[마케팅]마케팅에서 사람은 숫자가 아니다

In Marketing, People Are Not Numbers

by Sam Ford  |  12:00 PM February 13, 2013

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/how_companies_avoid_spreadabil.html

For marketers, there was much to like about the broadcast era. It was easy to pretend things were simple, even when they weren't: general aggregate numbers and basic demographic data served were "close enough" for understanding audiences.

Now, though, media content is controlled as much by the audience as by traditional distributors. We find ourselves in the age of what my coauthors and I call spreadable media. Sharing articles, video, and other content is an everyday part of life for a significant portion of the population. "Close enough" really doesn't work all that well anymore.

Still, corporate logics have tried to preserve the old models and to fit new phenomena into familiar management patterns. Here are three fundamental ways companies are trying to resist the nature of today's media environment.

1. Transforming People into Data. As companies became their own online publishers, they used the logic of "stickiness" to maintain an impressions-based model for understanding audiences, defining success by visits, clicks, likes, time spent per page, and so on, and turning audiences into quantitative data that can be easily collected and compared.

Similarly, as companies monitor what people say outside corporate-owned platforms, they often convert conversation into stats. In Spreadable Media, we call this "hearing," because it focuses primarily on recording what has been said. Companies have invested deeply in making sure they have collected most or all mentions of the company and that they have easy ways to convert that to "sentiment" and "share of voice."

But most companies put little emphasis on "listening," an active process focused on the context of what the audience is saying. As "Big Data" becomes the predominant buzzword across marketing disciplines, companies risk paying even less attention to deeply understanding the full context of the communities they are trying to reach.

2. Maintaining a Distance. How we talk about content makes it the active ingredient and audience members the passive carriers. "Going viral" insinuates some scientific phenomenon through which audiences have no choice but to spread certain content. "Meme" adopts the language of gene replication to describe how material spreads. It's implied that you don't need to "know" the audience members themselves but rather just track the resulting pandemic.

Some marketers do see audiences as socially connected networks rather than aggregate data but still have the impulse to find some other shortcut to actual, meaningful participation in those communities. One of the most popular concepts in marketing today is "the influencer," a model which presumes that any community includes a few people who, if they get on board with an idea, will bring everyone else along for the ride. Once again, the company doesn't have to actually participate in relationships with most of their audience — just the shepherds who everyone else follows mindlessly.

3. Making Them Come to You. A core myth has traditionally governed marketing: that the industry is solely focused on the art of persuasion, on trying to align audiences with whatever the corporation wants them to do. Marketers still see their calling much the same as they did in the broadcast era: to pump out one-way messages and get audiences to buy whatever the company is selling (figuratively and literally).

The era of spreadability provides a transformational opportunity: for marketing and communications to act as the listening ear of the company, and to help better align the company to address the wants and needs of its various constituencies. Often, the information, service and expertise companies provide customers are as important as products and services themselves. Marketing and communications will best serve an organization when they put their primary emphasis on serving its audiences.

요약

마케터들은 사람들이 쉽게 이해하도록 미디어 콘텐츠를 활용하는 것을 좋아한다. 하지만 많은 미디어 콘텐츠는 기존 유통업자들에 의해 통제되는 만큼 시청자들에 의해 통제된다. 그러나 여전히 기업들은 기존의 미디어를 보존하고 새로운 현상을 익숙한 관리 시스템에 맞추고자 노력하고 있다. 여기에 기업들이 오늘날의 미디어 환경에 저항하는 세가지 기본적인 방법이 있다.

 첫 째는 사람들 데이터로 바꾼다는 것이다. 기업들은 방문자 수, 클릭 등과 같이 사람들을 수집하고 비교하기 쉬운 양적 데이터로 변환하고 있고, 사람들의 대화를 통계로 변환하고 있다. '빅데이터'가 마케팅 분야에서 두드러진 유행어가 됨에 따라, 기업들은 콘텐츠를 깊이 이해하려는 노력을 더 하지 않는다.

 두번째는 거리를 유지하는 것이다. '바이럴로 가는 것'은 특정 콘텐츠에 대한 선택없이 확산시키는 과학적인 현상을 나타냈다. 몇몇 마케터들은 사람들을 통합적인 데이터로 보는 것이 아니라 사회적으로 연결된 네트워크로 보고있지만, 여전히 의미있는 실제 사회에서 지름길을 찾는 것을 그만두었다. 오늘날의 마케팅에서 가장 인기있는 컨셉은 다른 사람들을 끌어오는 "영향력을 행사하는 사람"이다. 기업들은 모든 사람들과 관계를 맺을 필요없이 단지 안내자와 관계를 맺으면 된다.

 세번째는 당신에게 오게 만드는 것이다. 설득의 예술에 중점을 두고 있고, 기업에서 소비자들이 하기를 원하는 것을 하도록 조정하고 있다는 전통적인 마케팅이 지배하고 있다. 앞으로 마케팅과 커뮤니케이션은 기업의 귀가 될 것이고, 기업이 다양한 니즈와 원츠를 해결하도록 도울 것이다. 마케팅과 커뮤니케이션은 고객에 대한 서비스를 가장 우선시할 때, 조직에 가장 기여하게 될 것이다.