail in later posts).

3)    If making better decisions (and implementing them better) is the epicentre of value for individuals, then the interrupting/persuading aspects of marketing are probably value destroying from the individual’s point of view (back to marketing schizophrenia).

Two further points to note.

First, if the this analysis is correct, when it comes to truly adding value for customers, every sinew of the persuasion paradigm scream in marketers’ ears, ‘DON’T DO IT!’. Because persuading and influencing peoples’ choices is the direct opposite of helping them make and implement better decisions.

Second, in the process of researching, making and implementing decisions, individuals generate huge amounts of new information about who they are, what they want, when, etc. Twenty, thirty years ago, that information evaporated as soon as it was generated. But now, thanks to digital technologies it’s becoming possible to capture, share and use this information to align buyers and sellers much more efficiently.

I’ve written a little about this in my latest Marketing Magazine article.

In my opinion, the implications of this development are fundamental.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctl-shift.co.uk

Marketing's missing metric

 The alternative to ‘stimulus-response’ is to assume that, generally speaking, individuals buy and use marketing as they do any other product or service – when it adds value to them … and they ignore marketing that doesn’t add value.

 
That begs a load of questions, especially questions relating to ‘what exactly does value look like in this context?’. The underlying conclusion is very simple however. Without a Mad Sheep analysis of every element of marketing strategy and tactics (what the ‘wins’ and costs are for both sides, through every step of the engagement process, and the discliplined relentless focus on building win-wins), you can’t avoid the traps of marketing schizophrenia and you will never be able to predict which of your balls will bounce or squidge.

There’s more. If individuals only really ‘buy’ marketing that adds value from their perspective, then the most important metrics in marketing effectiveness are the consumer’s metrics – their benefits minus their costs.

Yet these are metrics that ‘stimulus-response’ marketing completely ignores, because it’s only interested in one side of the equation – how big the desired ‘response’ is; what the benefits and costs of marketing are to the marketer.  

Conclusion: as long as we remain wedded to persuasion paradigm stimulus-response marketing, we will never gain any proper understanding of what works in marketing and what doesn’t … because the measurement agenda it sets only ever tells half the story.

Alan Mitchell    ww.ctrl-shift.co.uk

The secret of effective bounciness

The big assumption behind stimulus-response marketing is that all the power rests with stimulus (and the stimulator), and that the response is just an automatic by-product of the nature of the stimulus. In other words, the responder doesn’t really have much say in the matter.  

To see the flaw with ‘stimulus-response’ just ask the question, ‘does a ball bounce if you drop it to the ground?’

The answer, of course, is that ‘it depends’. If it is a ball of potato mash, it’s not going to bounce: it’s going to go ‘splat’. If it’s a nice hard, bouncy superball being dropped into a bed of honey or a soft pillow it’s going to ‘squidge’. In other words,  ‘bounciness’ is not an attribute either of the ball or the surface. It’s the product of the relationship between the attributes of the two different entities.

Let’s quickly consider the alternatives here.
•    You drop a ball of potato mash on to a hard surface. Result: splat
•    You drop a superball on to a hard surface. Result: bounce!
•    You drop a superball on to a bowl of honey. Result: squidge
•    You drop a ball of potato mash on to a bowl of honey. Result: splat-squidge

Many hard years of carefully measuring the results of such experiments will teach you never to bother dropping balls of potato mash, because they never bounce. So you stop doing that.

From now on, you only drop superballs. Even so, they only bounce half the time – the other half being the times when they hit bowls of honey.

In a situation like this you might invent an aphorism that goes something like this: “Half the balls I drop bounce, but I never know which ball is going to do the bouncing”.

Sound familiar?

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

Marketing pink elephants

 
Economics is the last leg of our reinvention trilogy.

Traditional economics frames the central problem of economics in terms of purely bilateral exchanges between ‘rational’ buyers and sellers exchanging money for tangible goods in markets which are always naturally tending to equilibrium.

This perspective fitted the product-focused technologies of the mid 20th century, but it’s incredibly myopic in some ways and downright crazy in others.

In the 21st century, our vision is expanding to see a much bigger, more complex and exciting picture. The narrow bilateral focus of economics (and traditional marketing) on exchanges between buyers and sellers ignores or downplays context – the nature of the ecosystems or networks which frame how and why bilateral exchanges take. Economics’ one nod to this reality – the importance of ‘the market’ – is misleading. Markets never tends towards equilibrium: real networks and ecosystems are, in fact, always generating novelty.

