We, users, have always been considered capital for marketers but we are still unable to define our capital value as working currency we can capitalize on.
Users place in the marketing mix evolved and their influence grew but a quantum leap is still in need. The companies had users, but didn’t see who they were. But with changing time they can see their users, infiltrate their spheres, try to converse with them and create value that would attract users but they can no longer own users or dictate them.
With changing scenario, its semantics, power balance and arenas but users do not have yet full control. That control demands a paradigm shift – only then only user will be able to exercise the real core of their own capital. The power of sharing and influencing at will, as equal partners negotiating and being rewarded in the food chains created around users.
In the traditional marketing era we were customers, users. Companies’ value increased in parallel to the market chunk they held; it was measured by the percentage of the market share owned and by how much of the customer share they could aspire for.
We, consumers, were targeted through mass media, data companies and sophisticated marketing and sales promotions all across. Marketers owned the scene through aggressive push paradigms aimed at getting to the users wherever they are and accumulating numbers of customers as a basis for the company’s value. Users were capital as components within the marketing mix to be targeted and translated into siloed captivity schemes that would make it very difficult to switch and abandon loyal customer benefits defined and calculated for them.
With the advent of the internet, new semantics described our customer capital value. It was still measured in mass value terms and we were still faceless. For internet based companies users became eyeballs, and the value of the company was measured by the number of eyeballs it owned.
As web 2.0 evolved, users were no longer faceless. Web 2.0 was our web. We had voices, opinions, conversations. Marketers no longer owned the scene. We could independently comment, recommend, warn against, express our dissatisfaction and our peers would listen and be influenced. Marketing campaigns happened in parallel, detached from our conversations or at best responding.
Marketers had to be more careful about the users now. They had to become more credible to earn user’s trust, less intrusive in their attempts to reach them and less aggressive in their means to do so. They had to heavily invest to individually learn about each of users, hire 3rd party companies to monitor users, get to them where we went and develop product lines and personalization schemes that would suit users as individuals.
Only when paradigms will shift, user centered paradigms will enter the game and ecommerce will become fully pull based, the whole marketing discourse will not ignore user as a natural component in the food chain created around and will no longer exclude the user from it. Providers share their profits with targeting companies, advertising agencies but do not approach users directly for their relevant data and do not directly trade with over their attention. How about a marketplace where you can choose between a free downloadable movie with 3 targeted ads and 4$ fee?
Only when these two elements that combine the economics of your context can be safely objectified under your control and user centered controlled systems will ensure your data’s privacy on your behalf. We will be able to translate our capital as customers and our social capital as influencers into workable and tradable currency and become equal partners in the marketing mix.
Author writes regularly about web ecology, user centered initiatives and user centricity. To know about more Attention economy, web evolution from Author visit here.
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