Gordon Mattey

New Principles of Marketing

I had a dig at why marketing needs meaning and talked about the importance of having principles.  That was very conceptual, so here are my suggestions for some tangible principles on which a great marketing business should be built.  There are almost certainly better ones but here goes;

People and feedback not outdated audience research.  Web sites use traditional audience research to segment their users based on many attributes, to then subsequently sell premium advertising based on these segments.  A different approach is to open up a direct connection between the advertiser and the people to capture their preferences and feedback directly in real time, continuously, keeping information relevant and accurate.

Relevancy not interruption.  Treating an audience as one mini-mass segment is wasteful on the time of the people using the sites.  The interruption and annoyance created by advertising that is irrelevant frequently becomes unbearable across many types of online media.  Use the power of people’s feedback to make advertising relevant to the individual.

Opt In not Opt Out.  Through pressure from advocacy groups and in some cases legislation, advertisers have been forced to be able to let people opt out of cookie tracking and other technologies that determine what advertising should be shown.  No advertiser or advertising network has ever started by asking people to opt in before any advertising is ever shown, they start with opt out.  This is the biggest mistake ever made, and has created a fundamental imbalance and an adversarial relationship between people and advertisers since day one.    We should shift the balance in favour of the people.

Long term benefit for people not short term economic performance.  Each advertising campaign that runs is focused on maximizing performance today, regardless of the impact on people or even the advertiser/brand.  We believe that the value of the advert to the people is paramount over the long term, not making sure impression and click-through targets are met just because they have been promised.

Open and transparent not secretive and opaque.   Advertising personalisation technologies work in secret, capturing information on one site to be used in collusion (let’s call it what it is) on another site or a later time, where people have no knowledge of their use or application.  The information they typically capture can cover both personal profiles as well as usage and even purchasing behaviour, all extremely personal information.  We believe that disclosure should be driven individually by the people, with tools to make it easy to access and control all elements of profiling and it’s application.

These aren’t the only principles, and perhaps they overlap and perhaps there are gaps. Let me know if you think of any more.