Bart Simpson was once depicted walking through a shopping mall where every single shop was a branch of Starbucks. George Orwell wrote that if ‘Jack the Giant-killer’ had been written in the twentieth century it would be entitled ‘Giant the Jack-killer’. With his characteristic cold-eyed realism, Orwell had seen how powerful agencies - agencies of the state or corporate agencies - could control the lives of ordinary people and crush dissent. Despite Orwell’s observation, or maybe because of it, the human race still has a place in its heart for heroic figures willing to challenge the rich and powerful. I’m thinking of figures like Ralph Nader and Naomi Klein.
Klein has argued that the global brand is a device created by clever marketing people with a single aim in mind, namely to persuade customers to pay a higher price than is justified by the product or service they will receive.
Klein’s first book ‘No Logo’ explained, in sometimes painful detail, how brands have penetrated the media, the High Street and even schools. When major corporations talk about ‘corporate multiculturalism’, Klein showed what they really mean: building assets and networks that just multiply the situations in which the consumer will be induced to buy. Klein generated further animus against some big corporations when she demonstrated that they were increasing their profits still further by manufacturing their products in third-world plants at rock bottom wage rates.
Klein also believed that offering their brands online would help global corporations to an even more potent position. “Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing,” she wrote, “these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations.”
But there is evidence now that the spread of technology has actually begun to weaken the power of corporations to dictate to consumers.
The Economist Intelligence Unit in 2007 published a report on Customer Engagement (CE), reporting the views of over 300 Chief-Level executives. The key findings of the EIU report are as follows:-
Once upon a time, it seems, clever marketing departments wove their magic for passive recipients. But the proliferation of TV channels, the ubiquitous mobile phone and the spread of social and visual networks has made the world one huge gossiping village. The buyers are in a sceptical mood. They don’t believe the marketers as much as they do the views of their fellow customers.
Make no mistake; this is a major shift of emphasis in world markets.
Of course it doesn’t mean that advertising and PR campaigns are dead. Companies will continue to spend marketing dollars. But increasingly the big prizes will go to the businesses that know how to mobilize their customers as advocates.
In the USA Procter & Gamble has set up Tremor, a specialist subsidiary under a charismatic leader named Steve Knox. Tremor’s charter is to help companies build networks of customer/ advocates. When a savvy business like P & G invests, you get the scent of dedication to a driver of long term profit growth.
So, the big question is - as a kingpin in your company - what are you going to do to understand what drives your ‘Jacks’ to become those valuable advocates?
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