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Great Ideas I learned in October -- Part 2

People, not consumers

At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference, P&G's Jim Stengel said, "Let's stop talking about consumers. Let's talk about people."

This is an echo of a conversation I had with Rishad Tobaccowalla, CEO of Denuo, earlier this year, as well as the rant he went on at OMMA.

The statements that "the consumer is in control" and "markets are conversations" are ubiquitous, cropping up in almost every presentation at every conference. Stengel and Tobaccowalla rightly point out that you don't have a conversation with a consumer, you have a conversation with a person. Products aren't used by a target audience, they are used by a person. This is more than a semantic difference.

At the IIR Market Research event, P&G's VP of Consumer and Market Knowledge, Kim Dedeker, carried on this theme, describing P&G's "Walk a Mile" program which encourages senior managers to walk a mile in the shoes of the people who use their products. She told the story of one executive who lived for 2 weeks on the budget a single mother might have, describing how at the end of the period, he had to make a choice he had never faced before: buy milk for his kids, or buy presents for their teachers.

If consumers people are in control, then brands must know those people better than they ever have. If not, they can't offer the benefits those people seek and that person will seek the benefits from some other brand.

Also at the ANA conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Lauterborn, Professor of Advertising, of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I had interviewed Prof. Lauterborn years ago when I was at Forrester. He quoted me the mantra he instilled in his students, which I've quoted frequently since then. It is truer now than when I first heard it:

"The only sustainable competititve advantage is superior consumer insight."

I don't think he'd mind if I revised it slightly to "The only sustainable competitive advantage is superior insight into people -- and their wants, needs and motivations."

Posted by Jim Nail on November 9, 2006 at 02:39 PM | Email this post Permalink

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