Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin: Part 2

My previous post introduced a Web 2.0 era  definition of “cluster,” a term traditionally associated in marketing with demographic segments. This post continues the discussion with an examination of the art and science of cluster husbandry.

 Cluster husbandry is not about targeting consumers. It’s about encouraging them to become meaningfully engaged by interacting with them in an authentic voice. As the agricultural term “husbandry” implies, cluster husbandry turns marketing efforts into a farming-like practice. It’s about generating and tending to a community of supporters of a brand. 

Cluster husbandry is genuinely consumer centric: it starts with a more holistic view of consumers’ needs than characteristic of traditional marketing. In the past, marketers have tightly focused on bending consumers’ wills to their wills. In cluster husbandry, the marketer strives to wed his or her will to that of consumers. Cluster husbandry is an authentic expression of relationship marketing.

Despite thousands of articles, entire seminars and many books on the subject over the past two decades, relationship marketing has generally not been about caring relationships with consumers; rather, it has been about finding more effective ways of targeting consumers and “reeling them in.” For example, so-called customer relationship management (CRM) is not about managing customer relationships. It is about managing customer data. Better that it be called customer data management.

CRM is a quantitative approach to markets. Cluster husbandry is a qualitative approach. It includes quantitative tasks but “numbers” don’t dominate the process.  Numbers are important in setting objectives and feedback metrics that help the cluster specialist determine how well objectives are being met. They are especially important in gauging consumer satisfaction with their participation in a cluster social network.

One way to view clusters is as ecosystems in which people, places and things are organized around exchanges of information concerning topics and needs of the people involved, be they consumers or providers. David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, the principles in Immersion Active and sponsors of this blog brought forth this idea in their book Dot Boom. In another time they might have used the term cluster management.”  However, that would imply ambitions of control that are more suitable to the posture of traditional marketing. Cluster husbandry is not about gaining and exercising control over consumers. It’s about collaborating with them in determining their needs and finding effective means of satisfying those needs.

 Cluster husbandry is like traditional marketing with respect to one overarching objective: finding ways to break through the clutter of advertising.   However, the cluster manager will likely discover more ways to do this than the traditional marketer will because the cluster manager works both sides of the equation: first, from the consumer side, then from the provider side. The magic lies in seamlessly integrating the both sides in the information  exchange process.

To the cluster manager, the consumer is not a number in a data set. The consumer, as David Ogilvy famously said, “is your wife.”  Obviously he meant that metaphorically. He wanted to bring home the flesh and blood reality the consumer represents by positioning her in personal terms. Ogilvy, one of the greatest marketing minds of all time by common  accord, understood relationship marketing before it became a buzz word in marketing and long before everyone had a personal computer on their desk to focus the marketer’s mind on number instead of on consumers’ circumstances, needs and emotions.

Ogilvy understood consumers as people as few marketers since his time have. Getting such an understanding is the best place to start in setting up your first cluster husbandry ecosystem. That is where I will pick up in my next post.

 

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin

Most of us in marketing associate the term “cluster” with a demographic or psychographic segment of consumers. But there is another kind of cluster that gets little discussed even though it can be much more determinative of a marketing effort’s success: engagement clusters.

Marketing doesn’t really revolve around demographic or psychographic clusters despite the considerable sums that companies spend to figure them out. They would likely get a better ROI from making larger investments in engagement cluster research.

So what is an information exchange cluster? It’s a micro environment within a total marketing program where providers and consumers engage in product-related communications.

The term “engagement” signifies what engagement clusters are all about. The first step in the marketplace for marketing to succeed is to secure the conscious, active engagement of customers – prospective and otherwise – in the product information stream. No sale is possible without this first step.   

Information exchanges in engagement clusters take place at three information transfer points or nodes:  people, places and things:

• ·         People

• ·         Places

• ·         Things (or means)

People.  Information exchanges in engagement clusters occur between consumers, between consumers and product providers and between agencies of both consumers and companies. Consumer agencies include direct representatives of a consumer, such as an attorney, financial planner or concerned family member. Also, governmental regulatory bodies and news organizations function as agencies of consumers.

Places. Like Einstein’s special theory of relativity, engagement clusters have time-space elements that need to be taken into account. Places can be in three-dimensional reality, such as a point-of-sale environment in a commercial setting like a mall or in a person’s home. Places can also be virtual in the sense that they have no corporeal substance. Websites, blogs, social networking sites and forums are examples of virtual places that can exist within an engagement cluster.

The timing of invitations to consumers to participate in an engagement cluster can be critical. To express this idea in caricature, it certainly makes no sense to run an ad for Christmas just as Easter is just over the time horizon, or to have characters in a summertime ad in wintry dress.

Time also needs to be considered in the abstract. For example, in marketing housing and care services to seniors, any sense on the part of consumers that they have a need for such typically lies dormant until they experience a health set-back.

Things. These nodes facilitate or catalyze information exchanges. They include advertisements, news articles, and consumer rating systems such as Amazon’s product reviews by consumers. They also include technological artifacts as simple as a “FORWARD” command on an email client or a hot link to a website.

Marketing has traditionally been mostly executed in the format of a monologue which renders consumers as passive participants in the information exchange process. In fact, most marketing still remains a unidirectional information delivery process despite consumers’ growing perceptions that one-way marketing communications reflect marketers’ desires to manipulate consumers’ minds.

The need to accommodate consumers’ growing resistance to the unidirectional information streams of traditional marketing has magnified the importance of giving attention to engagement clusters because this is where buying decisions are conceived, gestate and are born.

In the next post I will give attention to what you can do to increase the intensity of the dialogue that takes place within engagement clusters that form around your product.