I read this interesting piece of article in Wired about a company called MusicToday and their business model. It conjured-up a lot of thoughts in my head on how marketing and marketing service providers have to reinvent themselves for this new era.
In the article, John Legend, the musician quotes "I can't let someone else have more control over the relationship people have with my music than I do,". The article goes on to explain "there's a compelling lesson here for any company that makes a product: If you control a piece of the transaction, you understand more about your customers. By aggregating fan data that artists haven't usually been privy to, Musictoday can help shape decisions such as where to tour, advertise, or deploy superfans to evangelize. Considering that an estimated 60% of concert tickets typically go unsold every year, that kind of targeting is no small contribution. "We're able to say to artists, 'We know more about your fans than you do,'" says Nathan Hubbard, 31, who runs Musictoday as Capshaw's chief of staff. "Let's put our heads together and figure out how to monetize this relationship."
This is the fundamental shift that marketing has to take accountability for. It's more than just building a brand and a set of values around it. It's about owning customers by identifying them, understanding their behaviour real time, adding value to their relationship with the brand continously and building a tangible bond with the customer and the product. Marketing, therefore, has to extract budgets for doing all of this rather than just building awareness and recall.
Also, there is a lesson in this for agencies/consultants/marketing services providers too. Their product is an idea. Are they monetizing it well enough is the question that came to my mind. It needs a new revenue model to extract value around every touch point the idea is creating an impact and therefore build a tangible revenue or value for them. It needs dumping of old methods and thinking of new ones. Of course, keeping the customer at the core of all their efforts.