Hats Off to Mr. Rogers
May 19
2009
2009
Marketing has always been about reaching the right people It the olden days, gosh — what … 12 years ago?– it was still about mass marketing — reaching the masses. Then, along came Pepper & Rogers and everything was about 1:1 –get to one person at at time with a personalized message and make them feel special. Was Rogers related to Mr. Rogers perchance? I think not. That Rogers cared about neighborhoods.
Soon thereafter came Seth Godin with permission marketing…. even if you personalized the message you’d better make sure you had permission to talk to the person. It’s kind of the Victorian version of marketing — speak only when you’re spoken to.
And now, we have social media — which is probably as anti-social as you can get. It’s not personal, most people have pseudonyms or pseudo-pictures (also known as avatars) and the game is again about numbers (i.e. how many followers do you have on Twitter?). Never mind that half my followers are people I never heard of and people who shouldn’t want to follow me, but are hoping against hope that I’ll follow them back. It’s reverse mass marketing!
This is what hasn’t changed in marketing over the years. It’s all about people. Sometimes we call them targets, sometimes audience. More recently, we call them community (there’s that Mr. Rogers thing again), but unless some people out there care about our message, product, company, cause — our marketing has truly fallen on deaf ears.
Here’s the real marketing question: Whom do you want to reach? Whom do you want to care about you? Those are the people you need to account for in your marketing efforts. And without knowing your target, you don’t have a marketing plan at all.
* adapted with permission from original post on InsideMarketing.org, 5/19/09, Rhona Bronson, NAPL
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