The world is swimming in data and information. Marketers, brands and publishers are battling for customer attention with methods that are increasingly less effective. Only a focus on customer-value and entertaining content will help businesses stand apart.
In this "ignite" talk I spent 15 seconds on each of these 15 slides telling this story.
I hope you like it!
12. What is Marketing?
• “The aim of
marketing is to know
and understand the
customer so well the
product or service fits
him and sells itself…
• ~Milan Kundera
• … The aim of
marketing is to make
selling superfluous.”
• ~ Peter F. Drucker
• “Marketing is too
important to be left
to the marketing
department.”
@BrennerMichael
~ David Packard
Hi. Michael Brenner, SAP. We live in an over-crowded world and we are ALL swimming in information. This is causing marketers, agencies and publishers to “battle for customer attention.” The world has changed. Most marketing sucks. And we need your help to forge a new path.
These are my kids (aren’t the cute?) They will grow up in a hyper-connected world with every memory documented in the cloud. Like us, they will look back at the immature devices of their youth and laugh. Reaching them will be an epic battle.
It didn’t used to be so difficult. When I was a kid brands had simple choices. TV, radio, newspaper, magazine. With the right agency and a big enough budget ANY brand could get their message to their audience.
When I graduated from university in 1993, a technology called Mosaic changed their name to Netscape and opened the world to the internet. Within a few years, thousands of connected computers became millions and now billions.
Today, we are all connected and it’s not the Internet but content and accessibility that is driving the world. There are more cell phones than toilets in the world and most people have to really think about which one is more important.
Bombarded with over 5,000 messages a day, consumers are felling like the Spartan hero-King Leonidas at Thermopylae facing a battle they cannot win
Traditional publishers are struggling as well. newspaper ad revenues in America have declined by 300% to 1950s levels. This rapid change is affecting all media and we are struggling to respond fast enough.
Marketing is broken as we throw more and more at them, response rates continue to decline. 2/3 of the US population is on the “Do Not Call” list. 86% of U.S. consumers skip television ads, 99.9% of banner ads and 99% of emails don’t click.
In fact, one US website declared earlier this year, you are more likely to win the lottery, produce twins or die in a plane crash than to have someone respond to your banner ad.
So we’ve given up (this is not one of my kids!) We are bored to death of marketing messages and have accepted our role as great content filters. Picking through the trash of marketing messages looking for something valuable, something that can help us.
It’s not about the volume of the messages. It’s about the quality of the content. N this transparent world, consumer can see right through brands thinly-veiled attempts at selling what they’ve got and only caring about themselves.
What are we doing? Peter Drucker defined the aim of marketing as “knowing the customer so well that your product or service sells itself.” Here, the product and the content is the marketing! And it’s amazing.
Successful brands, agencies and publishers are reaching out and putting their customers first. They are not just seeking to make a connection to their customers, they are seeking to warm their hearts and inspire their minds.
Successful brands and marketers follow this guys example. If you don’t know Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters, he doesn’t just write the songs, or sing the lyrics, or play the guitar, or bang the drums, He does all these things. He connects. And he rocks it out!
So in summary, the world has changed and most marketers, brands and agencies are struggling to keep up. The vast majority of marketing efforts are highly ineffective. It’s time to define the new marketing civilization. So let’s connect and build something that will stand the test of time. Thank you!