The future of marketing's number one evangelist just wants everyone to get along.
__ In 1990, Martha Rogers, a marketing professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, was becoming less and less comfortable teaching the principles of mass marketing. When she met Don Peppers - then an executive at multinational advertising agency Lintas:USA - she felt she'd found a kindred soul. They recognized that technology would mandate a new approach to business, and together wrote The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Doubleday, 1993), based on the idea that as technology makes it affordable to track each customer, marketing shifts from finding customers for products to finding products for customers. In the one-to-one future, a company uses new technology to gather information about, and to communicate directly with, individuals to form a commercial bond. The book, now in 11 languages, became a bestseller and is influencing the way companies work. Rogers, along with Peppers and their partner Bob Dorf, continues to evangelize for her vision through marketing 1:1 Inc., based in Stamford, Connecticut, while still on the faculty at Bowling Green. She spoke with Wired contributor David Weinberger. __
Wired: The central concept of your book is that mass manufacturing, mass marketing, and mass communications are giving way to one-to-one relationships. How does this change the way businesses behave?
Rogers
: Traditional mass marketers develop a product and then try to find customers for that product. They aim for maximum share of market. But now, with the rapidly declining cost and increasing power of information processing, companies are able to remember every detail of each relationship with each customer. Thus, they are able to offer tailored communications, personalized service, and mass-customized products.
Doesn't this threaten the consumer's right to - or sense of - privacy?
Good one-to-one marketers will become jealous guard- ians of their customers' privacy. Unlike mass marketers who see the value of a name only as part of a list that can be sold, a one-to-one marketer understands that the most valuable thing he or she can produce is a customer and information about that customer - and therefore he or she won't sell that information to anybody, no matter how tempting the price.
On the other hand, wouldn't it be in your interest as a consumer for the company to spread the word to other vendors, so you can have targeted offers from a variety of companies in the marketplace?
If the company doesn't have what I need, it can scout among other companies and, without ever giving away my name and address, find what's there and sell it to me.
Then why should a company even have its own line of goods?
Maybe it won't. Cataloguers don't now. But we also see a major business opportunity for what we call "learning brokers" or "information intermediaries." A learning broker acts as a matchmaker between a customer and the marketers that customer may want to do business with - but never gives out the customer's identity. The successful brokers will be the ones who never betray their customers' trust.
Commercial interests with all this personal data? Why do I find this scary?
Because the way most companies get this information now is by buying it from other companies, without your knowledge or consent. That's a violation of trust. In one-to-one marketing, not only isn't personal information passed around, companies are willing to pay the customer for it, in the form of discounts or rebates.
Won't this appeal mostly to the poor? People will sell their personal information the way they sell their blood today.
Not just the poor. It appeals to those who are busy and want to waste less time looking at offers for things they don't care about.
So who will our learning brokers be? Mom-and-pop enterprises?
Probably not. The ones who can do it first and best are the ones who have huge channels of information plugged into you already. For example, your bank, telephone company, cable television company, credit card companies -
You're scaring me!
Only because you're thinking in the old-fashioned way that they're adversaries. A company that wants to become a learning broker has to understand how to be a collaborator. Besides, haven't you been to a store where they say, "Hi, David, how did you like that jacket you bought three months ago? Here are some coordinating pants you'll probably love." That's one-to-one marketing. It's very rewarding to be treated that way.
So, as commercial interests know more and more, we'll be able to tell less and less when someone is sincere. Isn't one-to-one marketing taking the sin out of insincerity?
Simply put, the more I know about you, the more I'm able to meet your needs - better than someone who doesn't know you. Ultimately, if I do it right, it's a great advantage to both of us.
OK, so along comes the Internet, a new infrastructure ideally suited to delivering personalized marketing messages. But Net culture is dead set against it - there's no greater sin than spamming. Instead we're seeing billboard advertising - the epitome of mass marketing - being erected at popular sites.
These are sites whose authors haven't yet escaped the mass-marketing mind-set. Internet advertising is going to turn interactive and is going to be more like door-to-door selling than mass-market advertising. When you go door-to-door, you have to strike an explicit bargain with each customer you visit - "Let me in and here's what you'll get." The Internet is a perfect setting for learning brokers who allow messages to be delivered only to those who have expressed interest in them. This changes the balance of power for marketing - sort of like handing the rifle to the deer for a change. The learning broker is establishing a close, lifelong relationship that's representing your interests to other companies.
