Consumers stand back as the power of the individual rises
That’s the title of Adriana Cronin-Lukas’s powerhouse opinion piece in the first issue of New Media Age of 2006, which is published tomorrow (today was one of those times when I ended up with advanced copy from the publisher). It really does pack a punch, laying out so many of the concepts and forces that are changing the landscape not only of marketing and business, but how the entire world operates. (Sound outlandish? As I said to people about blogs until I was blue in the face - and as I now say about search engine marketing - just you wait and see: It’s already happening.) I would love to see the looks on the faces of the sleazy, falling barons of intrusive, interruptive marketing as they read it.
Adriana’s piece isn’t available on the NMA site, and as its editor, Michael Nutley, told me recently that he was fine with me quoting their items wholesale, I’ve transcribed it and am making it available here. Enjoy.
There really is only one trend for this year: the consumer is no more.
The monolithic demographics are breaking down to individuals - customers and those creating the products that they want. When it comes to online new media, these are often the same people. How much more of this trend will be obvious in 2006? First, let’s look at where this trend manifests itself.
In advertising, the demand side is supplying itself. Blogs, social Web, tagging, user-generated media - all these enable users and customers to provide each other with information about products, brands and companies.
This shows up increasingly as more ‘noise’ from the consumer side. The trend is for the distributed conversations happening online to be more networked and therefore more aggregated. Tools for monitoring those interactions are improving by the day. We will see more cases of customer power demonstrated online, with mainstream media increasingly amplifying it.
Online is now a profoundly social place as individuals have been gaining more control over their environment and the way they interact with others. The authority of the one-way broadcast model will decline further as alternatives emerge, showing up the traditional communication methods as expensive and counter-productive. This applies to external as well as internal communications.
Branding has become a very different activity; it’s now all about communities. Brands able to tune into the online dynamics will learn how to join the existing communities instead of trying to create new ones with the delusion of control. This will bring a number of different approaches to interaction with customers, who are determining the nature and context of their involvement in any community.
There’s a different type of new media created by users for users where digital isn’t an issue but empowerment is. In online technology, there will be a further shift to modular components, where the value will be in their application and how they’re put together for a particular purpose.
What about the trends that most of the marketing industry looks to as the next big thing? First, a couple of concepts that are having impact across the industry and are making the traditional techniques and methods obsolete, to say the least.
Transparency is one of the most important pressures that developments online have brought for businesses. Online attention has shifted its value. The industry’s focus is on attracting, packaging and selling it as a valuable commodity, but online the individual customer has unprecedented control over his attention. Online advertising will decrease in its effectiveness without a proper understanding of the shift in the balance of power.
So with behavioural marketing, interactivity and engagement, word of mouth and viral, what will work in 2006? The same things that have always done: engagement, connection between individuals and conversations, as blogs and the blogosphere have demonstrated. The greatest contribution of online technology to date has been supporting a thriving Web of social interactions.
As in any shifting landscape, there will be two types of company: those that cling to what they know and those that immerse themselves in the social aspect of the new media and share in the empowerment that the individual customer has been experiencing for some time.
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