Self-interests can no longer be served through selfishness….

By Robert Wheatley

Image c/o Philip and Karen Smith

With all of the conversation and discussion about the explosion of social media, and the era of two-way engagement and conversation that shift ushers in, you’d think businesses must be falling to their collective knees in a sort of Road-to-Damascus epiphany about discovering a new path to building brands. Have we seen the light?

Has a new marketing and communications religion taken hold? Apparently it’s still a work in progress. We learn that the vast majority of marketing spending still flows down the hide-bound and intractable pipe of interruption media and its embedded agenda to disrupt, persuade and imprint messages.

Oscar Wilde once quipped, “I can resist anything except temptation,” and so the addiction to push media solutions rolls on. Like a massive electric motor bolted to the floor of an industrial age power plant, the tradition-bound backbone of brand marketing built from an interruptive model continues to spin on its own inertia.

• Consumers are not walking wallets merely to be sold. If anything there’s a refined “selling detector” that’s emerged as consumer’s turn away from and avoid or ignore blatant pitches in favor or more interesting and helpful forms of brand interaction.

We’ve institutionalized a legacy over time of brand narcissism that should evolve. It’s not all about us anymore. Yes, the fundamental goal of a business organization is to sell more stuff more often and more profitably.

But if the tone, tenor and manner in which we go about achieving business objectives flows from a view that consumers are merely walking wallets, then we’ve failed to grasp the fundamental changes that impact how great brands are built in the age of consumer control. Behaviors that reinforce customer relationships as transactions-to-sweep-in only lack understanding that consumers now control brand interaction. And so we must move from push to engage, from tell to listen, from imprint to co-create.

Brand narcissism is a systemic problem. It emanates from deep-seated behaviors that suggest company’s can compel consumers into favorable purchase behavior at will. Years of pushing messages and other tactics at consumers continues, whether openly acknowledged or not, to flow from a belief that the one-size fits-all consumer will do what we tell them to do.

Not so.

What’s needed…?

1. Enduring brand relationships are now built from a foundation of mutual respect, interest and caring.

2. Brands must earn permission for a relationship with core customers by aligning themselves with their unique lifestyle passions and interests.

3. A form of brand selflessness must authentically take root — such that all points of contact reverberate with the same level of reverence for consumers as friends of the brand, not just targets to target.

The change here is more attitudinal than anything else. Once consideration is given towards how a brand can mine a “higher purpose” built around reciprocity, then we have room to move to refine strategies that will help effectively build a foundation of trust. And let’s be clear, trust is the fabric that binds brands to consumers.

It is the absence of meaning, compelling value and trust that turns businesses into commodities…

Social media by the way is a partner in all of this, not a stand-alone panacea. Engagement media gets interesting and valuable when it is integrated as a component part of all forms of outreach.

We’ll examine more of media integration piece tomorrow. What do you think?