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October 9, 2006
The Big Guys Are Getting It. What About The Rest?
Colleague Louise Stix tipped me to a great article in today's New York Times Advertising column by Stuart Elliot. Titled "Letting Consumers Control Marketing: Priceless" (link may require you to register with NYT before viewing), Elliot describes comments by industry leaders like A.G. Lafley from Proctor & Gamble, Stephen Quinn of Wal-Mart and Lawrence Flanagan at MasterCard Worldwide. Each, in their own words, described how advertisers need to abandon their top-down pushes of messaging and adopt a strategy of bottom-up, grass-roots marketing. Innovation and risk-taking collide in one of the take-away lines in the article, a quote from Mr. Lafley, "Most of the experiments don't work, but we have to be out there, trying." Now that's priceless. Some brands like Burger King, relegated to a positioning strategy that forces them to play on the edge, are always toying with crazy ideas like Diddy TV.
But others like MasterCard have shown some real courage in allowing their brand to be parodied (sometimes in graphic ways!) in between the praise...without resorting to litigation.
One thing is becoming clearer with each day, new media has shown itself to, at times, be more effective at evoking the real feelings of a marketplace than structured, expensive market research.
As the evidence mounts that some industry leaders get the concept of letting customers help drive marketing and product innovation, what can we do to spread the word to more companies? I continue to see manufacturers ignore the facts and attempt to run "business as usual" campaigns and marketing programs. And, the problem is even worse in many B2B sectors where companies continue to spin traditional product-centric tales, instead of letting customers describe real problems in need of real solutions.
I figure the least I can do is continue to beat the drums. ;-)
Posted by jcioban at October 9, 2006 1:33 PM
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