Economists’ traditional focus on exchanges of money for goods exclude all the other dimensions of value that people give, trade, exchange and share: e.g. intangibles such as ideas, information and emotion. And economists’ definition of ‘rational’ decision-making has about the same scientific validity as 1) assuming that every living organism is actually a breed of pink flying elephant, and 2) comparing the living creatures we see in the world around us to the pink elephant ideal. Every time you see phrases such as ‘rational decision-making’ or ‘rational behaviour’, think ‘flying pink elephants’.

For marketers, this is a toxic legacy.

•    It makes the firm the centre of economic gravity, equating economic success with improving the economics of the firm. This contorts marketers’ vision of consumer value, and helps generate endemic diseases such as brand narcissism and misleading marketing metrics.
•    Its rationality/pink elephant assumptions create confusions which confound many a marketing debate to this day. Two examples: 1) the supposed distinction between ‘emotional’ and ‘rational’ appeals, and 2) confusion about what marketing actually affects – is it rational decision-making or something else? If so, what?
•    Its magical belief in ‘markets as equilibrium machines’ (‘the hidden hand’) neatly defines away its biggest challenge: how to design and maintain sustainable win-win social and commercial ecosystems?

To successfully reinvent marketing we will need to slay these dragons!

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

Hunting the Snark

 Somewhere, lurking in the background of every marketing initiative lies some sort of theory of human motivation and behaviour.

Big problem: During marketing’s formative years, one particular school of psychology dominated academe – the theory of behaviourism as espoused first by John Watson and then B.F. Skinner. Behaviourist assumptions rule the roost in marketing to this day, even though they are completely off the wall.

Behaviourism saw human and animal behaviour as being infinitely plastic, capable of being moulded at will by external forces – e.g. the right ‘conditioning’ delivered by the right ‘stimuli’.

Classic marketing textbooks such as Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing simply take it as read that ‘stimulus-response’ is the underlying methodology of marketing. The only question then, is how to apply this theory. With it comes a quest for control: the central question for marketers being ‘how to deliver the ‘right’ stimuli to consumers to get the ‘right’ response?’.

Nowadays, behaviourist theories (not to be confused with behavioural psychology, which is very different) are a laughing stock amongst serious researchers. If they apply at all, they apply to a tiny minority of situations (e.g. if you sit on a drawing pin, you jump and you learn not to do it again).

But many marketers continue to view the world through the behaviourist lens. Instead of discarding behaviourism as the psychology profession has done, marketers continue to take it for granted, seizing on new psychological discoveries in the hope that at last they might now be able to find the elusive ‘stimulus’ that’s going to deliver exactly the response they want.

This is a recipe for perpetual failure. Like the Snark in Lewis Carroll's famous poem The Hunting of the Snark, the elusive stimulus does not exist. Its nonsense.

If marketing is not about marketers issuing stimuli and consumers responding, what is it? We cannot reinvent marketing without a half-decent answer to this question.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk

When the tide turns

 If marketing is a product of its 20th century roots, what are they? In my last blog, I talked about economics, psychology, and technology.

Let’s start with technology – which defines what’s possible to do and in doing so shapes peoples’ perceptions of how things work and what’s important.

There are two crucial points here.

First, marketing’s heyday was the post-war years of the mass production of goods made possible by carbon-fuelled power: the motor car, the TV, the refrigerator etc. The big assumption this generated is that value is always embedded into a ‘product’ that’s made by a ‘producer’ and ‘sold’ to a ‘consumer’ who then ‘consumes’ it. Trouble is, if you peel away the surface credibility of these concepts, you quickly discover they are superficial and misleading. Every one of them is, in fact, a mental block which serves to mask the underlying logic and processes of real value creation.

Second, this was also an era when top down flows of information – epitomised by advertising-funded mass media – reached its zenith. Every development since the turn of the 20th century – from the steam powered printing press through radio, broadcast TV and on to cable, satellite had reinforced this trend. Even the early, publishing, days of the Internet did.

Given that ‘top down’ was effectively the only way information could flow, marketers could be forgiven for focusing their attention on ‘messaging’: deciding which messages to send to who, how. But the assumption that grew up – that ‘good marketing = effective messaging’ – is another mental block.

Neither of the above two formative conditions exist any more. We now know there is much more to value than products and that ‘consumers’ do a lot more than ‘consume’ – they can help us co-create too, for example. Meanwhile, ‘bottom up’ flows of information are rapidly become the pivotal mode of communication in our society.

These developments are not only changing the day-to-day practice of marketing. They also challenge its underlying theories and assumptions.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk