Interactive Communication & empowerment

The primary strategic marketing communications battle from now on will be to see who goes furthest in empowering their customers.

To empower your customers you will have to:

Provide them with far more information than you currently do.

Shopper’s Voice, through Programmed Instruction, provides far greater choice and information than conventional advertising.

Allow them to make decisions about you and your company together with your resources.

Shopper’s Voice through the “Event” format gives your customers plenty of choice. Additionally it provides your customers with the perception of control!
Shopper’s Voice allows your customers to make decisions about your company and your products.
Additionally the copy “Your opinion is important” and “We will listen to what you have to say” allows your customers to feel that they are running your organisation!
Because of this Shopper’s Voice will tighten your relationships with your
existing customers therefore increasing the revenue you get from each customer.
And the only form of communication that can do all the above so that you do tighten your grip on your customer is…. Interactive communication!

Because interactive communication allows you to have an ongoing debate with your customers and your prospects, make regular interactive conversations available where they can debate not only about your products and services but the very soul of your company. Because that will be much more powerful than just putting your advertisement on television (or wherever) or I’m going to sell my goods in Tesco (or wherever).

Then, when you get asked, “Who’s running your business?” you can honestly reply, “My customers through genuine interactive programmes!” and earn major brownie points!

If it’s broke then please fix it!

And Publicis Boss, Maurice Lévy says it’s broke!. He spoke of “huge challenges ahead for the industry. The very model of our industry is being called into question the model nowadays is no longer valid, no longer relevant.”

Perhaps he should be telling this to the head of the IPA and AAA as they appear to be saying different things about the effectiveness of advertising in its current form.

The only point of difference that I have with Mr Lévy is that he attributes this to the development of digital, it is not. It is to do with the advertising industry being totally unable to understand the meaning of the word “communication”.

After all “digital” is merely a facilitator, understand what communication is really all about and then you can have highly effective advertising communication.

And the really terrible aspect of this whole story? The answer to the problems facing the advertising industry, problems, for example, like total unaccountability, clutter, declining audiences and attentiveness would all be made to disappear if they really understood the word "communication"!, as research has already proved.

The dreadful fact is that the advertising industry totally rejected this proven technique years ago and now finds itself in very poor shape to day.

So now I guess we have to wait while the IPA et al hastily draft papers containing questionable research which denounces the renegade Lévy!

There's only one way to solve the problems of Advertising - Interactive Marketing Communication!