For truly radical thinking in the field of marketing that will get you to rethink the whole paradigm of ‘customer’ and ‘branding,’ look no further than Alan Mitchell. Alan is author of Right Side Up and The New Bottom Line, books which introduced and fleshed out the concept of ‘buyer-centric commerce’.
“‘The approaches that dominate marketing today were invented for conditions that are fast disappearing, so we need to revisit and rethink our deepest assumptions,’ said Mitchell. ‘It is scary, but as we do, I believe we will discover huge new opportunities.’
Mitchell has two blogs that contain more of his thoughts. Check them out.
http://www.rightsideup.blogs.com/
http://www.rightsideup.net/
Marketing Mumbo Jumbo | Alan Mitchell
May 28, 2006
The other day I had the privilege of listening to a lecture by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi. Roberts linked a series of propositions to create an argument that goes like this.
1) “Brands were invented for one reason only: to charge a premium; a higher price, a higher margin.”
2) Creating an emotional connection with the consumer is “bigger and better than more quality, more value. These table stakes aren’t enough”
3) 85% of human decisions are made emotionally, not rationally.
4) “Great communication works inherently at an emotional level”
5) “The only point of advertising is to drive people to do something”.
6) So the role of marketer is to do great communication that works at an emotional level, to create a ‘lovemark’ which “inspires loyalty beyond reason. That is where the money is. Beyond price. Beyond benefit. Beyond attribute. Beyond logo.”
In other words, the role of the marketer is to ‘drive’ people to ‘love’ you so much that they no longer use their reason and hand over loads more cash to you – more than if they still had the use of their reason. And you do this by emotional advertising.
Never mind the fact that each one of these six propositions is flawed in its own right. Look at the instrumental, self-seeking motives. Look at the attitudes it displays towards people – ‘the consumer’.
Kevin Roberts’ arguments sum up everything that is wrong with marketing today.
The Customer Is Not King | Alan Mitchell
September 15th, 2010
Whenever marketers use the word ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ they bury themselves deep within an organisation-centric view of the world: these terms are seller-centric inventions.
The only entities that see ‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ when they look at the world are organisations trying to sell stuff. When marketers talk about customers and consumers, they are not talking about the world ‘out there’ as it really exists, they are looking into a mirror reflecting their own internal obsessions back to them.
A customer is someone who buys what we sell. When the organisation looks at ‘the customer’ it is just looking at ‘what we sell’ from a slightly different perspective, a perspective designed to help it sell better. There is nothing wrong with this per se. There is lots to be said for it. But it is a seller-centric projection. You can spend an entire lifetime peering into this mirror without ever seeing what lies beyond.
One way of looking beyond this mirror is to recognise that every product or service that meets a need – i.e. that’s sold – also generates a new need: the need to make a decision.
In the industrial age, meeting this meta-need – the need to make better decisions (and to implement them better) – wasn’t the seller/marketer’s job. There was a division of labour. The job of the organisation was to make a good product. The job of the ‘consumer’ was to make a decision – a choice. And the job of the marketer was to influence these decisions.
This was probably inevitable at the time. Decision-making is an information intensive task and gathering and using information in an organised way was prohibitively expensive.
A tectonic shift
But today that’s changing and we can look at the world through a different lens – that of the decision-maker (the person) rather than that of the decision-influencer (the seller). Once you do this it quickly becomes apparent that this meta-need – to make (and implement) better decisions – is bigger than all other needs (for chocolates, for cars, for current accounts etc) because it embraces them all, subsuming them into the bigger task of achieving what the person (not the seller) wants to achieve.
Person- or buyer-centric services then, sit on the side of the individual, helping the individual achieve what the individual wants to achieve, including managing relationships with many different suppliers more efficiently and more effectively (VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management). The central questions here are, What challenges does the person face when doing this? How to do it better?
The difference between now and say, twenty years ago, is that twenty years ago this person-centric perspective was operationally irrelevant. You couldn’t do anything practical to help people address these challenges. When marketers said ‘the customer is king’, it was just a disguised way of saying ‘the organisation is king’.
Now, however, as information becomes a tool in the hands of the individual, that’s changing. The organisational king is being deposed. This is not about superficial changes in ‘how to achieve the same old marketing goals better’. For example, it’s got nothing to do with arguments about whether it’s easier, cheaper or better to get marketing messages across via social media or mass advertising. It’s a deep, structural, tectonic, remorseless and comprehensive transformation in the relationship between individuals and organisations.
And if you keep on looking in the customer mirror, you simply won’t see it coming.
Inspirited Enterprise 