Years ago I was waiting in line to watch a movie I hadn’t heard much about, except Clooney was in it and it was good. Popcorn and tickets in hand, the cinema doors opened and the guy ahead of me smiled to his girlfriend and said, “They all die, you know.”
I responded on his girlfriend’s behalf, “No, I didn’t know. But thank you so much for sharing.”
Years ago I was waiting in line to watch a movie I hadn’t heard much about, except Clooney was in it and it was good. Popcorn and tickets in hand, the cinema doors opened and the guy ahead of me smiled to his girlfriend and said, “They all die, you know.”
I responded on his girlfriend’s behalf, “No, I didn’t know. But thank you so much for sharing.”
Turned out his audible insight wasn’t the spoiler I thought it was. The crew’s ultimate fate becomes a no-brainer fairly early on in the movie. How they deal with that mother-of-all water walls is what rivets you.
And yes, marketers around the world are heading into what may be one of the fiercest financial storms of our lifetime, an unnatural disaster born of greed, ignorance and neglect.
Unlike the movie, our fate is not necessarily foretold but how we “deal” with it will be just as fascinating – and frightening – to watch.
If I were writing the plot (as you might guess) I would power our craft with Direct Marketing, including Customer Relationship Management. My colleague, Drayton Bird, has called our specialised discipline “one step closer to perfect marketing”.
We target individuals who are most likely to be future customers. We encourage sales, now, measure our efforts and pay attention as prospects become customers, to ensure a mutually rewarding relationship for years to come.
Not perfect but it’s closer than you’d get if you just tossed out a net into an increasingly dark and roiling sea.
Others have their own plot ideas.
Take online social networks, for example. Facebook, whose users are estimated to be around 175 million, is surely one of the web’s social networking titans. They offer an economic survival tool that’s powered by their ability to store user data, and then use names and images from that data for commercial purposes.
The idea of using publicly offered content – users freely reveal themselves for the entire world to see – to create a wildly profitable business is ingenious, if not a bit scary. Call me crazy, but creating an income stream from virtual interactions with friends, seems cause for pause. That old fashioned idea of privacy? (In fact, call me certifiable. I’m one of the 175 million.)
Here’s another plot twist. In early February, Google launched, in 27 countries, a system called Latitude. This digital mapping technology for hand phones has been described as a ‘location-aware, friend-finding’ system.
The application allows users to keep track of each other by showing where the users are at any given time. Parents can keep track of where their kids are. Friends can agree to meet up if they are shown to be in nearby locations. All’s good.
Or … if your service provider tracks that you have visited three different furniture stores in one day, are you suddenly a good prospect for sofa sellers? I’m absolutely certain that is not the motivation behind the technology but if I’m going to be digitally watched and targeted by marketers, I would really, really, want them to ask for my approval first.
From a marketer’s point of view, especially in desperate times, keeping gimlet eyes on prospects and customers is a must, not a maybe. In a perfect world, you would know where they are now, what they’re doing, who they’re seeing and what they need and want … the instant they need and want it.
Perhaps “one step closer to perfect marketing” is perfect enough.
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