My Manifesto of Successful Marketing: 1. Relevance beats Awareness.
Maybe tonight you are going to a pub for a drink. Now Imagine yourself standing at the front door and starting to shout very loud how great you are. how beautiful and how intelligent you are. To be fair, you are doing it in a very unseen and smart way. The way nobody did it before. What do you think how many people in the bar will appreciate that? How many would fall in love with you? How many will have the desire to be your best friend? Nobody. But wait a minute. Doesn’t that remind you of something? Exactly. It is the Awareness System which the whole traditional mass media and marketing & communication industry were built on.
The whole old System of marketing and communication is not working or to be exact, not working any more. For the last 50 years it was very easy to be successful. The markets were growing and the system produced a lot of new needs for a lot of products and services that actually were useless. The right Brand Promise, the right positioning and a creative way of communicating brand values was enough to hide the weakness of products or services. We were selling sugared water as the ultimate happiness. Chocolate as the epicenter of Joy, Cars as the Arch of Dreams and refrigerators as the vehicle to define your personality. A mobile phone with 2456 Features was seen as a milestone of human progress. DVD Players, which didn’t work were not a problem of the companies who were producing them but the problem of the customers who didn’t understand how to work with them and so on and so on. And Suddenly the old logic is wrong?
Not Suddenly. The progress started a while ago. There are three huge movements.
It started with the unbelievable speed of the digitalization and in addition to that with the economical evidence that quantitative growth will not work anymore as you see in the actual crisis which is not a financial or economical crisis but also a system crisis. The Bubble companies and their marketing departments and ad agencies were producing is much more bigger than the bubble of the bankers at the wall street. And last but not least there is this huge shift of change in people’s mind about the definition of true values and important things in life. I call it “The Delta of new Order”.
Companies will only be successful if they are truly start to develop relevance. And Relevance is also what i think the true innovation for the 21st century. All the things that makes people’s life better, easier and more effective. And all these Innovations are simple to understand. Everybody can see, feel and enjoy them. And as we are in a world of digitalization, where everybody will be connected to everything in real time and can know everything in real time, everybody will know about these kind of relevant products, services or concepts in real time.
What are the consequences for Marketing & communication? I believe that companies should start to implement Marketing in the R&D process and should stop to look at Marketing as the supporters for sales and distribution. Another consequence is the way these companies will communicate. Beside the relevance of products and services there is a need for relevance in the communication of the messages. Seduction or Promising were yesterday. You should act and walk the talk. That means that you should understand that everything which has something to do with your company is communicating and that people will recognize the consistency and the absence of it. If you have relevant messages, the content will find it’s way through media and there will be no need of pushing it with a lot of money through all the channels. Great examples are the little cleaning shop in the picture and the thefuntheory.com from Volkswagen. The youtube video was seen 10 million times and it is one of the most famous and known communication campaigns around the world by investing not more than 50.000,-- Euros.
If you have a great and relevant product and a culture in your company, where you see People as your Friends and not as customers. The People will start to do the job of communication for you by sharing their experiences and convincing others to try your products. The next Chapter of my manifesto of successful marketing is about customers as Friends so look back for some thoughts on that very soon.
