What are channels for?
I’ve just been looking at a new Coca-Cola sponsored report on best practice in ‘shopper marketing’. Shops are just as much a communication channel as the media, the report points out, and people in the role of ‘shoppers’ think and behave differently to when they are in their role as ‘consumers’. Marketers need to understand these differences.
This paragraph caught my eye:
“The proposition that product manufacturers should place as much if not more emphasis on marketing through retail as they do on mass media initiatives has been a shock to many industry practitioners – and incomprehensible to others at organizations for which media advertising has always been the dominant communication vehicle.”
I suspect shopper marketing is just scratching the surface of ‘incomprehension’, as the persuasion paradigm that’s dominated marketing for so long begins to collapse under its own weight.
The persuasion paradigm is simple and intuitive. Producers deliver consumer value via the products and services they sell, and they use retail and communication channels to persuade customers to buy these products and services (otherwise they go bust). The product is about value delivery. The channel is about persuasion. It’s a neat division of labour where everyone understands their role.
But what happens if the customer wants value from both the product and the channel? What happens if the role of the channel in say, providing extra, trustworthy information for decision-making, simplifying choice, or streamlining the process of buying, is just as much a part of value delivery as the product itself? And what happens if the attempt to use the channel as a means of persuasion actually gets in the way of this value delivery?
From what I can see, to many in marketing the idea that channels are channels of value delivery rather than channels of persuasion is indeed incomprehensible. They’ve been brought up in a world where three questions define their working lives: ‘what’s the message, how to deliver it, and how persuasive has it been?’ A more holistic approach to value, where every engagement – every touchpoint – is understood and designed in terms of the customer’s value agenda a) leaves them without a job and b) leaves the organisations they work for powerless: “How are we going to persuade people to buy our stuff if we don’t do any persuasion?”
The answer, of course, is that ‘persuasion’ hardly ever persuades. In fact, all it really does is undermine trust. But demonstrating value through everything you do is highly persuasive, and turning every touchpoint into a natural magnet of customer time and attention – because the customer positively finds it valuable – is very efficient.
The Coca-Cola report said of shopper marketing, “The concept has the potential to be transformative … and will require a significant realignment of corporate structure and resource allocation.” It added: it’s becoming “a mandatory component of marketing in general”. You could say the same of channels as vehicles of value delivery.