I’m a little late in getting around to this posting. Some time ago I participated in a panel at the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at NYU. I was asked to discuss integrating online and offline media for the purposes of marketing.

This was my presentation: Selling In A Consumer-Empowered Marketplace

Preparing for this presentation I took the original marketing cycle I learned in college and updated it to reflect the impact of the Internet (which was originally to displace print as the primary information gathering medium). It looks like this:

The problem of course is that the digital infrastructure that the Internet rests upon not only displaced print, but it also made it much easier to build customized media channels and experiences. This lead to the massive fragmentation that in turn made the mass media, TV-centric advertising business harder, more expensive and a lot less effective.

To compound these problems, the social web (Web 2.0) started wreaking havoc just as traditional agencies were wrapping their heads around using the Internet to support the ad-centric model. Terms like ‘banners’, ‘Google Ad Words’, ‘rich media advertising’, ‘pre-rolls’and ‘impressions’were just making their way to the top floors of ad agencies when the social web disrupted the whole process by displacing the value of all we were told to hold dear.

‘Buzz’, ‘viral’, ‘word-of-mouth’and ‘sticky’became the new terms. They have proven very disorienting because they don’t fit neatly into the advertising model. ‘Paid media value’is giving way to ‘earned media value‘.

Social media-enabled consumers are becoming the most powerful purchase-influencing channel available to marketers. Given this, I am recommending a new way of looking at approaching the marketing cycle:

The net take away is this: If you want to sell something today, think less about the features and benefits of a product, or the marketing messages being published, and more about what your customers will do once they get their hands on either. Command and control marketing (and it’s battlefield-centric lingo like ‘campaigns’, ‘targets’, and ‘media blitzes’) is being replaced by cooperative, communal terms like ‘community’‘network’‘friending’and ‘following’. This isn’t to say you have to ‘give up control of your brand’(that’s the hype pendulum swinging the other way) so much as needing to adopt a new, more flexible approach to ultimately getting what you want from your brand (which is revenue and long-term value creation).

Recalibrating to this environment has not been easy. But one thing is for sure – today it’s all about the customer.

Bottom-Up: Start with the customer.
If the customer is all-powerful, then an evangelical customer is a true asset. For sexy brands (like consumer electronics) stoking evangelism may come easier. But true believers come in all forms and brands were invented to capitalize on this by emdying the trust that leads to loyal purchase decisions.

(Incidentally, a fellow from Disney once mentioned that rather than doing one thing 100% better, they focus on doing one hundred things 1% better. Something to think about in mature or unsexy categories where headline-grabbing product innovation is harder to leverage in creating evangelists.)

Evangelism is all about believing. To make anyone believe they have to experience what you’re offering in a way that feels authentic to them. Consumer insights – real, actionable insights -  are critical to this process. I find it more than a little ironic that most of the talk around ‘social media’is focused on the technology and less on the sociology of how communities form. While people may initially gather around a technology (witness the Oprahfication of Twitter) enduring communities bond over common interests, lifestyles and beliefs. The glue of a community is not a button, badge, app or icon.

Finding out what makes people tick requires looking into much more than just how they feel about your product or category. More importantly, the courage to seek disconfirming insights is critical. In a search-centric world, it’s easy to find evidence to support what we already hold to be true. Thorough professionals will take the time to look for a contrarian opinion. The reward for this bravery is the potential for a spark of innovation that competitor’s hadn’t considered.

Despite a fragmented media environment, people lead integrated lives in which their various media choices – and your product – are but a small part of an ongoing, interwoven existence. Understanding the full panorama of these lives mitigates against the naturally-occuring myopia common to companies focused on the business they’re engaged in. Step back, look at your customers broad and deep, and let this perspective inform the work you’re focused on doing.

Inside Out: Integration Means More Than Media
Once the customer is understood it’s time to think about that customer’s experience. Evangelism after all is predicated on more than a satisfying experience, it requires a remarkable, bloggable, postable, tell-a-friendable one.

To pull this off requires absolute alignment within an organization. The vision and mission of the executive team must be realized in the way managers build processes and employees execute them. And all of this must remain in synchrony with the greater understanding of the customers being served. If digitally-enabled word of mouth is the most powerful purchase-driving medium out there, then suddenly the call center rep handling a cranky customer can have a significant impact on your business.

The cost in time, money and resources to get a single new customer to pick up the phone, order or try your product is very, very high. The payoff comes when that customer’s experience of the product’s quality, and the company’s people and processes is so remarkable that they want to tell their extended digital network all about it.

Endangered Awareness
On the plus side, working from the bottom-up and inside-out need not bleed a company’s marketing budget early on. Much of this work is on the less expensive side (at least in comparison to running a national television campaign). In fact, a big reason to work from the inside-out is that when it comes to spending the big bucks on paid media, having all that other work in order increases the return of every precious ad dollar spent.

This brings us to the final step in the new marketing process – building awareness. Building awareness will only get harder. The digital media used by consumers became powerful because it is user-controlled. A negative byproduct of this (from an advertiser’s perspective) is that consumers can search for what they know interests them and effectively block everything else out. There’s enough information and choice available on any topic or interest to keep us all busy for our entire lives. This makes serendipity (discovering something you didn’t know you liked) an increasingly uncommon occurance.

Sort of.

Yes, its true, we can all spend our days searching for information that interests us. But in the process of building digital networks we link ourselves to other people who have some common interests and some different ones. This is, in my mind, the future of serendipity. I can discover interesting new ideas easier by interacting with friends online. Serendipity happens spontaneously and naturally in my social interactions. Links are passed by a reliable source and therefore worth investigating.

While TV campaigns will continue to ripple across our consciousness and traditional advertising will always have its place, the slice of our consciousness it influences will be reduced and frankly isn’t coming back.

To that end, even building Awareness at the far end of the spectrum comes down to recognizing the customer as primary messenger. Determine what you want your customer to say about you (the evangelist’s message) by determining what about your product/service/brand will resonate with your customer (the actionable insights into their integrated lives).

This won’t solve every marketing problem you face, but it will give you a star to navigate by.