A wake-up call for those deaf to the age of consent

Last week, within the space of a few minutes, I had two phone calls from large financial institutions telling me how lucky I was to be eligible for one of their credit cards. The first call irritated me – it came after a few other calls that had gone dead after I answered them, and not long after my son was interrupted from his homework by a caller who said: “I’m sorry, this call was meant for an answering machine.” (We’ve started receiving advertising messages on our answerphone too.)

But it was the second call that sent me ballistic. I was just getting my train of thought back (I was up against a deadline, feeling the pressure) when…ring, ring…and my attention was gone again.

As a consumer, I feel that marketers are hassling me and interrupting me more and more. Then I turn to the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s latest Shape the Agenda paper “You talking to me?”, which states baldly on its first page that marketing communications have descended to a state of “pointless deluge” and “resented intrusion”. An arms race between consumers and marketers is developing, warns the CIM, as consumers work hard to block out the noise, and marketers work harder to crowbar their message through these defences.

The CIM predicts that by 2010 – that gives us about five years – we will have moved from today’s communications free-for-all to a new “age of consent”. This new collaborative model of marketing communications has the following characteristics: it is customer initiated, based on consensual relationships (trust-driven and permissive), maintained through appropriate dialogue (two-way and ongoing), built on mutual value, neutral across media, and is cost effective.

The CIM suggests five ways of reaching for this nirvana. First, encourage self-segmentation by consumers – whereby consumers’ expressed interests and preferences determine what communications they receive, via which channel. CMR – customer managed relationships – rather than CRM is one possible example. The CIM believes that a likely knock-on effect of this will be that in future, “companies will increasingly buy personal data from customers” as a key input into this self-segmentation process.

The second key step is what the CIM calls “open planning” which, put simplistically, starts the communications planning process not with a message, a media, or a brand’s sales targets but with the self-segmented customer and how he/she wants to be communicated with, and about what.

Actually achieving such media neutral planning isn’t easy, the CIM concedes. “Many of the heuristics or rules of thumb used in selecting disciplines and media for a communication project are self-proving theories that don’t stand up scientifically”.

My credit card phone calls are a good case in point. No doubt marketers at the two brands that interfered with my deadline – the Alliance & Leicester and Abbey – will calculate the return on investment of their campaign on the basis of the number of new accounts opened. They will ignore responses like mine: that I’m now definitely less inclined to do business with them. Refusing to consider factors that positively do your brand harm, while focusing solely on measures that point to success, is a sure-fire way of “proving” return on investment.

So “open planning” requires a clean sweep of assumptions about which media and methods are best used for what. This in turn requires a rethink of marketing department and agency structures (get rid of those above- and below-the-line silos) and how agencies get paid.

Step number three, according to the CIM, is creating messages that matter. Andy Hobsbawm of Agency.com sums this idea up neatly in his recent report ” The internet ten years on”. Marketing communications that actually help consumers achieve their specific goals rather than diverting them from the task in hand aren’t even considered as “marketing” by most people, he notes.

Step number four is “managing legal boundaries” which, crudely put, means self-legislate on issues such as privacy before governments legislate for you. And step five is cost effectiveness. A key challenge here is that we still tend to measure different communication activities separately and independently, rather than calibrating their overall effect, in the round.

Is consensual marketing really likely to become a reality within the CIM’s short five-year timescale? A huge chicken-and-egg obstacle stands in the way. First, we haven’t yet perfected the easy, convenient, cost-efficient mechanisms and processes we need to make customer- initiated marketing and self-segmentation work en masse. Second, consumers have little reason to invest time and effort in such collaboration unless they are offered a clear and palpable return on their investment. Yet only a minority of companies have the mindset or business model to act on signals from consumers in the necessary value-adding way.

Yes, some (like Tesco) look like they are getting there. As Clive Humby, of Tesco-owned data group Dunnhumby, says: “The trick of real insight is to find what’s best for the customer and for the organisation. It’s about mutual benefit. If it’s good for you and good for the customer, that’s when you change behaviour.” But brands very much need to keep themselves in the public eye, and for many of these brands interruption and intrusion seem to be the only way to survive. As the CIM notes, while most marketers accept the notion of permission, they still do so “passively”. In other words, they accept it as good in theory, but not for actual practice.

The big question, then, is this. Will the few pioneers who first succeed in collaborative marketing act as catalysts, effectively creating a new marketing agenda for everyone, triggering an avalanche of change from intrusion to consent? Or is the world of marketing dividing into those that are able to construct win-win relationships with their customers, and those that are not?

The CIM paper doesn’t answer that question, but at least it prompts it. CIM chief executive Peter Fisk may be under fire from the old guard for some of his changes, but his Shape the Agenda initiative is provoking debate and raising the CIM’s profile. Isn’t that what the organisation – and marketers – need?