Now I understand. 

Marketing is so much more than efficiently offering products and services to people that they want.  Marketing is a fundamental process to a free society; it is a Right. 

Marketing and brands offer consumers choice; without choice, there is no freedom.  Conversely, a repressive society must limit marketing because it would cultivate an appetite for choice, desire, and citizens (rather than the state) wanting to be in control. That is the true meaning of brands and advertising; they are an essential part of the fabric of a culture built on freedom. 

What opened my eyes to the larger societal contribution of the practice of marketing was interviewing (with the help of Sheila Terry, formerly of Kraft) six people of various generations who grew up in essentially brandless worlds; The Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, and Cuba. What was their life like? What happened when brands became available to them either in their country or because they emigrated? 

State-run economies were the antithesis of a consumer-driven economy.  In fact, as Sheila concluded, “consumers, as we know them, did not exist in these cultures; consumer as boss would be unthinkable in a supply-driven economy.” 

Listen to how people described their experiences. 

About choice and availability:

 Cuba was a world of restrictions; here (in the US) we have possibilities.

You had a ration card…one pair of shoes, so many panties; half a pound of meat every month (Cuba)

 You had to decrease your desires (Hungary)  

If you saw a queue, you got on it.  You would wait 1-4 hours and maybe not even get anything.   

Sometimes you would even buy things you didn’t need just because it was available. (Soviet Union) 

About service:

Rude service.  They were better than you.  They were in possession of what you wanted. (Soviet Union) 

About product quality 

Everyone assumed products from other countries were better because we knew life was better elsewhere (All)

 Produce in government stores was rotten.  Although it was 6-10 times more expensive, 35% of fruits and vegetables were bought in private markets. (Soviet Union) 

About shopping experience  

What was shopping like? Imagine hundreds of identical bottles of vinegar on the store shelf (Poland) 

Was it really a brandless world? 

Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding, states that brands are so important because “we all want to believe in something greater than ourselves”. What I’m about to report supports that. 

One of the most interesting findings from the interviews was how people created their own “brands.”   Country of origin became a brand.  In countries where life was known to be better, it was assumed that products from those countries were better.  In the Soviet Union, the factory where something was made became a “brand” as certain factories were known to make better products.

 In addition, people would seek out brands by visiting other countries or speaking with relatives who emigrated.  For example, Hungary borders Austria and even before privatization, “We were going to Vienna for better brands and products. “

 Certain brands were available and were highly desired.  For example, “We all wanted to buy Levi’s jeans because it symbolized freedom and a better way of life” (comment from a number of those interviewed).

 When markets opened up

 Markets began to open up in the East Bloc, around 1990.  Again, I was a little surprised by what people had to say.

 “Brands started to enter Russia in the early 90s, but it took a while to realize what was happening.” 

 “When brands first came to Poland and advertising started we had to see if changes were permanent.  People were suspicious at first—was thisa government trap?”

 While some were amazed by this new Technicolor world (“You could excite me with a package of gum—all the colors, packaging”; “We would dress up to go to McDonald’s”), it wasn’t as new to others.  Many had already sought out brands from relatives living abroad or by traveling.

Others suffered from culture shock as lack of choice.  Struggling to buy the basics, and reusing everything possible was built into their DNA forever, it seems.

Dr. Nicos Rossides, CEO of MASMI (a firm that specializes in marketing research in Central and Eastern Europe) wrote, “The intense and rapid changes that accompanied this transformation were both exhilarating and unsettling, with citizens from ex-communist states able to travel freely, express themselves openly, vote for their leaders, and own businesses and land for the first time. What is more, they could now have a bewildering range of choice from among tens of thousands of competing brands – provided they could afford them. However, the values, beliefs and norms that entire populations were accustomed to and used as a gauge as to the appropriateness of daily actions – their moral compass – became largely irrelevant, causing a great deal of anxiety and disorientation, particularly for those …(other than)…the younger, more open and receptive people.”

 Living in this country, it’s easy to take freedom for granted and not see how blessed we are that we have the freedom to choose.  Why do you think that the internet has given us access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind and the long tail of choices at any hour of the day or night?  Because, when barriers were removed (blue laws, service costs, etc.), that is what people wanted and what marketers were able to provide.

 Is being in Marketing a worthy profession? “Oh, you’re in marketing”, or “Oh, you’re in advertising?”  (implied ‘ugh’ follows). Well, I beg to differ.  Our most important rights are based on our freedom to make our own life choices which are activated daily by the options that marketing and media give us. Think about the force for democracy that Twitter (a marketer) was in Iran during the elections. Marketing is every bit as noble as the medical profession, or education, or being an environmental scientist.  We are all equally essential to the human condition.

