Relationships Matter

It’s a complicated world today…between internet, mobile, and social technologies; as a marketer it’s often difficult to know where, when and how to target your prospective customer. There seems to be an endless supply of ad networks as well as contextual and behavioral targeting solutions all promising the same thing: Target Marketing. Each solution, designed to give advertiser’s the ability to target, re-target and re-re-target their prospective customer, based primarily on behavior.

Entire industries have been built on the technologies that support these efforts. Are these methods effective? Of course they are, Forrester Research predicts that Display Advertising alone will grow 10% by 2013 in terms of marketing spend. So obviously there is ROI to be had by investing your marketing dollars here.

However, things seem to be changing yet again. Last month Ad Age Digital ran an article titled “More CPG Players Embrace E-commerce” which explained major players such as Proctor and Gamble and General Mills will be rolling out e-commerce initiatives in 2010. Big deal? Yeah, I think so. Considering P&G to date has revenues of about $500 Million across their current e-commerce sites and CEO Bob McDonald thinks that he can get to 10 times that. $5 Billion in revenue from e-commerce is certainly nothing to scoff at, even when you are doing $80 Billion a year in traditional sales.

So why would a CPG company like Proctor and Gamble want to go head to head with their own channel partners? Mr. McDonald was kind enough to provide that answer: “The eventuality is a one-on-one relationship with every consumer, and obviously e-commerce needs to be a big part of that.” Yes that’s right…the world’s largest CPG brand just identified that they need to create a one-on-one relationship with their customers.

The value of a transactional database proved to be too alluring for companies like P&G to pass up. By providing customers a away to directly interact and purchase, P&G is laying the foundation for creating a database filled with rich customer data. And with that data they can begin to create those one-to-one relationships with their customers. They will know what you bought, what you like, what you searched, what you viewed and what you dislike. Then the CPG companies can begin to communicate with their customers is an extremely relevant fashion. (Considering myself a bit of an email buff, I cannot see how email is not a tremendously valuable tool here to help CPG companies communicate with their customers.)

And if that wasn’t enough…it gets better. No longer does P&G need to have their products listed side by side with their competition as they would say, in a retail email. No, they have complete control of the branding and product listings in their messaging. Having complete control of that messaging allows marketers the ability to create a brand experience with their customer base that will foster the one-to-one relationship.

This is the essence of what we preach at Zeta, we are what you would call relevance evangelists. Look up any Al DiGuido article and you will see what I mean. Today, marketers are sitting upon a wealth of information…some choose to do nothing with it and some are getting the picture that in order to compete in today’s world you need to be relevant or you are going to be left by the wayside. Time, money and effort need to be invested to create these solutions however I think the alternative (being tuned out completely) might be a bit more costly in the long run. So when you see companies like Proctor and Gamble and General Mills, who for decades never sold directly to customers turning to e-commerce to build relationships with their customers…Hopefully you get a slight glimpse into the future. The future is digital…the future is relevant and the future is why relationships matter.

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