Customer Engagement is the New Marketing

In his 1986 mind-blowing compilation, Marketing Imagination, marketing guru, Dr. Theodore Levitt defined Marketing as a company’s ability to “create, keep, and enhance a customer.” The ability to add the word enhance has really set marketing, as we know it, in the right direction.

Over twenty years later, this profound idea and theory are still being practiced by the best marketers around the world and will be for some time. However, with the advances seen in technology, the dynamics in consumer behavior, and the increases in marketing channels, will Dr. Levitt’s theory continue to grow or peril with other marketing ideas from the past? What would take its place if it were to fall?

With the new communication strategies (ie Social media) that are being utilized by consumers to gather information, aid in decision-making, and enhance the proliferation of word of mouth activities, marketers now need to engage the consumer in a meaningful, lifelong, two-way conversation, continually learning and growing the relationship to a level only dreamed of by our old friend, Dr. Levitt. This theory is called Consumer Engagement.

With Consumer Engagement, the marketer will fulfill the past needs of marketing by creating new customers, keeping current customers, and enhancing the brand to the highest level of loyalty throughout the best customers. But, with Consumer Engagement the marketer will add a level that, not only completes the marketing cycle, but allows for enhanced, dynamic communication throughout the consumer’s locus of influence creating brand advocacy where the consumer actually becomes a marketing channel in itself spreading the value of the brand.

Let’s see how Consumer Engagement fulfills these marketing needs:

Create: By gaining permission to start a conversation and build a relationship, a marketer begins to understand the consumer as and individual, drastically increasing its chances of turning the prospect into a customer.

Keep: Continually communicating, learning about the customer, and building a dynamic brand that is molded in the liking of the customer, a marketer will create a level of loyalty that will make it hard for the customer to defect.

Enhance: With this level of intimacy with the customer, the marketer now has the data and permission to integrate the brand into the day-to-day life of the customer, enhancing the relationship to the highest level of brand loyalty, brand saturation.

Advocacy: Complete and utter satisfaction for the customer has been a well played strategy by the marketer, molding the brand more and more into the life of the customer creating a brand advocate. This person will, no doubt, become a marketing channel in itself. As an advocate, they would create a word of mouth in their locus of influence that would allow the marketer to gain the permission to start the cycle over with each and every prospect in the group.

In conclusion, Dr. Levitt was right, marketing is a company’s ability to create, keep, and enhance a customer. But does that encompass everything in today’s environment? Or is Consumer Engagement the New Marketing? That’s for you to decide.

Paul Miser

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