Understanding the new order

(A preview of my approach to customer conversations)

I believe in a different order of priority. The consumer comes before the brand, the brand comes before the advertiser. Not the other way around. ABC must give way to CBA.

Often in the rush of everyday business targets and in the preoccupation with one’s own portfolio of products, the consumer ceases to be the centre-focus and the communication therefore ceases to engage. The consumer is our touchstone, our reality check and our raison d’etre. This blog, I hope, will reacquaint us with those who are the very reason why brands and advertisers exist and succeed.

This space will feature thought-provoking observations about the consumer, his or her needs, desires, triggers, hot buttons and behavioural patterns. Because without those key insights, it is impossible to create truly and totally integrated communication with digital at the heart of the experience.

Understanding that technology must reach out and touch lives

(A summary of my breakfast session at a Big Five consulting firm in London)

The human body is the hardware. The human mind is the software. But we need to appeal first to the human heart.

Technology that recognises this, finds immediate resonance. Communication that relates to this, finds loyal customers. Brands that respect this, find lasting relationships.

But why should we humanise technology? Because people are people. It is in our essence to consider, to share, to understand, to learn and to emote. It’s as simple and fundamental as that.

Steve Jobs once said: One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

Perhaps the time has come to ask these questions first. How do we turn code into emotion? How do we address a genuine consumer need with a technological solution? How do we make technology a friend, an enabler, a teacher, a confidante, a source of empowerment? How do we do all of this without making it all daunting and intimidating?

Brands that have gone beyond their product or service offering to reach out and empower customers, relate to their unspoken needs and touch their lives in meaningful ways have understood the one fundamental difference. State-of-the-art needs to go a step further to become state-of-the-heart.

Understanding the mindset of ethnic minority groups

(An excerpt from my white paper on multicultural marketing)

The hydroponic existence of the uprooted and the unrooted is tinged with the overwhelming need to possess a place and belong to a people.

It is a life punctuated with tales of loss, fear and anger but it is also an unfolding story of hope, aspiration and tingling excitement as the inevitable journey of acculturation begins.

It is seen by some as the greatest misfortune and by some others as the greatest opportunity.

Standing outside the umbrella of all things familiar, the new nomads fantasise about exotic homelands while fearing alienation in an alien nation. Struggling to hold on to their definition of belonging in a displaced, misplaced and then replaced identity, they also proudly demonstrate that a transplanted life is often a more fertile one.

They are a collective of cultural riches, a delightful confluence of colours, flavours, customs and contrasts. Seeking out commonalities and celebrating differences, they have become vital ingredients in the melting pot of a cosmopolitan society.

Living the daily duality of conflicting allegiances and cultivated affiliations, these are the bi-culturals who seek constant affirmation as they find the past on one side of the divide, the present on the other.

Having battled the odds, survived the transition and broken new ground, the ethnic minorities of today have the strength, the stamina and the staying power to live a new life and dream a new dream.

Often, it is a life and a dream in which they are not a minority at all.

Understanding the dynamics of the new consumer universe

(An excerpt from my keynote address at the Latin American Communication Festival at Rio)

There was a time when the bull’s eye of brand building was at the centre of the communication and the consumer universe. Today, it is no longer fixed – it is wherever the consumer goes. We now have a ‘moving target’!

Again, we had above-the line, below-the-line and, indeed, online as a system of segmenting conversations with consumers. Today, the lines have, literally, blurred.

In fact ‘target’ as a phrase is more about a mindset or a mode or a moment, rather than a demographic.

With such dynamics rapidly changing the playing field, the integration agenda that agencies are talking about becomes a very interesting one. Given the new role of behavioural economics in all of this – with online and offline behavioural patterns being vastly different as well – it’s a highly interactive world we live in.

So which medium is at the heart the campaign? What is the role of channel planning? How are manufacturers and consumers enjoying co-parenting brands? These are question that will determine where the bull’s eye has to move – and where brands have to align themselves in relation to that.

These are the most exciting times for marketers. Because these are the most engaging times for consumers.