While some bloggers focus on using the conventions as lessons in marketing, I want to spend a moment here by asking you to step back and ask yourself if we can learn anything from political marketing that is useful to us as business and consumer marketers.
My bias is simply stated as "No!" Political marketing is based on the segmentation of huge numbers of people in groups based on the following:
- Party affiliation.
- Party loyalty based on ideology (right, left or middle).
- Race.
- Ethnicity.
- Age.
- Geography.
- Wealth.
- Class.
In marketing, we call that coarse segmentation. Most marketing remains mass marketing based on such coarse segmentation. It is expensive, ineffective and inefficient, with response rates typically between 1% and 2%.
Because we are mired in the wrong strategies, the wrong goals, and the wrong tactics, we marketers are under pressure from both our executive teams and customers to fix this. For executives, it comes down to ROI. For customers, it relates to the fact that we frustrate the heck out of them with information they don't want or need. (The we means all customer touch points, including sales and customer service/call center.)
The Problem: We continue to design, launch and manage business processes containing departmental boundaries and silo operations that serve only to frustrate customers. We create goals within those internally constructed boundaries and often achieve them, but our customers aren't happy. We do things right but they are the wrong things. If we want to create great customer experiences, which in the long run produce customer loyalty, positive word of mouth, increased margins and revenues, reduced marketing, sales, service and operations costs, and more efficient organic growth, we need to do things differently and we need executive and cross-departmental support to do them.
The reason for the disconnect: We don’t gather the right information from our customers; therefore, we don’t know what we need to do to make them happy. We don’t understand what customers value and why what we do frustrates them. We ask lots of questions of ourselves and of our customers but often they are the wrong questions, asked the wrong way, at the wrong time and place and using the wrong tools. At the end of the day, there is but one question we need to ask of everything we say and do: “What is the value of this to my customer?"
The solution, which I plan to discuss over the coming weeks and months, is to recognize that customers want to be treated as special individuals, not as anonymous members of a group.
Read More on This Subject: You must read Ike Pigott's The End of Identity Politics. Also check out CK post at Marketing Profs Daily Fix Stop Putting Obama in a Box (New Markets, New Mindsets).
