The new marketing paradigm should be easy to digest for any brand used to telling the truth, letting customers steer the wheel, and making sure every ad message is at least as valuable as a tangible
service. For everyone else, the new standard is likely “a very scary thing,” says this morning’s keynote speaker Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager of IBM Enterprise
Marketing Management Group Unica. “In the old days a company could spend enough money to control what consumers think about a brand, according to Lee. “That paradigm is going away,”
he says. “Companies have to tell the truth.” With consumers increasingly setting the agenda, companies increasingly need “systematic technologies and processes to energize
customers,” according to Lee -- which actually seems like a contradictory idea, unless the message is that consumers only need to
think they’re setting the agenda. Either way, Lee
says businesses need more elegant systems to measure consumer behavior and beliefs. Companies currently use somewhere between 50-to-100 applications to do this, according to Lee, which he calls
“not sustainable.” In an ideal world, adds Lee, businesses would rely on about 5-to-10 measurement applications.
