In a recent interview, Bob Hutchins and Greg Stielstra claim that demographics no longer rule the marketing roost, ideology does:
…there are no Facebook groups for traditional segments like women 25-54 or households making $75k+/yr. Instead, people define themselves according to their interests [...] which is why there are Facebook groups for Scrapbooking, Yoga, and fans of the Green Bay Packers.
All of this is exciting and scary to me as a marketer. It’s easy identify 25-54 women living in households that made $75k+/yr. It’s hard to know who’s an avid scapbooker.
As affinity groups gain importance (and attention from marketers), there’s no doubt that permission marketing will conquer (thanks Seth Godin).
In other words, we have to start thinking about how to find a permissions base, how to grow it, and how to maintain it. The days of “blast an email to all the 25-54 year old women to see if we can find some scrapbookers” are numbered.
Of course, permission marketing is hard. Finding a permission base and engaging them enough to buy whatever you’re selling is tough. But it’s not impossible. The internet has given us the ability to view behavioral trends and gain access to groups that we never could before.
I think permission marketing will force us to shift where we spend our marketing dollars.
Instead of shelling out big bucks for ads, we’ll invest in tools that allow us to listen more efficiently (like Radian6—full disclosure, this is a completely unsolicited plug). We’ll also spend more time producing relevant content to add value to the online community.
This is a vision of the future that places more responsibility on businesses to concentrate on their customers first so that profits will follow. It means that all of us will be responsible for creating and maintaining relationships with our customers. It means that we’ll spend more in time and less in materials.
So what do you think of this vision? Let me know.
-Andrew
