Redefining Relevance

You can no longer buy relevance these days, so you actually have to start with it. And this fundamental new truism lies at the heart of the marketing revolution of the 21st century, which all companies are grappling with now. So I propose a new definition of relevance, one that better aligns with the needs of today's marketers who must satisfy today's demanding and very different consumers.The old definition was formed in the mass-media era, and it roughly equated to brand awareness. The media revolution of the 20th century, exemplified by the efficiency of television in aggregating mass audiences, enabled marketers to gloss over a myriad of deficiencies in product quality, design and packaging. If you could afford the media dollars, you could buy relevance. Mediocre products flew off shelves with the winds of a well-crafted television campaign at their back. And so our definition of the term was shaped primarily around communications: did the message resonate?But as our ability to effectively leverage mass media erodes in this new era of consumer control, so too will our ability to create hits from mediocre products and services. And that's why you can no longer buy relevance along the lines of the old model. It has become simply impossible to aggregate mass audiences in a way in which they will continue to be susceptible to the old definition. In fact, for many audiences (e.g., teens), this ability has already disappeared.We need a new definition of relevance that can help guide our industry once again. Essentially, the role of the marketer is to create hits out of the products that are brought to market. Marketing budgets represent the investment necessary to create these hits, but our problems are more fundamental to what the marketing industry can currently deliver. They start with product development itself. With a few rare exceptions, most companies develop products as if the powers of mass media were still available to make hits out of the mediocre. In other words, we don't begin from a basic starting point of relevance: beginning with a great product or service that uniquely suits a real customer need.Instead, the methodology of product development is often "top down"—with scientists in white lab coats creating new inventions that are thrown over the fence to the marketing team to create a hit. In essence, product development became siloed from marketing because the power of the mass-media era afforded this separation. The problem with the top-down approach is that it offers no guarantee of consumer relevance. It makes invention the starting point, as opposed to need or want. And so many of our inventions are simply not relevant. Worse yet, the marketing team and the agencies get the blame when these irrelevant inventions fail to fly off the shelves. Perhaps this explains why the average tenure of a CMO is less than two years.But we can no longer afford the separation between product development and customer needs. We have evolved from a media-driven era to a customer-driven era, yet the very way we continue to go to market clings to the ways of our previous era. In order to achieve relevance in a customer-driven world, companies must work from the inside, based on a real understanding of customer needs. They must find new ways to understand the needs of discrete segments of the market and drive everything from product development to communications from the "inside out," with true customer needs at the core. One of the drivers of the previous marketing era was our ability to gain consumer insights through account planning. But planning disciplines, largely formulated to optimize media-driven messages, are not holistic enough to drive work from the inside out. So in our redefinition of relevance, we must also redefine the role of planning and make it more holistic and universal. It must put real needs and wants at the core of every single investment, from product development outward to all forms of customer experience: package design, retail promotions, public relations, extensions of the product experience into Web sites and mobile applications, and even the good, old-fashioned ads about the product. Gaining relevance puts additional pressure on all these things all at once so that each needs to be exceptional rather than just mediocre. Where will we find the insights to ensure this today? That is one of the fundamental issues our industry must solve to move forward.Our job is no longer about integrating a bunch of disparate marketing disciplines to optimize communications streams. We've passed the moment in time when integration was about 360 degrees of branding. That's the old way of thinking, and it can never guarantee relevance because it doesn't begin with it. The old thinking propagates the false assumption that you can somehow buy relevance in the media marketplace. Instead, we now live in a world where we must deliver 360 degrees of relevance. Our job today is to redefine the entire role of marketing and drive complete integration of the customer experience with a relevant product at the core and extending outward across the entire experience.In the long run, clients and agencies will adjust to a new era of relevance, and the industry will move forward. But in the short run, we are likely to see continued effects from the end of the mass-media era. Many brands whose relevance was created during this era no longer respond to the real consumer needs and wants I described above. As these brands and products sit side by side in the marketplace with ones created under the new definition of relevance, the contrast will be stark and obvious. Newly empowered consumers, equipped with all the consideration tools the new marketing era affords them, will vote irrelevant brands "off the island" at a quickening pace. Avoiding this fate will require nothing short of reinvention—of brands, of client organizations and of agencies.

Brand Marketing

Redefining Relevance

Adweek Staff

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