[1]The first day of the Festival of Media in Montreux emphasised that the secret to effective communication is listening to your customers. This is not something new, but what has changed is how it is done. Big brands such as Dell, Coca Cola and Vodafone are making use of social media to maximise the impact they have on reaching new audiences.
Communication these days is all about behavioural targeting, measuring topical influences and bringing some order to the mass of information available thanks to the interconnected world we live in.
But the question is, how? How can you make sure you are using the right tools that will allow you to engage with your customers and grow your revenue?
There are currently companies such as Onalytica and Kantar media, with which we had one to one interviews, that do the fieldwork for you. They use scientific tools to gather the information about your brand, see how people are interacting with respects of what you do and based on this can give you pointers on how best to engage with them without imposing the brand but rather influencing trends and behaviours.
The explosion of smart phones and their wide spread usage is also a force to be mind full of. Mobile internet and new applications are opening new possibilities for brand engagement and marketing.
The apps market is, in it self, a very democratic one. There are 94 different providers of the top 100 apps, pointed out Esther Lee, from AT&T. Her company is reinventing itself and focusing on re-thinking ‘possible’ taking into account that there is a new generation of connected devices and that the hub, these days, is on people’s pockets.
The main message from today, I would say, is that we are no longer living in a broadcast communications world -one message fits all, but rather in a one to one comms world. Consumers have the technical capability of choosing what they want and when. It is up to the companies that want to reach them to understand these variants and propose the right message and the adequate digital medium to do so.