Advertising and marketing campaigns, whether they be direct or mass, are inundating our lives. E-mail inboxes have become a new bottomless pit where every day hundreds of unrequested sales offers land. And these offers don’t even respond to our needs. The cinema and television constantly broadcast images that invite us to consume, sometimes in a veiled way, sometimes eloquent. In the sports world, sponsorship even includes the bodies of athletes and swimmers, which is living proof of the triumph of the new commercial aesthetic that rules in this young century. But the efficiency of these strategies is more than debatable.
Resistance to current advertising mechanisms is constantly increasing. The potential public has begun raise barriers in order to shield themselves from the avalanche of offers they receive – more than 2,000 advertisements per day -, the majority of which are poorly focused and designed. Professionals are under growing pressure to meet turnover goals, and they face the threat of budget cuts when they do not reach their desired goals. The result is an increasing inefficiency in marketing strategies and company plans.
The customer is the element that allows us to accurately interpret these types of contradictory situations. Although for years we have heard of the importance of putting the customer at the center of our business as a starting point for activity planning in all areas of the company, the theory has not been translated into an effective practice. For many companies, the customer is still their objective, but not their purpose.
It is necessary to establish a new paradigm, a new Marketing replaces old ideas and mechanisms in order to adapt to the circumstances of a market in which the client increasingly demands to be taken into account at all times. Since the middle of the 20th century, the market has gone through a long transformation in which we have gone from applying transactional marketing techniques (where the product was the foundation of business and companies, the protagonist that offered its propositions to a passive buyer) to needing a new collaborative marketing. It is no longer enough to establish a trusting and loyal long-term relationship with the customer. The world is changing too much, and the competition is too active.
As opposed to paternal attitudes, we must put ourselves on the client’s side and turn them into our ally. It is essential to know their decision-making power, but not so we can bow down to them. Rather, so that we can take advantage of the mutual benefits. The client demands solutions and results, and in order to meet these expectations, companies must supply the clients with the necessary mechanisms to make themselves heard.
The first step in this task must be to establish mechanisms geared towards getting to know the consumer better. They leave us constant samples of their tastes, preferences, desires, and mistrusts in the way they relate to us and to their social environment. In order to take advantage of this enormous amount of information, it is essential to apply a scientific methodology that helps us to appropriately orient our decisions.
We don’t demand anything of companies that we do not demand ourselves as clients. From this point of view, we demand something more than a nice offer or a well-designed product. We desire differential treatment, services, and results, and we want to be heard. That is the perspective we must adopt: seeing with the client’s eyes.