Brand Republic post: Marketing will be a customer service

March 22, 2007

I’ve posted some thoughts on Ask.com’s Information Revolution at the Brand Republic blog:

Why marketing should be a customer service?

It’s not for want of technical online or offline or a want of brilliant marketing talent- in-house and agency – that campaigns like this run into trouble.

It’s simply that they have been built back to front. They’ve been designed around the brand and not around the user. In the design world they call this user-centred design: it’s a way of thinking that will be essential for brands to survive in the 21st century.

Technorati tags: brandrepublic, marketing, brands, social+media

Antony Mayfield

Public notebook

3 responses to “Brand Republic post: Marketing will be a customer service”

kelvin newman

March 22, 2007 at 2:31 pm

I think a lot of companies get involved with these viral marketing campaigns without really thinking about how their audience might react.

I know hindsight is a beautiful thing, but its common knowledge that a lot of users have a passionate relationship with Google. These are just the people to leave comments and explore viral marketing targeted at them.

It might well be a number of the people visiting the Information Revolution aren’t as pro google as those leaving the negative comments. But the 1 Percenters are having a negative influence on the success of the campaign.

It doesn’t surprise me the pro google mob have come out en mass. This could probably only have been more ill thought out if microsoft had tried it against Apple.
Asi

March 22, 2007 at 5:24 pm

I think you’re missing the point here.

the whole campaign is purely lame.

First look try to position this organisation as a sort of free choice organisation campaigning against the dominance of Google.

But it’s a campaign for Ask.

The worst thing you can do today is create a campaign for a big cororation and disguised it behind grassroots look-alike campaaign.

That’s what happens when you hi-jack an insight (or in this case a genuine human concern) and trick people into coming to your site. Strangely they don’t like it. Fair play to them for leaving the comments open, but I bet they were wishing they hadn’t.
Antony Mayfield

March 22, 2007 at 5:30 pm

Thanks, Asi, I think you’re right. I’m making another point, but I’ve not been harsh enough on the Ask campaign: it is lame. And wrong.

Not being a Londoner I wasn’t exposed to the dummy ads, so I wasn’t fooled or irritated.

Tom Hopkins has made a similar point in the comments on the BR blog.