Consumers are engaged in a high-tech arms race to destroy your marketing efforts. Spam filters kill your unwanted e-mail messages, ads are unseen on Web sites due to pop-up blockers, television commercials are skipped with DVRs, and caller ID screens calls from telemarketers. As a result of this column you and your organization will learn how to: Understand that customers no longer want products or services customized for them. Know that customers want to self-customize the products and services they purchase. Give your customers what they want most of all, control of the entire process. Four days after the opening of the Federal “Do-Not-Call” registry, 10 million people had signed up on the Web and in one year it had grown to more than 62 million. Technology may be causing you to pour valuable marketing dollars into hyperspace, never to be seen again. In a recent survey of attitudes toward marketing, by the authors of Coming to Concurrence, 60 percent of people were actively seeking products to avoid exposure to marketing efforts. With high-speed Internet connections, all the product or service information consumers need is easily available. They’ve ceased to be passive and are getting what they want when and only when they’re ready.

The “information superhighway” empowers people to isolate themselves from marketing and makes it easy to access what they want, the way they want it and only when they want it. People want to participate in the creation of meaning in their lives rather than find meaning in what you’re offering them.

• Customers no longer want products or services customized for them.
• They want to self-customize the products and services they purchase.
• Most of all, they want to have control of the whole process.

Finding profitable ways of giving power to consumers is now the only way to succeed at giving them what they really want. How can you know what your customer wants?

Here is an example of how technology can be your friend. An on-line MasterCard survey revealed that its customers didn’t want more stuff, but they did want the emotional rewards that buying more stuff brings. With its “Priceless” marketing campaign, Master Card capitalized on this shift in consumer preferences, focusing on the emotional rewards.

What does your ideal customer want? The first step is to identify this “ideal customer” and get to know them very well. If they want a car, let them take control of the process, and if they want a stuffed animal, let them control and customize that too.

Build-a- Bear, for instance, enjoys tremendous success by allowing the customer to take charge. At the retail locations of Build-a-Bear, total customization is available to every patron.

As another example, at car Web sites running from GM to Toyota buyers build their personalized vehicles and are offered dozens of ways in which the car may be customized.

Long before technology, we all enjoyed it when we got the opportunity to make our own ice cream sundae. It’s always been fun to “have it your way,” but only recently has technology given the consumer the tools to do so.

Just a few years ago at Walmart.com, you could click on music and build your own CD for eighty-eight cents per song. After listening to sound clips on line, you could select from over 400,000 titles, and when finished, slip a blank CD in your disk drive and burn your customized album or have Wal-Mart burn it and ship it to you. It was the essence of a-la-carte purchasing.

More recently MP3 players permit instant a-la-carte access to billions of songs and music videos thru such services as Rhapsody and iTunes and they boast a menu of over 10 billion choices and growing. They are available 24/7.

“Power to the people” is the absolute, new key to success in our globally competitive new world. Does your Internet site and entire organization allow people to take control of what and how they buy? Your process should allow customer control, because that’s what your customer wants.

Questions for discussion:

Who is our “ideal customer,” what do they really want and how can we get more of them to do business with us?

How can we give our customer a greater level of control in dealing with us and how could we give our customers more options so they can customize the product or service we offer as well as how they receive it?

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