The Consumer Is Boss: A 10-Year Perspective
Bryan Eisenberg On October 15, 2000, A.G. Lafley, president and CEO of Procter &
Gamble Co., delivered a prophetic speech entitled "The Consumer is
Boss!" to the Association of National Advertisers. In his presentation
he emphasized three main points:
"We're moving away from the current mass marketing model, away from push and toward pull.
Consumers will only become more demanding.
They want to have a conversation, to dialogue, to participate, to be more in control."
These points may seem obvious to marketers and other business people
today, but they still confound us. We only now begin to realize the
implications. Recently, Rich Green, CTO at Nokia, said companies should
stop trying to think of using social media for their own ends: "The big
'a-ha' moment is when enterprises finally realize that their digital
existences are being defined by the consumer world, not the reverse. It
is hubris to think that an enterprise can 'use' social media for its
advantage."
There is no question that marketing has been completely redefined,
and understanding the impact of social and mobile technologies on
customer behavior is still unclear for many. While we know people are
engaged with our social and media efforts, the return on investment is
still hard to define. In fact, according to the just released
Forrester/Shop.org's State of Retailing Online 2011 report
(SORO 2011), 68 percent of retailers said if Facebook went away it
wouldn't impact sales at all in 2011. Also, 62 percent of retailers
agree that returns on social marketing strategies are unclear. There is
some good news: 72 percent of retailers will increase their spend in
social. However, 36 percent of retailers are pursuing a social media
strategy mostly because their competitors are.
In IBM's State of Marketing 2011 study,
we learned that 60 percent of marketers identified "turning data into
action" as their top organizational issue. We suffer from data overload.
It's unclear what a lot of this social data is telling us, because we
can't directly correlate that data to sales in most cases. The true ROI of social media is unclear for many.
The study shows our frustration with social media:
"This year, social media is no longer the adorable baby
everyone wants to hold, but the angst-filled adolescent – still immature
yet no longer cute – who inspires mixed feelings. All things social
continue to hold intense interest, with 53% of marketers currently
applying it to their marketing efforts. But as tactics rise and fall, a
more sophisticated approach is emerging."
As quoted in The Wall Street Journal,
Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said:
"The explosion of social networking with consumers has changed their
(consumers) expectations about how they can and should connect with
businesses. 'Real-time' is a new imperative, which is causing many
businesses to rethink their customer relations strategies via digital
marketing."
We have had 10-plus years of warnings about these changes and so few
are prepared. Companies have totally missed the point. They don't really
need to worry about keeping up with their competitors. Nevertheless,
they must worry about how to keep up with their customers.
We have either entered or passed the year when mobile became a
critical issue for business. The SORO 2011 reports that only 29 percent
of retailers say they have a mobile strategy, are implementing it, and
are already optimizing. Meanwhile, only 12 percent of the Internet
Retailer Top 500 websites had mobile websites in a mid-2010 study, and only 7 percent had mobile apps.
I think every digital marketing executive should watch this video
produced by Best Buy (be sure to replay the part from 1:20 to 1:30 many,
many times):
Companies will continue to be slowed down by their slow corporate
metabolisms. Their inability to collect the right data and act, analyze,
react, and optimize based on the data continues to provide opportunity
for those companies that have a faster metabolism. I no longer wonder
how dinosaurs became extinct.
Where are your consumers headed? Where are they today? Will you truly serve them as they want to be served?
