Would you accept as a consumer what you do as a marketer?
As the blurring lines between what we would accept as private people and what we will be willing to do to achieve marketing goals infiltrate larger aspects of our digital life – it’s time to take a hard look at the mirror and ask the marketers of our providers some poignant questions.
- Would you respect as a marketer the freedom and self control you as consumer would want marketers to preserve?
- How do you reconcile a natural tendency to be restrictive in what you allow your colleagues to collect about you when these same manipulations are the ladder for your marketing aspirations?
- How do you personally, a micro universe of one, reconcile your individualism with being defined in terms of categorization, segmentation when you pursue market segments?
- How do you reconcile the provider’s oriented culture, traditionally sugarcoated with consumer bound lip service, with your interests as a consumer to get what you want, when you want, how you want – your way?
- How much would you as a marketer accept my authority as a user/customer to personally define for you to what extent you may do what you want to do, regarding your relations with me? Would it coincide with the way you would personally instruct a marketer hovering around you regarding your digital relations?
- Would you willingly participate in allowing your private social, real time and location based interactions become tagged, uniquely identified and searchable, so that your life becomes displayed, measured, intruded and played about in the same way you would gladly purchase these data to promote your brand “anywhere your audience and the action” are? Are you equally open as prey as you are as predator?
- Would you accept a situation in your personal life where your social sphere becomes a liability because aggressive marketing technologies introduced elements you don’t want to be associated with or referred by?
- How do you reconcile your natural inclination for freedom of choice in the brands you consume with the ardent desire to preserve as large a part of your customer share all along the customer’s life cycle?
- Would you apply the same methods to build relations with customers as you would do with a personal friend?
- How would you draw the line between social influence within your trusted social circle and the constant search for data and content by which you can reach and capture my attention?
- Would you as willingly open your digital doors to marketers pursuing you in the same cordiality you would welcome a friend?
The new realities of digital marketing are changing our lives, and not for the better. Lines are blurring – trust is a central issue for users and providers alike, privacy and publicy, private life and work related, offline and on line, locality and globality become more balanced, softer values of integrity and transparency dictate new personal and work related practices.
As consumers, our private information, the watermarks of our web interactions and our personal social sphere are our digital DNA. It is ours to share at will and not some ethereal information out there to be manipulated by interested parties.
As a consumer I want to cut off the umbilical cord marketers put so much effort in building, sustaining and cherishing. I want to freely roam from site to site, from one interaction to another, with the benefits, wisdom of accumulated profile from previous interactions, and spontaneously choose my next move.
As, marketers, you want to hold me captive in your siloed site, keep my profile hostage, unseen, without allowing me portability of my profile, and extend my customer share based on the comfort of your offered personalization through pinpointed knowledge already accumulated about me.
As a user, I want my private social sphere to be humanized by me solely interacting with my friends on our mutual interests. As a marketer, you want to tap into my social sphere and build social media strategies that will capitalize on my private circle of friends and acquaintances, and strike conversations around your brands, that would capitalize on the trust my friends have in me as a private person.
Would you be as willing to yield your personal social sphere to the same manipulations? Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter started out without a clearly defined business model. It took time for Google to develop its ad placement auction system.
When we started using Facebook and Twitter, part of the magic was in the fact that they had no business model. They offered a viral building and spreading of our social sphere – for our use.
We never intended our social spheres to become social media for marketers and ad hunters. Facebook and Twitter have spread their social networks to become almost a commodity in our lives. Now they are introducing business models and in doing so are breaching the very trust we put in them to start with. When a new guy comes into town with a new offering, and has an explicit business model around it – it’s easy, clear and transparent for me to see the real costs. But to discover that there is no free meal and the cost may be higher than foreseen after it has become a commodity – that’s a different ballgame.
I am sure that as private people – you enjoyed it as well. How do you reconcile that in your personal digital activities?
Once my data become factor in measuring social data ROI – there’s a problem. Would you, dear marketer, engage in all those measuring methods knowing they would apply on your and your kid’s social sphere activities? Where do you draw the line between your social circle and the measuring stick you need to justify the marketing budget to your superiors or your board of directors? How does my personal recommendation to a friend become part of a commercially initiated conversation, tracked and enhanced through supportive commercial and social technologies?
The answer lies in changing the paradigm and the customer provider relations, towards a new mindset. Instead of the natural marketer’s inclination to totally dominate the whole CRM process throughout the whole customer life cycle – shifting to direct transparent dialogs that relinquish control over customer information ; shifting from brand performance measurement and application of technological and social means to enhance it, to an open offerings that cultivates the customers who actively choose to be wooed, accomodating each individual with what suits her best – on her terms.
