I developed some of the thinking from the last couple of posts and expanded it for the nice people at Canvas8 into a report.
Proximimty is still a virtue, and a few more examples bring that to life, includin, Zaarly, Neighbourgoods and Whipcar, all of which use proximity to facilate sales, renting or sharing.
It also touches on another idea I've been playing with about what customers are:
Customers are to people as waves are to water.
"For the majority of marketing, it may be better not to think of customers as people.
‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people – from the point of view of a company, it doesn’t really matter who that person is when they walk into a store.
Throughout the marketing process, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural economics and decision research all suggest that 'where', 'what' and 'when' are at least as important as 'who'."
Which is a nice [as in accurate..I think], slightly abstruse concept to mull over during the long weekend [USA only, check your local listings].
5 responses to “Proximity is a Virtue [REDUX]”
Customers are a behaviour not a demographic
In marketing and comms, we are constantly trying to move away from the abstraction of ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’, and think in terms of real people. We give these archetypal (usually stereotypical!) consumers a name, we write pen portraits of their…
I am starting to disagree with this view more and more and more, as I step into the world of digital awesomess available to us ad geeks, and am striving to put the WHO back at its core, centric position.
In other words, I tend to disagree with your statement: “Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people – from the point of view of a company, it doesn’t really matter who that person is when they walk into a store”, as in my humble opinion it is too much of a simplistic and marketing-esque perspective on the world.
As J. Lanier aptly put it in You Are Not A Gadget last year (when specifically referring to technology and social networking): “Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad mobilke behaviors” and… “As long as you are not defined by software you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations”.
Which to me sounds like a big ‘look-out!’, to not get lost in the trend of simplifying and categorizing human behavior (through technology) to a point where it becomes un-realistic and too approximative , anti self-expression and anti-innovation… in that it becomes too predictable, too multi-choice based or even, at times, too dumb?
Hello Enrico! Thanks for your eloquent thoughts!
So – I don’t disagree that WHO is important – but up until now it has been the ONLY thing we factor in. The context and its impact on decisions and behavior has largely been ignored.
Now the crowd isn’t the same thing. However, we should think of the ‘crowd’ as a scaled up slightly irrational human being – this is a massive error – but as a network of inter-operating motivations and behaviors that create unpredictable emergent properties.
If anything, I’m not trying to simply, I’m adding in multivariate complexity to understanding of how people behave.
That said, if you believe Barbasi and that kind of network thinker, most people are utterly predictable, individually, if you establish context.
BUT
I’m reading Duncan Watts’ Everything is Obvious atm which is good on this stuff. And he doesn’t think so.
in some ways- the marketingesque view of the world – is an aspect of what i’m talking about. we only look to explore people in relation to how the buy things from us. hence consumers and customers and so on.
somewhere in between context and intention mapping, advertising, and CRM, you probably get a more holistic view / encounter with people. maybe.
i’ve realized that I didn’t link to the full report. which may explain more…
I guess in this manner they want to tell whats inside their mind and share to others how is it to advertise in a different manner.