Decoding Modern Marketing: How To Cultivate Customers
Instead of living for your love and attention, grateful for a pat on the head, customers have their own agenda, make up their own minds, and rarely respond just because you ring that bell.
Buyers were once like your trusty dog: easy to excite and guaranteed to come when you called. Now they’re more like cats: finicky, unpredictable, and very independent. Instead of living for your love and attention, grateful for a pat on the head and ready to respond at a moment’s notice, they have their own agenda, make up their own minds, and rarely respond just because you ring that bell.
This is the world of the new consumer. If you want to sell someone something, you have entice, seduce, and tempt them to pay attention to your offer. With the power shifting from companies to the people, brands must approach selling very differently.
At the core of this change is cultivating the customer. That basically means taking those who show interest in your brand and nurturing them until they are persuaded and ready to buy. This is the battlefield where brands win or lose. Can they engage and hold their prospects’ attention long enough? Can they produce a consistently compelling stream of content that stands out? Can they capture enough behavioral data on their prospects and customers to know what to do when?
Cultivation has become a complex business—a stew of science and technology that enables brands to know more, faster, and at a much higher bar for the creativity required to differentiate a brand from the competitive noise.
This is the subject of the latest chapter of the “Decoding Modern Marketing” series. Building on the strategic work that informs your choices in Chapter 1, and the branding work required in Chapter 2, I then outlined how to take a brand to market in Chapter 3. The fourth chapter discusses what happens after you’ve reached out to consumers for the first time. It explores what to do with all those people who don’t come running when you call, but instead act coy and cat-like, waiting to be cultivated and nurtured—if you have the ability.