‘Conversational Advertising’, main marketing tool within five years?

81 percent of today’s marketing professionals believe that in five years they will spend at least as much or more on conversational (social) marketing as they will spend on traditional marketing, Marketingcharts reports, via New Communications Review. This result was taken from a research conducted by TWI Surveys, Inc. on behalf of the Society for New Communications Research and Joseph Jaffe. What struck us at 77 were the reasons the marketers provided for a possible reluctance to engage in social marketing:

“Manpower restraints” - 51.1%

“Fear of loss of control” - 46.9%

“Inadequate metrics” - 45.4%

“Culture of their organizations” - 43.5%

“Difficulty with internal sell-through” - 35.8%

‘Fear of loss of control’ and ‘Culture of their organizations’ are basically other ways of saying ‘we don’t think that we have good enough a product to let the public decide for themselves what they think of us.’ Social conversations should be the means to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in general marketers think that it is very well able to do so. They are even slightly nervous to have an (online) community talk about their products. We think, therefore, that the prediction of huge ‘conversation marketing’ spend will not come true. The issue is, that when you need make a lot of effort to affect social conversations in your favour, then a mere increase in social marketing spend is probably not going to solve your problems.

Positive social conversations about a product happen, because people like your product, and not for any other reason. As an example, take Starbucks. The valuable observation that companies and marketers should take from this research, is that they should invest in having a true conversation with the customer themselves, and listen to their needs.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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