Selling: the dawn of a new market reality
From Richard Edelman’s* Me2 Revolution:
The employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. The consumer has become a co-creator, demanding transparency on decisions from sourcing to new-product positioning. Smart companies must reinvent their communications thinking, moving away from a sole reliance on top-down messages delivered through mass advertising. This is the Me2 Revolution. What is now required is a combination of outreach to traditional elites, including investors, regulators, and academics, plus the new elites, such as involved consumers, empowered employees, and non-governmental organizations.
The most profound finding of the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer is that in six of the 11 countries surveyed, the “person like yourself or your peer” is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed. This has advanced steadily over the past three years. In the US, for example, the “person like yourself or your peer” was only trusted by 22% of respondents as recently as 2003, while in this year’s study, 68% of respondents said they trusted a peer. Contrast that to the CEO, who ranks in the bottom half of credible sources in all countries, at 28% trust in the US, near the level of lawyers and legislators. In China, the “person like yourself or your peer” is trusted by 54% of respondents, compared to the next highest spokesperson, a doctor, at 43%. Meanwhile, “friends and family” and “colleagues” rank as two of the three most credible sources for information about a company, just behind articles in business magazines. Again, in the US, the “colleagues” number has jumped from 38% in 2003 to 56% in 2006.
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There is sharing of content because now we can do it easily, quickly, and colorfully.The Pew Center for Media noted that 60% of US teens have created and shared content on the Internet.
And from Terry Heaton at Donata Communications:
New media economic genius Umair Haque has written extensively about the differences between what works in the mass marketing world (the blockbuster) with what works in the Media 2.0 paradigm (the snowball). In the blockbuster concept, he notes, attention has the highest value and therefore commands the most dollars, because attention is a scarcity that can only be overcome with a significant marketing budget. In the new world, however, where the customer is at the controls, attention isn’t the scarcity, because the customer is already providing it — quality snowballs are where the new scarcity exists, and that’s why the value shifts from attention to production. This has profound implications for television, because its core competency is the providing of attention.
So what does this mean? On the one hand it levels the playing field tremendously: it removes barriers to entry for new products or services or ideas, it mitigates the power of incumbents, it puts (even more of ) a premium on quality of service and originality of thought. Potentially it lowers inertia and resistance to change by customers and partners. It creates enormous opportunity to change the competitive landscape in any particular industry or economy.
*Richard Edelman is the president and CEO of the world’s largest independent public relations firm with 1800 employees in 40 offices worldwide.
