The Zen of Success – Awareness
Consumer awareness is such an interesting yet very powerful force that has entire markets in a ceaseless battle to capture it, and of course there are different traditional methods that most businesses are still locked into including “buying” awareness with advertising, “begging” for awareness from the different media (public relations), and “bugging” people one at a time to sell them something.
Now most organizations have a corporate culture years in the making which is based on one of the traditional approaches to create awareness, they don’t know anything else, and are typically not open to any other method that hasn’t been used for years and is taught in business schools across the globe as that’s the way it’s always been taught and used in the markets.
Consumer awareness or attention itself has become the new common currency for modern Social Media and Web Marketing, and what is interesting about this notion of attention as a common currency is that once you understand this fact and embrace it, a lot of the other mysteries surrounding this consumer-centric marketing start to fall into place.
Consumer-centric marketing can be simplified to three guiding principles, with the first principle is that customer relationship management (CRM) has ultimately morphed into a business philosophy driven by market forces and supported by technology. The second principle is that media channels or platforms are collapsing into a single stream of two-way dialogue between brand and consumer and should be treated as such.
And finally, in the extremely noisy, hyper-competitive digital media landscape that we live in, awareness is becoming the ultimate common currency for the new modern marketing.
If you think of awareness as a medium, it is the first medium where the consumer controls the inventory of this medium, not the Fortune 500 advertiser or the major media company or the ad agency, the consumer enjoys the control, has the leverage in the market, and will direct the awareness or attention where they perceive getting the greatest value in return for their awareness and attention, and giving them additional leverage is the direct and secondary influence they with members of their social graphs and networks.
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