Harvard Business School professor John Quelch once said, “The purpose of marketing… should be geared to changing and reinforcing customer actions rather than customer attitude.” I recently revisited this quote and feel it still holds true. But in the age of social media, it is likely to come under siege.
Within his remark comes the idea that we as marketers need to focus on driving fundamental shifts in customer behavior. Using tactics like pay-per-click advertising, you can effectively do just that. One well placed Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords can get prospects to engage in the exact behavior you want them to! It’s short. It works. And John would be pleased!
Other forms of media, however, can no longer deliver a captive audience. Customers and prospects have plenty of reasons to dislike media these days: irrelevance, interruption, and just plain clutter.
But now factor in social media. The media balance is shifting from push to pull. Content creators represent 13 percent of all U.S. adults online. That means command and control of exact behaviors just gets harder every day.
Using social media effectively requires an understanding of customer behavior. For example, one of the hottest trends in Web advertising is behavioral targeting -- the practice of delivering ads to individuals based on their previous surfing behavior. But behavioral targeting helps more with the pull than with the push side of online marketing. By analyzing the data to understand what individual users are actually interested in and responding to, behavioral targeting helps you create more engaging content around that topic area.
So to think marketers can really affect customer behavior with social media is a dangerous idea to hang your hat on these days. Sure, marketers can perhaps influence behaviors with forms of social media like communities. But to me, it seems as if we are getting further and further away from where Professor Quelch was directing us.
— Paul Dunay, Director Global Field and Interactive Marketing at BearingPoint Inc.
I don't see any need to change the definition or practice of marketing - get peoples' attention, make them think and act.
However the promise of social media is that the tools marketers and consumers use are virtually free (except for that damn ISP bill). So the behavior becomes more of an interaction that hasn't existed since the day of small town Mom & Pop stores with a concerned engaged owner.
Today, everyone is more willing to share opinions and preferences online. Marketers need to make the effort to monitor/measure and importantly engage, respond and participate in the process of brand and reputation building and customer service.
Again, new tools and new responsibilities are a great opportunity for marketers who understand that command and control is irrelevant.
The Internet is slowly being taken over by more mainstream broadcasters who have seen the power of giving the end user the power to choose their own viewable content. As to whether there is the bandwidth and who will pay (that’s another battle ground). Though there is new technology, with ever changing terminology being utilized for the online marketing, it’s still very much the same marketing principles being followed to target customers and that will never change.
In one of my favorite Jim Carrey movies called Bruce Almighty - Jim gets the opportunity to play God for a few days - he can do anything he wants EXCEPT for changing Free Will.
Not that marketers get to play God but thinking we can change Attitudes is like thinking we can change Free Will - and my point is we really can't
We can do a great job helping to direct behaviors and over time change them which if we are lucky end up changing attitudes
Behavioral therapy has caught on not only because it's cheaper than traditional psychotherapeutic approaches, but because it works. Phone training tells you to smile while you're talking, because you sound -- and are -- friendlier!
Branding messages change attitudes if you're lucky!
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These days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging, and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command-and-control branding that has become so commonplace for marketers. Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!
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