How - Dov Seidman [76]
The new challenge for marketers is to find ways of facilitating authentic impressions on their potential consumers. Authentic impressions come from human interactions where people get their HOWS right, without attempting to manipulate the message or the market. “The world is so transparent today that the minute you’re not honest and authentic with what you stand for, the damage can be done so quickly,” Wolf said. “Your customers feel like they’ve been fooled or tricked; they absolutely do feel like they’ve been betrayed. When a company has done such a good job in building up the trust in this relationship and then does something to crack that, the sense of betrayal is just huge.”
Marketing today is all about making Waves through the marketplace by connecting in direct, transparent, dialogic ways with consumers. It is the new HOW of brand messaging. You might think that putting shills in dance clubs to talk up your product is just another manipulative way to get your highly crafted message out, but amazingly, a recent study showed that evangelist marketers who identified themselves as paid shills to those with whom they had contact actually made a stronger impression than those who kept their affiliation a secret. In other words, even in the highly crafted message world of advertising, those who reach out personally and transparently to the market benefit more than those who seek to manipulate it in covert ways. If the message is the proxy, an actively transparent proxy wins.
Mass information access has fundamentally changed the way we perceive the messages we receive. Technological transparency renders living, governing, and representing yourself through proxies and surrogates obsolete. “Winning customers is now all about building authentic and relevant relationships,” Wolf said. “The extreme fragmentation in the media world today creates an opportunity to clearly reach different customers based on their interests and desires, and build those relationships. It’s a very exciting time. You can have a much more one-on-one, richer relationship, a much deeper relationship with those who believe most strongly in your brand, and work with them.”
Connecting with the market is no longer about propagating brand image or brand awareness; it is about asserting brand promise, a direct relationship between business and the market. Brand promise is deeper than image, it encompasses what you stand for, the expectations you set for yourself, and how you honor that promise with action and behavior. “It’s all about trust,” Wolf said. “Trust is key, and brands that consistently stand for something build that trust and build that credibility and build that relationship. When they do, it’s a rock-solid relationship that is very difficult to be broken.”
All of this points to one simple conclusion: what you say about yourself now takes a backseat to how you create a rewarding and reliable experience for your customers. And the key to that? “We all need to be very clear and transparent in what we stand for, and what we stand for with our company,” Wolf said in closing. “That clarity will immediately communicate to whoever that customer is. That’s the simplicity of it.”
SAY YOU ARE SORRY
Fear of exposure is a real concern in a transparent world. Transparency is not just a WHAT, however, something that happens to you; it is a HOW that any group or individual can embrace and master.
To see how this can work, let me say, “I’m sorry.”
Those are difficult words to say, especially in a business context. And yet there’s a lot of it going around. In June 2005, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corporation, the fourth largest bank in the United States, issued an apology to all Americans, and especially black Americans, because a historical search it commissioned revealed that two of its ancestral banks owned slaves before the Civil War.25 “While we can in no way atone for the past, we can learn from it, and