Me Tarzan – You Jane!
Can you imagine the impact on sales if we treated our customers like this? Well maybe in some ways we do, but our customers haven’t known any better! But that is changing, and changing quickly.
One of the biggest things we are seeing electronic technologies having an impact on in marketing is not just how we do marketing. Electronic technologies are changing the mindset behind how we view marketing, talk about marketing and the roles of who is involved in marketing.
Them & Us = Mass Marketing
Has marketing ever been a linear process? Do we as human beings actually interact with each other in a linear way? Now time is linear, and because we organise processes usually by time, many of our working processes are linear. But in fact we live and work in social networks.
If we think back to the agarian age, before the inception of mass machines of the industrial era, we lived and shared goods in social networks of close geographical proximity. Bartering and developing strong-tie bonds to facilitate the exchange of goods.
But as large scale machinery was introduced, enabling standardisation in production and broadcast media was invented to reach the mass audience with a single message, so too did the mindset of marketing involving the formalisation of linear marketing processes and strategies to market to the masses evolve.
Born was the concept of sales processes and mass strategic marketing. These are inherently linear one-way processes in which organisations (them) – be it marketers, sales teams, advertisers or account managers, develop strategies and programs to sell and advertise to segments of consumers, customers, buyers (us).
But inherently in mindset there is a divide, a physical and psyhcological divide between organisation and community. It’s a them & us mindset, in which the community is something marketed and sold to! They are not participatory, but passive.
Even the language – customer, consumer, user – denotes a psychological position in the mindsets of marketers. ‘You are inherently someone who responds, purchases, consumes, or buys on behalf of an entity’. You should feel happy I’ve identified you as a attractive segment I’m going to market to.
I can see the relationship to Tarzan and Jane now - Me provider – You Customer!
With the social web this mindset is evolving and tomorrow’s marketers especially, are seeing the world differently. They didn’t grow up in a time of mass mechanical machines but in one of social digital networks.
Me + We = Social Marketing
With recent developments in digital social web services – be it tools, technologies, channels, or platforms – we are starting to see changes in how marketing is viewed, spoken about and the role of people within it!
Marketing is far more social today than it ever has been. By social I don’t mean ’socially responsible’, I mean as part of a wider social network or community, not apart or distant from it.
Marketing projects are increasingly organised less and less in silos – such as advertising, PR, sales, distribution – and more fragmentated involving cross-functional teams across social networks. We are recognising the need for very differing skills in collaboration – be it in IT, usability, system design.
Electronic tools, technologies and channels are the enactors in this evolution, facilitating the rise in the ‘I’ generation (me), where my role in the media, in the message, in the marketing process I as an individual can define.
These choices are not just up to marketers, but to customers, consumers, buyers, employees etc to choose their role and participation in the marketing process. We also don’t want to be seen as a segment or number, but a person!
As a result marketing is being forced to focus more on people (me) and the social network, the community they are part of (we) and listen and interact within this community. Not just sit outside it, viewing the community as something we can break up to target or reach.
So perhaps marketing is moving out of the jungle … evolving from a mindset of them & us to one of Me + We!
I wonder who amongst us in this profession will survive? As Charles Darwin once wrote:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
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