Consumer Impact on Advertising Grows

”I am consumer, hear me roar.”

Consumer impact and influence is growing. The New York Times details how consumers are interacting with advertising campaigns and influencing their outcome. But we’re having an impact further upstream as well…as early as the product design stage. Trendwatching has a thorough analysis of this trend. They call it customer made. It has been around for awhile, but its momentum picked up when a myriad of technologies emerged to facilitate a real dialogue between consumers and corporations.

"Marketing has finally become a conversation. Not between corporations and consumers, but rather a global conversation involving millions of consumers ABOUT corporations. On sites like Planetfeedback.com, on millions of blogs, community sites, forums, viral emails, bulletin boards, and what have you, consumers relentlessly exchange views, complaints, opinions and comments about products and services, about brands, about companies, about YOUR company.

These fickle, wired, empowered, informed, opinionated and experienced holders of a MC (Master in Consumerism) are getting used to 'having it their way', in ANY way imaginable, which includes wanting to have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them.

It certainly helps that these same consumers are creative and increasingly have access to professional hardware, software, and online distribution channels to show (and dictate) companies what it is they expect from them, using text, sound, picture and video in ever more powerful ways.

Some companies are also engaging these customers in new ways. These companies are clearly aware that tapping into the collective intellectual capital of their customers yields great creative and 'real' content. However, let's not make the mistake to think that in the end these conversations will all be about communications and branding: how about extending this cooperation with consumers to virtually everything a corporation does, by making the customer an integral part of ALL creative and creational processes?

TRENDWATCHING.COM has dubbed the latter CUSTOMER-MADE the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed."

If only the TV networks would put this trend into practice. What if the seemingly, creatively-bankrupt TV networks created programs in close cooperation with viewers and produced shows they really wanted to see? Would this approach have stopped "Welcome to the Neighborhood" from being made? Hopefully. The reality series "had people with various backgrounds vie to win a house in a white neighborhood." Civil rights groups stopped ABC from airing the series.

TV networks and production companies could create a series of blogs, or more likely vlogs, that would serve as a test lab to get direct input from viewers on what they want to see on TV and get their reaction to projects before they are giving the green light. Not unlike the open source press release process we’ve seen recently, this approach creates something the public actually wants to see.

Some free advice to Nielsen: leverage your ownership of the TV research and measurement market. Expand into the early stages of programming. Create a blog.

tags: public relations, PR, advertising, marketing, branding, brand, consumer generated media

Comments

[Trevor]

TV networks should listen to bloggers before they greenlight projects? Are you kidding? Most of the crap on the networks is already watered down. The idea of having 500 channels was supposed to encourage diversity in programming. Most networks try to appeal to everyone and cater to the lowest common denominator in an attempt not to offend anyone. Now you suggest taking that to the extreme. There would never be a cutting edge show again. Television is a creative medium. Should painters discuss each stroke of their brush with a focus group? Just because someone has a computer and internet access, that does not make them an expert on what people should or should not watch.

[Josh]

I think networks could certainly pull some good ideas from viewers via blogs and such, but the computer savy blog goer is still a minority. Our appetite for media is likely a askew in comparison to the general populace who keep current shows on the air.

Sadly, TV is really one of the few true democracies in place...if viewers watch, the show goes on. If viewers hate it, off it goes. While viewers weren't in on the planning, they are casting their votes everday.

[Yegor Kuznetsov]

A sound move is to survey consumers BEFORE you start a PR aor Ad campaign.

Check out a case study on how Qorvis, one of the U.S. largest PR forms, is using WebSurveyor online survey solutions to optimize media and advertising campaigns.

http://www.websurveyor.com/company/websurveyor-customer-profile.asp?c=652

[Hispanic TV commercial advertising]

As the time passes more and more things will be in-demand for the consumers! Marketing has finally become a conversation, it is true!

-Daiel