 Some in government want to “nudge” choice.  Legislators who think they know better than we do are attempting to use taxation to dissuade advertising and consumption of certain products.  Seems logical; why “allow” people to make BAD choices?  Well, I hope they read this blog.  As you restrict choice, you move closer to a world our interviewees will find familiar.

 Feel the stories of people who grew up in cultures without choice where daily existence was defined by deprivation rather than hope.  Freedom is spelled C-H-O-I-C-E, and that is the importance of marketing and brands.

Marketing is forever changed by the “two-way world” we live in. People are no longer just members of passive audiences they are now also active participants.  They can pull information via search, going to owned media sites, become brand ambassadors (or angry activists) by exchanging ideas with friends in social networks. 

Marketers now need to build their brands in a mental marketplace to connect with people in four ways; functional needs, social attraction, self-expressive value, and offering entertaining and informative content that stimulates curiosity.

Brand building in a two way world means it is more important than ever to understand the changing world and how people are living their lives, which is the final theme within the ten “rock my world” changes. 

8. Multicultural becomes the American mainstream

According to the US Census Bureau, by 2023, minorities will comprise more than half of all children and by 2042, minorities are expected to become the majority. Maximizing brand relevance means that marketers have also made their brand culturally relevant. Two 2009 ARF Ogilvy Award winners who clearly demonstrated this were Honey Nut Cheerios and Allstate. Regarding Allstate, research found that Hispanics’ understanding of insurance products, the motivators and the process by which they go about buying insurance were different from Anglos’ approaches. Allstate re-engineered its owned media and agent environment (both English and Spanish) resulting in dramatic business success. 

9. Staying ahead of changing societal and personal values

As the values of society change, product and service marketers, as well as retailers, must stay in rhythm with society. Trends towards wellness, our aging population, and concern for the environment are examples of drivers of packaging, product ingredients, labeling, messaging and shopping experience. 

10. The new marketing research: commitment to quality and listening to the unprompted voice

As consumer values change, a commitment to insights generation is essential to bring the human into the boardroom. As telephone research gets less practical and less affordable, online surveys become essential for marketers, yet, data have not always appeared reliable. The ARF-led Foundations of Quality research program and Quality Enhancement Process are intended to understand and address the root causes of lack of data reliability. 

The research function in an organization really should do two things; quantify the expected (provides metrics that chart business progress and direct resources) and listen for the unexpected (to fuel new thinking about innovation). Listening gives us a way to tap into naturally occurring conversations and behavioral signals found in social media and search to hear changes in vocabulary and sense the next big thing. Listening is essential for innovating new offerings, media strategies, and having an existing brand adjust course.  Listening also opens a portal to impacting the rest of the organization as it merges insights and learning together with marketing action.  First you listen, then integrate yourself, then hopefully create a community of brand enthusiasts who even become ambassadors. 

The Changing World: The Bottom Line

Marketers must become fast learning organizations in a world where society and technology evolve at accelerating rates and change the consumer landscape. Management intuition based on past behaviors and preferences are becoming increasingly inaccurate predictors of the future, which makes a future-focused marketing research/consumer insights function more important than ever. Marketing research must not only measure but should also use a full range of listening tools to guide the marketing organization based on anticipatory insights.

As I think about ten “rock my world” changes going on in marketing and media, they fall into three broad themes: changing our approach to media planning; changing our thinking about building brands and understanding the changing consumer and world we live in. This blog is about the second big bucket, changing our approach to brand building.  Click here for part one on media planning.

Here are a number of changes marketers need to get ahead of and what it means for new approaches to brand-building.

4. Understanding the new consumer and your brand influencers

Brand influencers are changing. People can “pull” any information they want via online search, including on mobile devices. Social media influence brand learning and shape choices as recommendations from friends and social media contacts (even strangers like in Yelp) are a highly trusted source of brand information.  In this new environment, traditional advertising is still important, and even plays a new role.  It becomes a source of curiosity about the brand; a conversation starter.  (Traditional “mass” media are statistically proven to drive search and traffic to owned media websites.)

As 50% or more of purchase decisions are made in-store, shopper marketing becomes more important and retailers and store brands are getting more powerful; for example, a year ago, would anyone have thought Costco would delist Coca-Cola?

