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Wednesday, September 29, 2010
It's Time to Re-Humanize Marketing.
Four Rules for Humanizing Communications.
By Tom Cunniff
Article Link:
http://www.jackmyers.com/commentary/tom-cunniff/99845029.html
"I work all day at the factory Building a machine that's
not for me Must be a reason that I can't see You've got
to humanize yourself"
- The Police "Re-Humanize Yourself"
Modern marketing is a dizzying maelstrom of micro-trends:
digital, addressable, behavioral, social, mobile, location-
based, etcetera.
With so many bright shiny objects, these are our choices.
Go blind from looking at them all.
Go broke from trying them all.
Or get smart and look beyond the micro-trends, and focus
on the macro-trend that lies at the source.
Communications Is Becoming More Human
As important as Google and Facebook are, they are effects
of a revolution, not the cause.
The important revolution is this: digital has driven the
cost of producing and sharing our ideas with the entire
world to zero. This flips the media world on its head.
In his excellent (and highly recommended) new book
"Cognitive Surplus" Clay Shirky says:
"We need a new conception for the word (media), one that
dispenses with the connotations of something produced by
professionals for consumption by amateurs.
Here's mine: media is the connective tissue of society.
Media is how you know what's happening in Tehran,... what
your colleague named her baby, (and) when your next meeting
is."
Media was once expensive, scarce and produced by profession-
als. Now much of it is free, over-abundant and made by
everyone.
As communications becomes more human, marketing must
follow. But, we're not there yet.
Marketing Is Becoming Less Human
The macro-trend for more human communication has been met
with a corresponding marketing macro-trend for more auto-
mation.
Have you seen the chart recently presented at the IAB
Networks and Exchanges Marketplace? It all but shouts:
"You won't sit still for advertising? Fine. We'll just
hunt you down."
http://tinyurl.com/28rmoqt
We chase short-term direct marketing goals in digital, even
though we know that brand loyalty is built over time. We
optimize to click-through rates, even though CTRs are near
zero, and most of us don't believe this is how banner ads
create value anyway.
Like The Terminator, we target and re-target. Nothing's out
of bounds. We dig into people's finances (thanks, credit
bureaus!) and eavesdrop on their conversations (thanks
Facebook!) We interrupt. We road-block. We use every weapon
we can find.
Social Media Isn't Necessarily More Human
Social Media is a step in the right direction. But the
temptation to seek short-term "success" at the expense of
long-term brand building is as overwhelming there as in
any other medium. Is it taking too long to earn loyalty
and make friends? No problem. Companies like uSocial let
us buy them.
And these friends are absolutely happy to be bought. Why
do consumers follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook?
Because they suspect (quite rightly) that we will buy their
"loyalty" with deals.
At its best, social media achieves what mass media cannot:
intimacy. But the tradeoff is that intimacy -- by definition
-- doesn't scale. Social media is very, very important.
But it's a part of building a feedback loop, not the whole
thing.
Scratch the surface of any big social marketing success
story, and underneath you will see that it is actually
just one part of a very smart integrated campaign.
It's Time To Re-Humanize Marketing
1. If consumers want more human communications, we need
to stop faking it and start caring about the things they
really care about.
2. We need to start being more honest in our conference
rooms. Yes, we can buy short-term sales easily ? and yes,
there may be times when it's smart to do exactly that.
But we must also acknowledge that no real, lasting relation-
ship was ever built on a spreadsheet.
3. Yes, we can hunt down consumers and try to get them to
hand over their wallets. But it's better to create great
environments and positive human experiences so that people
will seek us out.
4. We need to remember that being on top of trends means
looking beyond individual blips of data to discover the
bigger picture. And today, that bigger picture looks more
and more human.
The legendary salesman, Zig Ziglar, was an avid student
of human behavior. Marketing would do well to heed his
advice:
"If you go looking for a friend, you're going to find
they're very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you'll
find them everywhere."
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Tom Cunniff is VP Director of Interactive Communications
at Combe Incorporated. He began his career as a copywriter
at traditional agencies, founded an interactive agency in
1994 and now works on the marketing side creating and
integrating traditional and interactive. Tom can be
reached at tomcunniffnyc@gmail.com
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