• We have the customer in our sights, sir!

    Posted on May 24th, 2005 by and currently 2 commenting.

    I finally got a chance to read Douglas Atkin’s The Culting of Brands. (I highly recommend it.) Basically, Atkin has studied the makeup of cults through the centuries and dismantled them to reveal their basic principals. And then he did the same with cult-like brands to compare the similarities between the religious based cults and the product based cults – from Saturn to Snapple to BMW Motorcycles.

    Reading the conclusion last night, something really caught my eye. Atkin writes on how the majority of brand managers (and ad agencies for that matter) are still thinking like it’s the 1960s – and their language reflects it:

    The vocabulary that’s still used today in the marketing world is telling. It’s a command-control culture that it’s imitated for generations: that of the military. They have campaigns, they target customers, they go for market domination, they launch an attack on competitors, they penetrate markets, and capture market share.

    When we begin to change our vocabulary, we begin to change the way we think. Customers know that they’re “targets.” And nobody wants to be a target – even to the point of going out of their way to avoid your message. Even words like “marketing” and “branding” mean so many different things to so many different people, that maybe it’s time to circle the wagons and change our own culture before we try to go out preaching it to potential clients.

  • http://brainsonfire.com/blog FI Chris

    Instead of targets, how about friends?

  • http://www.wom-study.blogspot.com Walter Carl

    I haven’t read Douglas Atkins’ book yet but I heard him speak at WOMMA’s Word-of-Mouth Basic Training conference in January. I think it’s fair to say the whole audience loved every bit of it and when the time for his session ended nobody wanted to leave the room. The conference planners had to kick everyone out to make way for the next panel. I can only assume his book is equally compelling.

    Among some companies I noticed a similar pattern regarding the use of the military metaphors, and I think the folks over at Church of the Customer have also commented on this. My view is that word-of-mouth marketing is ultimately based in people’s everyday conversations and relationships. So the terms I use in my research are “program participants” and “conversational partners” for any time a company (or other kind of organization) seeks to organize, or otherwise involve people, in WOM activities.