I read a lot of marketing related publications. Newsletters, blogs, magazines, etc. Obviously, all of them have written extensively on the change in media and how marketing through those media have been affected. I think the most recently evolved form of media – social media – gets most of the ink of late, along with mobile although more traditional forms of media such as TV still get the bulk of the investment.
One thing I find disturbing in all of this is a kind of legacy from my TV marketing days: a focus on the numbers. I don’t mean obsessive measurement – I’m a big believer in accountability. What I mean is what Bob Seger wrote about: feeling like a number.
In a nutshell:
To workers I’m just another drone
To Ma Bell I’m just another phone
I’m just another statistic on a sheet
To teachers I’m just another child
To IRS I’m just another file
Some businesses tend to think of “results” in terms of numbers rather than the people they represent. Social media in particular is less about numbers in my mind than about the quality of the engagement – dialog vs. monologue, the thoughtfulness of comments and not just the raw numbers (trolls and spam push numbers up but turn off and drive away real users).
We need to put a face on our customers. People aren’t numbers or data. Even folks with some similar traits might have very different elements in their personalities that can affect your interaction with them. I get that we need to quantify what we do and create an amalgamation of demographics since marketing is not done efficiently (at least in the customer development phase) on a one at a time basis through mass media (is there such a thing any more?). In 1978, the first “road show” I did was a presentation to convince marketers to buy demographics instead of household numbers in TV since all a household number tells you is that the set is on and nothing about who is watching. Laughable today, I know, but in a sense we’re doing the same thing when we talk about “traffic” or “page views” or “likes” and not humans.
Please hit up the comments with your thoughts.
Consult Keith 