The Secret to Effective Marketing

Marketing is a relatively young science. We began to form its basic principles in the 1800s. In the 1900s large companies began to refine the process through the study of advertising, psychology, and the practice of reaching out to the media. As computers began to bring large amounts of data within reach of human comprehension marketers stumbled across the first of their mightiest tools: the consumer survey.

Surveys have been criticized through the years for being imperfect snapshots of consumer sentiment. One of the most famous examples of how surveys fail to capture the exact "popular sentiment" is the political model used to predict elections. Surveys are more often wrong than right, either because they capture the public sentiment at the wrong time (people may change their minds when voting) or because they ask the wrong people.

The art of designing a good survey is almost a science. We have learned from many mistakes. One should not ask leading questions, for example; and it is always well to ask the same question more than once, but to change it subtly. If answers to the several versions of a question all agree, survey pundits suggest, then the answerer's feelings are stronger than if they provide a mix of different answers.

After the Internet was opened up to the public it was inevitable that marketers would turn their attention to the millions of people who were exploring the new medium. First the marketers put messages in front of the consumers. And then they started to measure the "reach" and "effectiveness" of those messages. And then they began asking consumers which messages worked best.

But asking the target of your manipulation which methods are most likely to influence him tips your hand; some consumers lashed back at marketers and rebelled against the growth of online marketing. So marketers turned to more passive methods of surveying consumers. They began to "spy" on consumers.

The spying occurs in the form of cookies and server log analysis. As you zip through the Web every day your every action is recorded and analyzed somewhere. Marketers study with great care and precision which Websites you visit, how often you visit them, and what you do when you visit those sites. They also take note of which advertisements you click on and which products you buy.

But gathering so much user data is tedious and there are laws that restrict how much information marketers are permitted to gather and share. And thus marketers have turned their attention to the consumer discussions that occur on the great social media networks. Not only do marketers strive to "listen" to these conversations, they are also injecting advertising messages into the discussions.

Annoying as all these marketing practices are, they continue to expand every year. Marketers themselves are very much aware of the proliferation of invasive marketig practices, but they press on. They build vast link networks across thousands of Websites and search for the next great innovation in link deployment. There seems no end in sight to the press of the marketing machine.

But the marketers who succeed tend to be those who are "tuned in" to what consumers genuinely want and feel. The right message, sent at the right time to the right audience, can spread like wildfire. Marketers are constantly testing their messages, sometimes on small audiences and sometimes "in the wild". These tests may represent the best hope that consumers have for some sanity.

For at the end of the day what the marketers are doing is listening to the people whom they want to reach. In a bizarre, Twilight Zone-like biofeedback mechanism marketers attempt to poke and prod consumers emotionally just enough to learn what stirs the consumer blood to passion and purchasing. They scrutinize our reactions carefully but have learned to participate in our discussions.

In fact, the marketers who truly listen to consumers now understand that consumers resent all the poking and prodding. And so the marketers are trying a new form of outreach, a responsive approach to addressing the concerns and issues that consumers themselves raise. Some marketers even go so far as to ask consumers what products and services should be offered next.

It is this art of listening that is leading marketing into the 21st century at a breath-taking pace. Marketers who overlook the great value of listening to consumers are still practicing 20th century business tactics and they are doomed to failure.

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