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RSSLafley's statements were sometimes trivial, but they were a huge deal for this audience of over 1,000, including the largest gathering of CMOs I've ever witnessed. His theme echoed boldly in every CMO presentation, from companies like HP, Sony, Wal-Mart, Charles Schwab, Mastercard and Yahoo among others.
Now, a reality check. Are big advertisers ready to cede control to consumers? Instinctively, they know they have no choice. However, I'm not sure how prepared they are to start tackling key obstacles. Surprisingly, one of the most powerful metaphors of consumer control, the "Web 2.0" movement, spurred blank stares among most senior attendees at the ANA conference. When Cammie Dunaway, CMO of Yahoo, during her keynote, asked the audience if they knew what Web 2.0 was, I estimate that less than 50 hands went up (or five percent).
So what are the barriers to embracing consumer empowerment? It's one thing to pay lip service to consumer control at swanky industry gatherings, but it's another to take real action to transform your culture into one that lives by it. The embracement of consumer empowerment as an opportunity to connect must move into the trenches of the company, where consumer experiences and touch points are created and managed.
Aside from getting the CEO on board, institutional silos--often discombobulated and mired in legacy--are perhaps the most important forces that will prohibit marketers from adapting. Big companies today have more silos than we can count, but here are the three most important ones we should pay attention to:
Legal Silos Sure, legal is justifiably empowered to protect a company and its assets, but good intentions and misinformed execution often conflict with the spirit of consumer empowerment. When consumers express themselves or create media involving licensed brands and copyrights, they often enter into harshly protected legal territory. It is common for corporate legal departments to "rectify" situations where consumers have embraced and altered brands, and made their expressions public, both passively and overtly. (See my recent piece on incremental, incidental consumer-generated product placement.) By default, legal becomes an extension of the marketing department. In some cases this makes sense, in others, not. Considering the proliferation of co-creation in venues like photo-sharing and social video, where do you draw the line? What if the people mutating your protected brand also happen to be your biggest fans?
Advertising Silos After legal, the advertising department should be evaluated. The fact is that so much of the money at big brands still goes to paid media venues, like television, radio and print. These traditional tactics surely shouldn't go away, but their legacies of power should. Paid media used to drive the whole marketing strategy, but the very notion of interruptive attention goes against the grain of consumer empowerment. Perhaps at the next ANA conference, we will see fewer presentations and "successful case studies" rooted in 30-second spots!
Customer Service Silos
Finally, customer service and listening becomes one of the most important organizational attributes in a world of consumer empowerment. Not a customer-service silo that is labeled a cost center, or one that is rewarded by rapid turnover of inbound calls, but one that embraces the entire enterprise and considers itself to be the ultimate consumer champion, as well as a metaphorical welcome mat for customers.
As my colleague Pete Blackshaw, a former P&G exec, notes, customer service becomes a powerful media department when consumers chronicle their experiences with your brand. But we can't even begin to figure out how to market to these newly empowered consumers until we have mechanisms in place to systematically listen to them. Perhaps the customer service department needs to be eliminated, and every employee receive the title "customer service officer"? No brand in an age of consumer empowerment will be successful if its managers believe customer service can be diluted to a silo.
What do you think are the key obstacles organizations must tackle to truly embrace the reality of consumer control?
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Consumer generated content in a select community, anywhere in the US, was the only way to empower local enterprize with up to date content.
Now our web site http://www.ShopNTown.com/SNTport.php is almost complete and I will be happy to announce the results after launch.
Point is, the only reason self empowerment hasn't been allowed before is they didn't want to give up control.
But think about this, isn't one of the reasons most people go into business is control . . .
Thank you for listening, Walter Rinebold
Now we have discovered we no longer understand consumer input, so we need to re-engineer it.
What a great country! What a great industry! Of course, I no longer know what this industry is; marketing, engagement, interactivisness?
If they did, many would have a presence here in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is home to overn 80 percent of the firms advancing digital media and Internet-related actvities. I'll bet few of your readers know what vlogging is or have done it, yet it's the one activity at the core of the consumer-generated content issues faced today.
Out here, people with firms like Stubhub.com (online ticketing) regularly get together with people from Google at a San Francisco bar to just talk and understand the needs of each other.
That's the kind of interaction representatives in advertising and marketing need to establish. I personally know one ad consultant out here in San Francisco who has yet to actually ask me about vlogging, the intenet and web trafffic dynamics, or what were doing or the industry in general. And this guy sees me at Cal games, and just out and about. Totally lost, he is.
But blissful, too.
That''s the problem. In fact, your blog post is representative of the problem "Are Marketers Serious About Ceding Control to Consumers?" implies that marketers have control -- I've got news, they don't.
It's not practical to have lawyers chase after every person that happens to use a brand's image in their vlog in a way that the company doens't like. That's prohibitively expensive. The tide of content development using video is so large that it is smashing over every part of our society.
That's the point: this is not a fad, it's a social revolution.
Marketers will be dragged along in this wave, kicking and screaming bloddy murder unless they adapt. And fast.
There's no excuse for only five percent of the ANA audience knowing what "Web 2.0" is. It's a reflection of how behind the social learning curve they are -- time to catch up.
(1) Product Development - especially true in the tech sector -- does it work? Is it easy to use? Are we educating the consumer on how to maximize the value of their purchase?
(2) Price - does the customer feel like they received a fair value, or hopefully, got more than they paid for "at the end of the day". Can the company stay in business providing a superior level of customer service. (See 1 above -- if it doesn't work in the first place, your customer service costs will be higher).
The final consideration in this mix are the people who are actually providing the customer service. I saw a recent survey regarding what's important to employees -- and feeling good about what they do is important. If the product works, the price is right and both the customer and the service person feel good about the transactions, the company is going to have a winner, and the marketing will take care of itself.
Christopher Conlan