5. The brand dilemma: globalization and hyper-localization

Marketers need the scale that global branding gives them. It gives them the ability to deploy resources to high growth markets such as those in Asia and to simplify their brand variants. At the same time, a marketplace is really a collection of small markets that vary in tastes and preferences as cultures vary from country to country, and across ethnicities within a country. Retailers are creating localized formats to best meet the cultural, regional, and economics needs of their trading areas and brands must adapt as well. Hence, marketing must build brands globally but activate locally, making sure that packaging, product variants, shopper and mobile marketing all strengthen the local relevance for consumers.

6. The changing meaning of ‘value’ in uncertain times

The recession has had an impact on how people shop and how they trade-off premium national brands versus cheaper store brands. It is unlikely that as the economy rebounds shoppers will completely go back to prior purchasing preferences. In many cases, shoppers have learned where store brands are “fit for purpose” (possibly superior; Kroger’s pies have gotten great press, for example.) National brand marketers need to rethink the value-add they can provide over and above store brands.

7. Geo-triggering of information

In the next few years, we are likely to see a rise in augmented reality and geosensitive messaging delivered to mobile devices based on the “cloud” knowing exactly where you are. Already, some mobile shopping applications even know exactly what aisle you’re in! The same mobile device can also be used, at the owner’s request, to “pull” information. Today, you can take a picture of a UPC code and Shopsavvy will comparison shop for you right at point of purchase. With a smart phone you can search or connect with a friend while deciding what to buy in a store.  You can find out what bars serve Stella Artois as you walk down the street and how that place is rated by others.

Smart marketers will integrate mobile and shoppers marketing into their media strategies as information and opinion then become instantly accessible right at point of purchase and impact the buying choices people make.

Brand Building in a two-way world

Consumers are no longer just members of passive audiences they are now active participants.  They can pull information via search, going to owned media sites, become brand ambassadors by exchanging ideas with friends in social networks and can even help you create new products.  However, they can also become activist in a heartbeat if a marketer does not provide the access, transparency, authenticity, and customer care people expect.

In the new marketing world, brands can (and should) compete in a mental marketplace to connect with people in four ways; functional needs, social attraction, self-expressive value, and offering entertaining and informative content that stimulates curiosity. Thinking this way reveals new ways of making your brand relevant and top of mind and if you succeed at creating that connection, you will be shopped for first even if, rationally speaking, you are only one of a number of similar, acceptable brands.  Of course, being shopped for is not the same thing as being bought, which is why locally relevant activation is so important to seal the deal.

The “mental marketplace” changes the rules of competition; your brand must vie for attention against functionally unrelated brands including celebrities and games like Farmville. For example, Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of “wellness” with Dannon, Kashi, Subway even WebMD. Whole Foods “competes” wonderfully via brand community across social media (e.g. 800,000+ Twitter followers), has an active blog and iPhone app about a wellness lifestyle from organic/fresh foods.

Brand building in a two way world will separate marketers into two groups; those who feel a sense of gain from conversation with consumers and those who feel a sense of loss because they are no longer in control.  The first group is the future of marketing.

1. Media clouds

Increasingly, the same media brand can be experienced on multiple platforms, in ways that fit with the strengths of each type. For example, MTV’s The Hills is not just a scheduled TV program; it has an immersive web environment with on-demand episodes, social media, ringtones, blogs, and more. The New York Times doesn’t just put print content online; it offers sophisticated interactive graphics on its website and articles encourage user comments.

I think of this as a type of digital cloud … a media cloud. Consumers can “grab” content from the cloud – in traditional forms, in non-linear snippets, on a mobile, on demand, at home or in a store while shopping. Your friends now come with you on every shopping trip if you have a smart phone; the possibilities are endless. Media companies are building their content for multiple platforms.

Advertisers need to consider if it is better to buy different programs in a given medium or to forge tight co-branded, integrated trans-media packages.

2. Integrating bought, owned, and earned media

Media exposure is no longer a linear, brand-controlled transaction – media can now be thought of as bought, owned or earned. They each can serve different purposes in the brand building process so you need to sharpen your objectives and map them to touchpoints. Bought advertising is costly, yet it works and it delivers the reach that many marketers need. Earned media can be defined as consumer-to-consumer brand sharing (comments or assets); it’s pretty much free and influential but you can’t control self-perpetuating sharing. If you don’t catch lightening in a bottle, consumer sharing of messages or applications results in low reach so it might not be the best center of gravity for a media strategy for a broad penetration marketing need. Owned media is about media synergy. People probably first discover your website by either bought advertising, search, or already being a customer. Bought and earned media also drive search so there are indirect as well as direct effects on the business. The ARF 360 media and marketing council is hoping to help the ecosystem crack the code on how this all fits together.

