intimacy & hijack

vinay kamat

Man is a hyper-interactive animal and the net is his preferred medium. Well, if that is what the world is coming to, marketers must rethink the battles for customers’ minds.

Good old marketing was a process driven by positioning. Sharper the focus, cooler the message, and greater the hype, the better were the chances of success. But as brands crowded minds and markets, clarity and simplicity became the buzzwords. Significantly, informality brought marketers closer to customers.

John Grant defined the mood in The New Marketing Manifesto: “It is time for marketers to get off their pedestals and get closer to the real world. You can think of it as a kind of marketing informality, a bit like Casual Friday.” One of the examples Grant highlighted was Pizza Express which set up its kitchen amidst customers, showing them their pizzas were all hand-made. That was how close the brand got to its customers.

Even today, the king of all marketers, Procter & Gamble, relies on the experiential. As Jim Stengel, head of marketing, P&G, told Financial Times recently: “You have to be experiential. And some of our best ideas are coming from people getting out there and experiencing and listening.” Little wonder then that Stengel is not hot on focus groups.

While the net has turned brand management into interactivity—where usage creates buzz—it has also given the customer a big say in defining brand persona. Hotmail, Napster, and Google are creations of the online community. True, they were engineered by codies, but they became what they are after numerous one-on-one interactions, user tips, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Customer proximity is passé. Customer involvement is the new thing. In the open-source era, it invites users to engineer the product by rewriting the code, partly or wholly. The idea of new-age marketing is simple: let the user create the brand. After all, the networked consumer, the netizen, is as savvy as the marketer. She dislikes aggressive push strategies, preferring to be drawn to the brand instead. She prefers informality to formality. And she likes the relationship to keep evolving.

Alex Wipperfurth’s Brand Hijack maps this changing brand universe in a provocative statement: Let the market hijack your brand. As he explains: “Marketing managers aren’t in charge anymore. Consumers are. Across the globe, millions of insightful, passionate and creative people are helping optimize and endorse breakthrough products and services—sometimes without the companies’ buy-in.”

For consumers, it’s not just a buy-in. It’s a live-in which strengthens the relationship between the product and the user. It’s not loyalty. For, loyalty is a lock-in. In live-in, you are not bound by a brand’s values. You chose the relationship, you architect it, and you keep evolving. In the structured world of brands, such unfettered, informal, relationships work.

For marketers, it is the best way of knowing whether a brand can survive intimacy or interactivity. It is perhaps the only way.