What is your marketing game plan?
Marketing is an empathy game. One where everyone can learn to play in the big league when we stop paying the “customers first” mantra a lip service. One which when we let the most important metric — making prosumers/brand advocates out of consumers, we can almost take a back seat and cash in on our chips.
However, marketing in our turf (maybe even beyond) reeks of abandonment. Brands spend so much to get customers but think little of holding them down. Also, blinded by the race to out-perform the next brand in terms of virality, and maybe creative excellence sometimes, we miss out on what/who truly matters — the consumers.
Truth is, there really isn’t any point attracting new customers if you can’t keep them locked in. You know, after spending a copious amount of money on production, social media ads, programmatic ads and so on — all of which might end up annoying more than half of the people it reached — what next? What is your game plan?
I’ve been in rooms where these things are discussed too much to worry about the way folks on our side of things zero in on numbers (or gra-gra metrics like I call them) that don’t do nothing for them while they skirt around retention and overall happiness of new consumers (budding prosumers).
It’s kind of like that situation where people do so much on the surface to get you to consider them but can’t follow through with execution.
The reality is — consumers always find the loopholes and they don’t hang around to watch you try to fix what was “promised” to them. They will find the next available thing to believe in.
Winning in today’s world is being sold out to building prosumers/brand advocates out of consumers, and your first step should be Empathy.
