The Tendo View

Call it content marketing, conversational marketing, or permission marketing—the premise is the same. If the goal of traditional interruption marketing was for marketers to act like shepherd dogs herding prospects like cattle through a sales funnel for cowboy salesmen to lasso and corral, then under the new rubric we are now farmers tending to our garden of seedlings, nurturing and nourishing them to the point of harvest.

In essence, what has always been a well understood role of marketing is shifting from the “deliver me the eyeballs/impressions/clicks” model to one that asks that prospects form a meaningful relationship with a brand before anything is asked of them.

Consider the calls to action that, until recently, were ubiquitous in billboards, print ads, and commercials. Test-drive the new Ford Mustang today. Choosy moms choose Jif. Try Tide with blankety blank cleaning action for even brighter whites. The call to action was try, buy, or choose, and the measure of success was whether the intended audience tried, bought, or chose.

With the advent of coded phone numbers and URLs, marketers could, for the first time, separate the sheep from the cattle and the pigs from the chickens. It was consumer bucketing in its most elementary form, but it did lay the important groundwork for both benchmarking the performance of specific ad insertions and campaigns, as well as the ingredients for bucketed relationship marketing based on consumer response.

Still, prospective consumers remained largely anonymous and we marketers had little insight beyond our intuition about why they chose to test-drive Mustang on a particular day, or how many times they encountered the Jif ad before choosing Jif, and whether they chose Jif because of that message or despite it.

With the expansion of online channels and a renaissance of content marketing, today we start off with the same naïve assumptions about how prospective consumers might perceive our products and our brands. But from that starting point, we see doors open that were firmly shut just a few years ago.

Through forums, message boards, blogs, and peer-to-peer communities, we can now track what consumers think about our brands, our products, and our services. Do they think about us at all? Are we top of mind? How does their perception of us change over time? Are there folks who seem to be the trusted authorities in these peer exchanges—people who have a key role in shaping opinions?

Just as importantly, we have an opportunity to provide our own sandbox, with our own toys, for folks to play in. Our websites allow users to come in from banner ads, communities, search, or simple word of mouth. Once they reach us, they can elect to rate our products or services, exchange information and tips with other users, and upload pictures and videos directly to us.

The assumption, of course, is that by providing the sandbox and staying involved, we care enough to listen and interact with our audience beyond treating them like cattle, with prospect rankings branded into their hindquarters. If they buy, great. If they don’t buy, but a friend (or three) buys on their recommendation, all the better. Maybe they give us some insight about a product glitch or shortcoming, or help identify a novel new use or application that hadn’t occurred to us. Either way, they are adding value for us; as the relationship grows and flourishes, we do our jobs more effectively as a result.

Not to worry, MBA scholars: The cowboys with their lassos at the ready will still get their shot at closing the deal. But when you can stop barking and chasing and take the time to listen to and interact with your target audience, the message can morph from buy, try, choose to share, join, and participate.