John Hagel has 15 mins to be “provocative.” [As always, I’m paraphrasing and will be getting things wrong.]

He says the big shift is from fighting for shelf space to fighting for attention.

Traditional marketing’s principles are: Intercept customers, isolate them, and inhibit their ability to engage with other vendors over time. The nirvana: 1:1 marketing: One customer, one vendor.

We need a different approach, he says: Attract, assist, affiliate. (Affiliate: Find other services and values to provide to the customer.)

We’re moving from product- and vendor-centric promises (“Buy from me because I have great products and I’m a great vendor”) to customer-centric promises (“Buy from me because I know you as an individual customer better than anyone else and you can trust me to configure the right bundle of products and services”). Those who do this, John says, will have the most powerful brands. He notes that he does not mean customer segment brand promises but actual individual customer promises.

Generally, businesses can answer the two questions: 1. What’s the lifetime value of your customers, and how is that changing? 2. What’s the 80:20 segmentation in your business in terms of customers. But those are going to be critical performance metrics.

We need to focus on Return on Attention, John says.

He points to three ways marketers are falling into old habits:

1. Companies are responding by doing anything they can to grab attention. They’re carving messages into the wool on sheep, and running ads on video screens above the urinals. Instead, marketers ought to put themselves in the customer’s place.

2. Some say marketers should move from the broad notion of attention to intention, i.e., intercepting people who already intend to buy. John recommends focusing on attention more broadly.

3. Some are too enamored with tools. Rather than inventing new stuff, hoiw can we help our customers find and connect to the environments that already exist?

Ultimately, it’s about the assumptions we bring to business. From that stems everything else. So, you should start at the top to introduce organizational change.

[Tags: john_hagel marketing]

Categories: Uncategorized dw