The Changing Consumer

I've had the good fortune to be part of the Marketing and PR professional community since the early 1980's. Back then, only the most forward-thinking companies were dabbling in computers. Most folks were dazzled by the "word processors" that eliminated the need for carbon paper and re-typing. Secretaries (you may remember those) were thrilled.

My first computer had no hard drive, just two floppy disk drives (the big ones that really were floppy!) and I had to switch disks back and forth to load programs and then save them. The screen was an eye-killing amber and I was ecstatic to be one of the few to have one.

Consumers were discovering CD's and walkmans and stereo TV. We reached them through broadcast and print media and direct mail. It was a very one-sided kind of marketing where you cast your net based on some generic demographic data. The only way you knew if you reached your potential customer was if they actually walked through the door and told you so, or happened to answer a telephone survey.

Fast forward 30 years or so and consumers are in a totally different position. They are managing the flow of information they get from advertisers. They decide where, when, how and IF they will receive messages. Traditional media still has its uses but the days of placing an ad in a newspaper to advertise a sale are over.

Today we have to track down the consumer and we must entice her to read, hear or watch our message. We have to understand what motivates her, how busy she is, and we need to know a lot about her. Fortunately, we have loads of data available to tell us that but, frankly, I am a little wary about how long that particular gravy train will be around for us to use. I wonder if consumers will get a little weary of marketers knowing everything about them. It wouldn't take much for them to start shutting the windows we have into their lives.

Of course, we won't go back to the stone age of the 1980s marketing tactics. But the plethora of messaging has its drawbacks. By one estimate, every consumer sees upwards of 5,000 messages daily. Some people put it at much more than that, but it is clear that communication overload is part of our lives. How long will we stand for that? I don't know, but I do think that while today's 20-something has less of an expectation of privacy than the over-50 crowd, I believe there may come a moment when that window does indeed start slamming down on our fingers.

So what will we do then?

Did Online Kill Old Media?

It is trite to say that marketing is part art and part science. As marketers, we must use metrics, ROI, behavioral analysis and other scientific, concrete tools to deliver and measure campaigns. But what we do also requires creativity - writing, design, a "gut" feeling for what will work. We have to understand our audiences at both the logical and the psychological level, then figure out how to meet them at both places at once.

CEOs are looking for the results - what did we accomplish, how much did it cost, did we reach our goal. As marketers, we have to put those questions at the top of our lists, too. Where the struggle can come is in focusing only on the immediately measurable results. As we move into the age of online, on demand marketing we gain the ability to have near instant results on our marketing activities. That's an advantage we haven't had before. 

The temptation, of course, is to discard all the traditional media we have used - outdoor, print, tv, radio, etc. - in favor of something that can be precisely measured. But those "softer" and less measurable media have an important place in the marketing mix. They provide the opportunity to tell a more complete message, or to create an emotional response, even to make people think, cry, laugh. That's hard to do in a search engine ad or a 140-character tweet.

Building your brand requires a consistent, multi-faceted approach to explaining who you are and what you stand for. Over and over and over. It cannot be one and done, or you will lose whatever investment you made. Yes, you can definitely build brand through online marketing. And yes, you can do some amazing targeting online to reach out to your prospects and customers. But don't overlook the fact that not everyone is online, that everyone responds to different media in different ways, and that there's no substitute for meeting your customer where they are in that moment when they need your product or service.