I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

Rance Crain asks in an Advertising Age column, "How Do You Get Control Back If You Cede Brands to Consumers?"

Here's a question: With all this talk about consumers taking control of brands, how do you get control back again if you decide to change direction? Or once you open the gates, is your brand's destiny out of your hands forever?

Did he really just refer to getting "control back again?" Umm...that presumes the advertiser had control to begin with, which is a premise I'd challenge. I also wouldn't equate working with customers to change perceptions with placing the brand's "destiny" out of one's hands forever. Brands are not shaped only by the ivory tower marketers who push messages supporting brand attributes. They're shaped by customers. You can buy a gazillion GRPs a day and use the ads to tell people Burger King rocks, but if they think it sucks based on their own experience, it won't do you a lick of good.

Thanks to Eric for pointing the piece out.

Fair Weather Politicians?

My buddy and client Rob Burke points out on his blog that Wayne Township Mayor Scott Rumana has told him that his plans for placing a wind turbine at the site of his car wash, Wayne Auto Spa, are a "no go" as far as the town planner is concerned. He also notes that the reason the town planner doesn't want to allow this is that granting a variance would set a bad precedent vis-a-vis cell phone towers, yet local governments can't block cell towers in instances where coverage is needed. What tweaks me about this is that Mayor Rumana seems to have been eager to align himself with Wayne Auto Spa's clean energy initiatives when the News 12 cameras were rolling and the newspapers were writing articles about how the car wash and quick lube invested in solar panels, furnaces to burn waste oil and equipment to treat waste water.

On his blog, Rob provided a link to a page where interested folks can e-mail the mayor, if they feel so inclined. I'm going to do so. If you support clean, renewable energy, I recommend you e-mail the mayor as well.

Driving A Wedge

I really want to drive a wedge between Conversational Marketing and any marketing method that uses compensated agents, whether they're disclosed or undisclosed. For the past several months, I've been receiving material from buzz marketing and word of mouth companies that want to do business. Typically, they pick up on columns I've written or things I've posted here about Conversational Marketing, and they try to make it seem like we're in the same business, trying to sell the same services to clients. We're not.

Conversational Marketing does not involve the use of compensated agents. I believe strongly that, in this medium, the use of agents (regardless of whether their relationships are disclosed or not) breeds mistrust in brands and companies.

One of the challenges we face is that potential clients, having been visited by the buzz marketing folks, often lump our services into the same category. The easiest way to understand something new is to relate it in some way to something you're already familiar with, but the comparisons to buzz marketing with agents are something we consider unwelcome.

We want people who are employees of our client companies to represent their company on the Internet, not agents. While we will give clients plenty of guidance, we cannot duplicate the experience of, say, being in charge of product development for an MP3 player. So we shouldn't pretend that we can. The best person to answer questions concerning the development of that MP3 player is one of the folks who worked with the electronic engineers, who built the feature set, who saw it through production.

I see people in the Word Of Mouth business trying to latch on to the term Conversational Marketing and lump it in with all the other terms that describe using agents to generate buzz. Any suggestions as to how to drive a wedge between the two marketing methods would be a great help, so be sure to leave your thoughts in comments.

The Best-Laid Plans

It seems the more I try to plan for Advertising Week and the conferences and events surrounding it, the more likely it is that a client or prospect will require something big and last-minute in nature. I notice a disturbing correlation with respect to Out Of The Blue assignments and iMedia Summits, too.

Is it Murphy's Law? Or is it that interactive marketing is top of mind with brand managers and VPs of Marketing when these conferences are going on? Maybe it's both.