Crowd Clout

CROWD CLOUT:
Aggregating Consumer Spending to Bring About Change
We Want Consumers Come Together to Force Corporations to be Socially Responsible.

Introduction:

The premise of this book is corporate America had better prepare itself for a new consumer base because the internet has changed the landscape of commerce. This is not to say, as many have hypothesized, that the future consumer will buy everything online and hence the notion of the “store” is dead and gone. Nor will there be a dramatic shift in the physical purchasing of consumer goods. Indeed, online shopping will grow, but consumers will retain the need to “touch and feel” goods before purchasing them. Further, the world will not shift all identities onto their Second Life avatars, perform all formerly tedious tasks such as shopping and going to the dry cleaner in their made up e-villages, and as a result become shut-ins wearing clothes for weeks on end and eating cold beans out of a can and not showering for similar periods of time.
As enticing as the above description may be, we shall not necessarily head toward that future; rather, the nature of the relationship between brand and consumer has undergone a fundamental shift as a result of the internet, and at present only a handful of consumers and even fewer corporations have noticed. Until now, the brand has made and marketed a product, and the individual consumer has either bought the product or not bought the product. By traditional and legal standards, this projects as a fairly equal exchange of position. However, this is a bit of a hoax perpetrated by marketers of brands, and now, most consumers have developed a strong and indelible skepticism toward marketing, advertising, and all ancillary brand activities designed to attract customers.
As is evident from the above, the brand and consumer occupy oppositional stances in this advertising/marketing exchange, and much, if not all marketing efforts were an attempt to win this exchange. As a result, the consumer became the marketer’s opponent, and the tug of war over consumer dollars commenced and continued. However, as we shall explain, this interchange was unbalanced, as the marketer enjoyed significant advantages the consumer had no hope of countering. While most of us buy soap, like certain kinds of soap, use soap on a fairly regular basis – leaving out the grubby kid exceptions of which we have a few —very few of us know what soap consists of, what chemicals go into soap, what it actually costs to make soap, or even if the use of soap is good for us. However, the marketer sure knows. He, however, kept this information to himself, and instead, devised lively jingles and slogans and pneumatic devices that left images of eye opening showers, “Manly, yes, but I like it too!” Irish lilts, and a number of other images and earworms that most of us can recite here and now without prompting of any sort. These intrusions upon our psyches were simply an excepted form of the warfare carried out by the marketer against the consumer’s desire to hang onto his hard earned dollars. None of this was illegal, nor was any of it immoral. Brilliant, clever women and men employed by brands devised these ingenious strategies which essentially aided the American economy to grow and prosper until it became the envy of the developed world.
Then technology had to stick its big nose into the picture. With cable television, napster downloads, satellite radio, TiVo, youtube, and other modern media delivery systems designed to avoid advertising intrusion, the ability to get commercials to the consumer became much more difficult. Indeed, some brands and their agents have become sufficiently frustrated to legally attack these means of advertising-free media, and their basic reasoning for doing so is that without the attendant advertising, enjoying this entertainment is stealing from the companies that sponsored the airing of the programming in the first place. Those companies spent a significant sum on sponsoring these programs, and when one eliminates their ability to advertise within the context of those programs, then that money spent has been essentially stolen by these alternative means of delivering entertainment content.
This strikes us as a lost battle. Indeed, record companies estimate that a minimum of 80% of all downloaded music now playing on those ubiquitous iPods and other MP3 mechanisms was taken from the internet without paying for it. This will be true of television programs, movies, and virtually all other forms of entertainment that can come out of a speaker and be displayed on a screen. Physical newspapers will essentially disappear as will magazines, books and all other published material, despite the protests of techno-Luddites who insist book reading just will not be the same unless you are holding something in your hand and turning actual paper pages.
Indeed, technologically, none of us are in Kansas anymore. The world has changed and those who adapt to this altered landscape will fare far better than those who refuse to do so. For the consumer, this means that brands will continue to dictate to you if you do not adapt to the changed landscape. To marketers, this signals a virtual death knell unless you understand that consumers will adapt, will band together, and will render your previous experience as a marketer almost irrelevant, unless you abandon nearly all of the fundamental positions you held about the relationship between brands and consumers. First and foremost, the market place will be won or lost in one arena: customer service. Second, your brand’s “authenticity” (ie. Consumers’ belief you aren’t totally full of shit) will be reliant on a notion of egalitarianism. What does this mean?
It means essentially, this internet thing is bigger than you planned, and if you hop on board as a consumer, you can join together with other consumers and get what you want. And if brands decide they don’t want to deal with you and your group on an equal plane, then you and your crowd will tell them to stuff it and you will buy your stuff elsewhere. That is “crowd clout.”