3. The yin and yang of technology

Addressable advertising technology provides the ability to deliver messages that are highly personalized and contextualized. But for every action there is a reaction; while some welcome relevant advertising, others find such personalization creepy and intrusive, motivating legislative inquiry into privacy issues. Every marketer, media company, and ad serving company will need effective privacy leadership. Marketers must prepare for a mixed targeting model that combines addressability for those who opt-in with a better choice of media properties where no addressability is required.

Media technology has also given us DVRs and video on demand potentially allow people to skip ads. In response media companies disable fast-forward for ads in on-demand viewing, create program/product integration and add coordinated interactive content.

Yin and yang; for every marketing action there is a reaction and then a reaction to that.

Media Planning: The Bottom Line

Media planning typically kicks in downsteam of the new offer development. Then media planners often start by reverse engineering the media strategies of benchmark brands. Advertisers need to rethink this media planning process. Media strategy development should start much earlier … right when the opportunity is first being sized, the target is being determined, and the way that consumers seek and share information about the purchase is understood. In fact, the media strategy might be the source of the innovation (e.g. Dove Campaign for Real Beauty) and the best way to choose among different concepts. Integrating media and offer into a quest for something new, different, and incremental means the advertiser needs to “run the media strategy meetings”.

Media strategy principles in a 360 world should take priority over the analysis of benchmark brands. The benchmark approach locks you into a recursive trap so you are probably observing strategies that reflect a 5-7 year old media environment (those brands probably used benchmarking too). Instead, the media strategy team needs to answer questions such as:

• How big is the opportunity? (To inform the need for broad reach)
• On which media properties and social media sites do my target consumers tend to congregate?
• How do people seek and share information about what you offer and the needs you address? Which media touchpoints are most influential for this type of product or service along the path to purchase? In fact, don’t rule out the possibility that shopper marketing (either in-store or via mobile devices) could be the cornerstone of the brand-building strategy.

We are living in the new normal so think different. Marketers need to fully integrate offer development, listening and consumer input, quantitative research, and media strategy right at the fuzzy front end.

But….the problem begins here because there are so many easy ways to get “listening” checked off your list without really taking the opportunity seriously. All one needs to do is check out Google Trends, or talk to Nielsen BuzzMetrics or TNS Cymfony about sentiment, set up a community or two, or get IT involved looking into Clarabridge or Lexalytics.

But is this “listening”? Is this consistent with the unprecedented opportunity to hear your customers talk honestly about your brand? Or, recognizing, as Chris Brogan said recently, that “Twitter is free mind-reading!”? I think not.

The ARF convened a Listening Workshop in New York City in November, 2009. Listening is exploding, right? Well, it is, if you consider all those “check-list” projects listening.

The disturbing thing to me about the talk at this event was that many speakers were preoccupied with the obstacles to effective listening –“no budget…nobody in charge…where is the statistical rigor?… is it projectable?… tough organizational issues… hard to sell internally…ROI tough to determine…legal has major issues….etc.

So, what’s up with this? True listening is scary, that’s what’s up. It’s a big change from our traditional way of thinking.

So, the single biggest opportunity in the history of consumer marketing lays dormant. The singular opportunity to tap into the brain of today’s newly empowered consumer in such a natural way that what we hear is the purest “research” ever is buried in nay-saying.

The purposes of the ARF Listening Playbook and our January 28 San Francisco Industry Leader Forum – Putting Listening to Work –  are to change that. To get you so excited about the promise of listening, the essentialness of listening, the unequaled power of the insight potential of listening that you will not go another day without taking your important first step.

That little first step? – implement a continuous, 24/7, listening program in your company tomorrow.  Not project listening…that’s checklist stuff. Welcome to a new world.

In September, 2004, Bob Barocci was named President/CEO of The ARF.  Just prior to joining the ARF, Bob was the director of communications of New School University and part of Bob Kerrey’s leadership team. Before that, Bob, as he says it, was privileged to enjoy a very satisfying advertising career including 21 years with Leo Burnett culminating in the position of President of Leo Burnett International.  After he left Leo Burnett, he was founder/CEO of McConnaughy Barocci Brown and then invited by Alex Kroll to become Director of Central/East Europe for Young and Rubicam.  He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University and a Phi Beta Kappa mathematics degree from the University of Wisconsin