The Market is a Conversation – The consumer is taking her power back
Marketing as we know it is under siege and may not survive in anything like its current form.
The foundation of mass media is eroding rapidly. The channels that mass media rely on are being disintermediated by direct web channels or by other media. Brand power is leaving the corporate centre and is being replaced on the web by the voice of the consumer. Trust in corporate and government leaders is falling. Customer attention, buffeted in a maelstrom of advertising noise, is falling.
A web-based and consumer-driven alternative is emerging rapidly.
The resulting fall-out in the advertising and mass media industry will be cataclysmic. The opportunities for those understand the new market will be tremendous.
This course will justify this claim and will take you inside the minds and behind the actions of the revolutionaries. You will not only see what is going in real time, you will meet and talk to the key figures. You will be among the few who know that is going on.
The Context for this Course
Advertising, as we know it, has become so ubiquitous and so omnipresent, that we are numbed by it. Radio ads, spam on our email, TV ads every few minutes, calls from idiots at dinner on the phone. Spam on our cell phones. It is all too much. We are pushing back.
New technology is being created that strips most of the ads away from content. The old mass media channels are terminally ill.
Downloading and portable players such as iPods are replacing mass radio for music and Podcasting will replace talk shows. Bit Torrent, that downloads the TV program without the ads, is enabling you to have your own TV shows when you want them and without the ads. TiVo,, records TV shows digitally and without the ads. We are only a year away from your own personal TV & Radio Network – the Multiverse.
Invasive ads are also under attack. To block direct advertisers, we increasingly program our phones to strip out spam calls and we use spam filters to strip out the ads from our email inboxes.
Consequently, all those that make their money on mixing content with ads and by invading our privacy are in trouble.
This threat extends beyond direct marketing, radio and TV to print. The most important revenue source for newspapers is classified advertising. Newspapers are also losing their classified business to online alternatives.
The situation for the traditional marketer is even more challenging than coping with the erosion of the traditional channels. Mass advertising has breached its effective ceiling of effectiveness.
For now, even when an ad reaches us, we no longer trust them. We are learning that much of what we hear from official sources is either wrong or worse. Hardly a week goes by without a new scandal in business such as Enron or Nortel, or in government such as the case for weapons of mass destruction or the ad scandal in Quebec.
So the return on advertising is already too low to be sustainable and the return will decline to a point where an alternative is the only way forward. Here is a chilling fact about the ROI issue.
In 2002 the US Car industry spent $15 billion on conventional marketing. Only 15% of car buyers acted as a result. 70% told researchers that it was word of mouth that enabled their decision. All those budgets are vulnerable to this type of analysis. So are all the branding budgets. In 2004, a video appeared online that showed that you could pick a Kryptonite bike lock in seconds with the end of a Bic pen. Within 6 weeks the brand was dead. Consumers are looking to their peers on the web to advise them and not to the marketers. Branding, as we know it, is dead.
The alternative way to market is to connect to the voice of truth and trust. Where do we find this? We find it in conversation with our peers.
How do we find our peers? We use Google to find them and we find them inside communities of Blogs. What do we find when we find a blog? We find the chance to have a conversation.
Why is a conversation so important to business today? The importance of conversation is that it alone breaks through the noise. We can only get the attention of another when we allow them into what we are doing and offer them a say.
Want to build the new Mustang? Then open up a site where the Mustang fans can chat about what would be best. But what if they don’t like what they find? That is the point of another key part of the new market. The web exposes lies very quickly. So quality is the only differentiating factor. In the context of the new, quality is defined by the quality of the customer experience not simply by product quality on its own. The product or service must serve the authentic needs of the customer not the primary needs of the seller.
Poor quality will be punished. If consumers don’t like what they find, they are going to write about it in public and the web will lead others to their page. So now the concept of a Brand as an object that is controlled only by the marketing guys is dead. The users will control the Brand now. They control the brand on the web and the medium they use is conversation.
Jeff Bezos is clear about the new business world. He asks why consumers will trust spin when their experience of the item is flawed. So Amazon spend all their money on delivering a better experience and rely on word of mouth to pick up traffic.
At the heart of this revolution are Google and Blogs and their associated toolsets. This new evolution of the web is all about relationships, quality, conversation and community. The web is no longer just a catalogue online but a place where consumers take on the power to drive business rather than to take what is on offer.
This bifurcation in the world of marketing has just begun. Those that understand this new reality will prosper and those that do not will fall.
Course Objectives
When you finish this course you will understand the new marketing. You will have digested both its theory and you will have experienced it in practice.
♣ The course itself will be delivered as a conversation and will use the primary tools of the new revolution
♣ You will be exposed to the new writing as it arrives and find out how to stay connected to the new ideas as they develop further
♣ You will have your own blog and aggregator
♣ You will have met online and had dialogue with many of the leaders of the revolution,
♣ You will learn about business evangelism and you will meet some of them
♣ You will have completed 3 case studies
♣ You will have launched a new type of campaign
♣ You will know what is going on and be prepared to find the oportunities
Required text & Recommended Reading
There will be no textbooks for this course. Useful new books that discuss this revolution such “More Space”, “100 Bloggers” and Hughtrain are all in production right now but their key content will available online free as is “The Cluetrain Manifesto” which will be your starting point.
You will be hooked up to the Blogs of the key figures today. You will have a tool that will enable you to follow these thinkers on a daily basis. You will be able to interact with all of them
Course requirements and structure
The course will be offered online using a very easy to use and access interactive site. The course will last for 6 weeks and will have 3 assignments. But the most important part of our work will be the conversation that we have amongst each other.
The assignments will be set from a menu of topics – the course is very broad. I want to offer you enough choice to enable you to find topics that especially interest you.
Evaluation plan
• Participation 40% of the total mark
o Our conversation rd is at the heart of the course. Dive in and have fun.
o I am looking for Quality and Quantity.
♣ Quality is defined by introducing novel insights and by building well on the ideas of other.
♣ Quantity is defined by participating 3-6 times a week
♣ If you participate less than 3 times a week without just cause, you will fail the course immediately
• Assignments 60% of the total mark.
o Papers that simply deal with the question and repeat the class thinking will be marked in the 60-75% range
o Papers that show original thought as well as having the covered the material will be marked in the 75-85% range
o Exceptional Papers that should be published will be marked in the 85-95% range
Course Schedule
Block 1 - July 4 ending July 16 - The Context
Understand and set up the tool set and connect to the key sources.
Track the undermining of the establishment:
♣ The threat to the mass media and to the telcos by disruptive technology – the emerging multiverse vs TV, Radio and Newspapers
♣ The noise issue – the issue of attention and also how technology is stripping out ads
♣ The trust issue – who trusts who now – the power of peer and the necessity for product performance and the death of spin
♣ The use of blogging and Google as the vectors for the new conversation
♣ Assignment 1 due July 16 – The fall of the traditional
Block 2 – July 18-30 – The New Marketing Voice & Evangelism
Connect to the leaders of the new marketing and deepen the understanding of the tool set
♣ Link to the key players and set up your aggregators
♣ Link to the key theory online – trust and engagement
♣ Look to eBay, Amazon as models
♣ Deepen the understanding of the power of Google and of Blogs
♣ Understand the trajectory of the change
♣ Assignment 2 due July 30- The rise of the new
Block 3 – August 1 –11 – The New Marketing, Small Business & You
The rise in power of very small business and how the network effect will give power back to the small versus the large
♣ We will pick a series of small businesses that we know and equip them to act in the new world
♣ We will examine the amplifying networks that will get then traffic
♣ Assignment 3 due August 11 – Your new business plan for yourself
Comments