Marketing, for the most part, is based on guesswork. Educated guesswork, sure, but guesswork still. For instance, I could say that most of the household purchasing decisions are made by women, and I would be right. I could say that when you appeal to people’s fear (fear of loss, fear of missing out), you motivate them to make a purchase, and I would be right.
And so it goes. Marketers, many of them, know these things. They know how people think and how they’re going to react.
But that’s people, and people react differently than a single person. So while we can, with reasonable certainty, know how people (many persons) will react to a given situation, we can almost never know how a person will react. People are complicated, emotional, unpredictable.
The challenge for marketers then, is to listen. Social media presents a unique opportunity to actually know what people are talking about. Ask them a question, they’ll give you an answer. The great, big BBDO style agencies are too busy being awesome to stop and listen. In my mind, that’s a clear advantage for the rest of us. We have the time, the inclination, and we are poised to react. All we need to do is stop, and listen. The answers are out there.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on June 13, 2011 at 7:46 pm, filed under Marketing. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.