Consumers Have the Upper Hand - Come to Terms With It Timeshare Marketers Must Change the Focus of Personalization Efforts By James J. Gilmartin Databases on Steroids "Several months ago, I walked out in disappointment during a presentation given by the founder of MicroStrategy, a young billionaire named Michael Saylor. He exemplifies one of my new clichés, which is 'If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?' His vision of personalization is one of databases on steroids." So writes Arnold Kling, founder of the pioneering website (1994), www.homefair.com, at http//www.personalization.com/soapbox/contributions/kling.asp. Databases on steroids. Now there's a metaphor for the times. Some time-share companies are courting disaster by having unrealistic expectations about the power of database technology in achieving personalization in e-commerce. Remember the scene in Titanic when the stern rises high in the air before the ship sinks beneath the waves. Hundreds of people slide uncontrollably toward the already submerged bow. That image comes to mind when thinking of al those who are looking to "databases on steroids" to achieve authentic personalization. My guess is that not a few companies that place undue dependence on database technology in their marketing will succumb to terminal failure. There are many conceptualizations of what personalization is about. My objective is to help arrive at a concept of what personalization is not from the vendor perspective but from the consumer perspective. Any different approach, it seems to me, does not lead to authentic personalization. Power Is Shifting towards Consumers In thinking about personalization, it's worth reflecting on John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong's thoughts in Net Gain about how the information balance of power is shifting toward consumers. One sign of this is the increased control consumers are gaining over communication channels on which companies depend to get out their product messages. Now, for example, a hard disk video recorder automatically eliminates commercials from television shows. The falling rate of clicks on Internet banner ads indicates growing consumer resistance to uninvited marketing messages. Seth Godin coined the expression permission marketing to describe consumers' expanding power over marketing processes and communication channels. Database technologies will continue to be valuable tools in marketing, but they cannot solve the problem created when, in Godin's terms, marketers do not have consumers' permission to pitch them. Now we automatically zap commercials out of television shows, doing the same thing in print media is just around the corner. E-paper, invented by Xerox, will take its place along side dead tree paper. We embed black and white electrically charged particles in e-paper. Change the electrical charges of the particles, and the copy they form changes. With e-paper, printed news virtually enters the real time world of broadcast journalism. We report events as they happen. An investor can get up-to-the-minute stock quotes as often as he wants from the same Wall Street Journal that he started the day with. Everyone can have a personally tailored newspaper. It's likely that many will want to specify advertising as well as editorial content. You can create your own radio station free of advertising at www.imagineradio.com. Hyperlink to a place in your imagination where forms the gossamer image of an ad-free world. You may be in marketing, but let's not kid anyone. Wouldn't it be great to be able to escape at will the crass world of commercialism that tugs at your wallet 24 X 7? Renounce Ideas of Controlling Consumers One of the biggest challenges in time-share today is adapting to a marketplace in which consumers have the upper hand. It means mustering the will to renounce all ideas about controlling consumers. Hundreds of books on marketing have tried to teach readers how to control prospects and customers and bend them to marketers' wills. Those books are now worthless. Control seeking is a core value of the Industrial Age that is now obsolete. It was a suitable value when Newtonian science was the primary source of economic metaphors. Modern science was born amid dreams of controlling the forces of Nature. Economics grew out of Newtonian physics and private enterprise never cut its connections with Newton's vision of a clockwork universe in which we reduce everything to an infallible prediction. However, with quantum physics, fuzzy logic and chaos science serving up some of the more compelling metaphors in economics and business, it is dangerous to corporate health to remain addicted to the belief that power flows directly from control. Growing recognition of this new truth has helped give birth to the quirky idea of "leaderless companies." Bring up the idea of leaderless companies in most corporate settings and you're likely to get a "Who let this weirdo in" look. Nevertheless, "leaderless" does not mean unbridled chaos and absence of oversight. It means upper management has renounced its direct control over company operations. Control is decentralized and dispersed into activity centers to leverage it for the company's benefit. It's easy to dismiss the idea of a leaderless company as a dumb idea because it's contrary to the convention, but it's significant that such staid business publications as Business Week are writing about leaderless companies becoming commonplace. The more iconoclastic Fast Company has run a number of articles on leaderless companies. Technology is a tool of control, and tempts companies to define themselves by their technological attributes when they might do better to define themselves by more humanistic attributes. Personalization must be about humanism, not technology. (Go to www.personalization.com for some other ideas about personalization.) Authentic personalization means giving up much of the control of marketing and selling processes to consumers so they can give it back. David Wolfe explains, "Sounds almost like one of those Zen imponderables, if not altogether crazy. However, several years ago a high-earning financial advisor at American Express exclaimed that her typical new clients wanted to be the controlling force in the relationship between themselves and her. However, within a year, she said, most new clients ceded a substantial portion of control back to her. Her tack is usual among top performers in sales. We need to bring the same ethos into e-commerce if the idea of personalization is going to be more than just an empty slogan like "customer-driven." Act as an Analog of Consumers We achieve authentic personalization when the marketer functions as an analog of the consumer. Think of the needle on a car's fuel gauge functioning as analog of the liquid volume in the gas tank. The needle moves in synchrony with changes in fuel volume. Authentic personalization in e-commerce means moving in synchrony with the consumer. This is a radical change in marketing. In the old Newtonian models of marketing, time-share marketers strove to get consumers to move in synchrony with them. Time-share marketers' wanted consumers to be their analogs. Nevertheless, the rules of the New Economy call for the reverse to happen: time-share marketers must now function as analogs of consumers to obtain the highest levels of marketing and sales success.

Biographical note: James J. Gilmartin is president of Illinois-based Coming of Age, Incorporated. Since 1991, the full service integrated marketing firm has specialized in helping clients to increase market share and profit in baby boomer and older consumer markets. The firm provides clients marketing communications strategy planning, advertising, public relations, customer loyalty/affinity programs, sales/service improvement training and customer satisfaction improvement programs. The firm helps companies develop and launch successful communications campaigns and sales improvement initiatives for these rapidly growing populations. Jim can be reached at jimgilmartin@comingofage.com. Back to Archive CURRENT NEWS: ALL HEADLINES Timeshare || Financial || Resorts/Casinos || Travel/Leisure NEWS ARCHIVES EMAIL SEARCH HOME To report broken links or other problems with this site please contact: webmaster@thetimesharebeat.com © The Timeshare Beat all rights reserved