The end of Mass Marketing?
A few days ago, I had the chance to eat lunch with Duke University Marketing Professor Dr. Martha Rogers, who was once again visiting our country. Martha Rogers is one of the top worldwide authorities on modern Marketing, author of the revolutionary concept of “one to one”, which basically presupposes different treatment for different customers. At one time in the conversation he used an entertaining phrase to refer to companies that are determined not to know their customers, when they have everything in their favor to know who they are. She referred to these companies as “Dory companies”, alluding to the female fish that accompanies the well-known Nemo on his adventures, and who lacks memory. These de-memorized “Dory companies” ask their customers time and again for their tastes, preferences, needs, and challenges, when they already have enough information to know what each customer wants.
The generic way of treating and communicating with the customer has been one of the mistakes most often associated with Marketing aimed at the final customer. While B2B companies (business to business), with a small clientele, have based their strategies on maintaining relationships with a high level of services and an extremely direct and relational marketing model, B2C (Business to Consumer) companies, which are aimed at the long-suffering final consumer, have traded that strategy for requiring customers to repeat until they’re blue in the face that they don’t want a receipt at the ATM, or that they prefer an emergency exit seat on the plane.
Why restrict the virtues of an effective relational Marketing only to the relationship between companies? With this vision, the product of an erroneous segmentation strategy, many companies are becoming “Dory” companies. Many of them must begin to turn to Customer Intelligence techniques in order to transform their traditional mass Marketing into a truly advanced Marketing that recognizes the true value and needs of each customer, and as such, the strategy that must be applied to each.
One result of this type of strategy is the creation of clubs in numerous sectors such as fashion, distribution, airlines, the automotive industry, or even wine clubs, with clearly uneven results. It’s no excuse to say that a company has thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of customers in the poorly-named “Fidelity Club”, in order to apply indifferent strategies that don’t take advantage of the existing information. Because the customer is also increasingly intelligent, different, unique, and demanding. Fewer and fewer mass campaigns are reaching customers; they only bombard a mass of people at a high cost, and obtain increasingly poor results. This is what we see from the negative evolution of investment in mass advertising in recent years, and how “below marketing” or relational marketing is gaining on it fast.
The customer is looking for personalized treatment, and they’re looking for companies capable of recognizing them, and consequently their tastes and needs, among 1 million. Little details in service, such as an ATM asking us whether or not we want a receipt, or automatically reserving an emergency exit seat for us (with the implications that carries with it: “They know me.”, “They’re paying attention to me and they want to please me.”), can generate a very positive image for the customer, at no cost. Only by using what we’ve learned about the customer during the relationship.
The traditional focus of mass Marketing is anchored in the old vision of “coffee for everyone”. This vision is outdated. Products can be copied, emulated, standardized… Customers cannot. The customer portfolio is the least imitable and most valuable asset of every company. So let’s forget about final consumers and companies. Let’s focus on the customers and on applying a unique Intelligent Marketing, based on the value of each one. Let’s not be “Dory” companies.