McKinney | Chicago

Commentary

"Stop talking, start listening
and there is nothing you
will not understand."

Customers are tired of irrelevant messages spruced up with jazzy graphics and clever headlines. It's time to become more knowledgeable about customers, the way they use products and how they feel about you and your competitors. Let's get to know them and allow them to get to know you. Together we can make a difference.

Let's communicate in a language of words and images that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and sometimes even shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, a real conversation is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, however, only know how to talk using their jargon-riddled, humorless robot voice. It's easy to spot and even easier to forget. Let's stop "reaching our target audience" and start finding ways to have real conversations.

"Take a position."

Companies trying so hard to "position" themselves would be better served if they just took a position. And watch out if it's something that customers really care about. Few companies have yet to recognize that the most precious thing they have to sell today is a fundamental understanding of customers and what motivates them.

To communicate with a genuine voice, companies must begin to share the concerns of their customers. They need to tear down the walls and start talking to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

Customers want access to your corporate information, to your strategies and tactical plans, to your best minds, to your intellectual property. They will not settle for anything less. If we want them to talk to us, we better be willing to talk to them. So why not make it something interesting for a change?

"Only fools can be certain. It takes wisdom to be confused."

Companies that were "built to last," must now be "rebuilt to change" and marketing communications must mirror the changes that are taking place. Your communications must reveal that your company is democratic, open, experimental, highly networked, non-hierarchical and flexible.

And as you see every aspect of your business changing, your core principles should always remain the same. This is what your advertising needs to communicate and it must do so in a way that makes an honest connection with your customers.

Don Schultz, a Northwestern University Professor and author of "Integrated Marketing Communications, Pulling it Together and Making it Work" talks about the new age of advertising this way: "Enter the new age of advertising: respectful, not patronizing: dialogue-seeking, not monologue-driven; responsive, not formula-based. It speaks to the highest point of common interest, not the lowest common denominator."

If you are going to stay ahead of the change curve, you can't possess even an ounce of nostalgia for yesterday's way of doing things.