The traditional marketing industry is based on two key assumptions. Consumers are ignorant and believe what they are told. Without this advertising can’t work nearly, not nearly, as well. Yet we have seen internationally that both those assumptions have proven to be false. 2010 could well be the year the penny drops, but probably not completely.

The assumption was once true: consumers were ignorant – they got their information from the company, from salesmen from advertising. Customers also used to believe what they were told; they trusted advertising – business controlled the brand message.

Not only does research around the world show that trust in advertising has declined but we also know that through the Internet and by their own connections, customers have access to an unbelievable mountain of information, opinions and comments. Just these facts have changed marketing forever. It’s with this backdrop that I make my predictions for 2010.

1. Someone will notice that, in spite of conventional wisdom, South Africans are connected. I mean, more than 30% of us access social sites on our cellphones alone on a daily basis. Everyone has a phone, even at the lower levels of society, with the majority capable of connecting to the Internet. But they won’t know how to use this information.

2. Marketers will be the first to cotton on. They will be influenced by their international contacts and will finally realise that the excuses of “but the majority of South Africans don’t use the Internet” and that we just don’t have the bandwidth are exactly that: excuses. With the new undersea cables coming into South Africa and Africa, bandwidth as a problem will soon be a thing of the past.

3. Local advertising agencies will be leaning back, secure in their misunderstandings but becoming slowly unsettled, as they listen to their international colleagues talking about the international media bloodbath and the need to rush to digital. They will see their international associates buy digital agencies – or even start a division of their own. BUT they won’t be the core of the business.

4. Agencies will still see digital and online as a media channel and start integrating into them more and more, not realising that the key characteristic of the Internet is that it’s a social creation. It’s about people connecting, not about the technology, or even the sites themselves.

5. Internationally, the lead will be taken by thought leaders – who realise that social media is not separate from the individual’s total life experience – making sure that digital eventually becomes the centre of the brand connection, not an adjunct.

6. From a technology point of view, manufacturers will be accelerating their efforts to make sure that connection to the Internet is ubiquitous and cheap. At the high end, Apple’s iPhone is already carrying more web data than any other mobile device; but there are netbooks, tablets, the Android phone and the soon-to-be announced Apple iSlate all making sure that, more and more, the web experience is accessible and separate from the technology.

7. The way people are finding stuff on the Internet is changing; this may start having an effect on traditional digital marketing. The filter that most users will place on getting the data they want will be their friends. SEO optimisation techniques will be under huge pressure from new search algorithms and as “friend” filters and real-time search guide web users.

8. There will be a lot of flapping in media circles as traditional media morphs. The resistance movement led by the News Corp relics will continue to resist and will become increasingly irrelevant. Media entrepreneurs led by the former journalist will reinvent the way the news is spread and the financial models related to that.

9. With every major change in society, new players will emerge, new approaches will take form and the cards in the pack will be reshuffled. I believe that we will see the first major signs of that in South Africa in 2010.

Marketing will change because consumers have changed. Consumers are no longer ignorant, whether they are 25 or 52 and living in Diepsloot or Dainfern; they have unprecedented access to information, they are buying online and are part of massive electronic networks.

Maybe the penny will drop, maybe it won’t. Then next year’s predictions will be to guess how big the splash will be as the dinosaurs fall into the marketing tar pit and their new competitors, more nimble, like mammals, create a new marketing ecosystem.

This post first appeared in Bizcommunity trends report.

Picture by The invizible on flickr

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At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960′s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.

The website appears to be nothing special although I refer you to a Business Report article in which Mike Sutcliffe, who is the eThekwini (Durban) city manager, said that the technology that would be used for the website was generally not in use in South Africa. “My understanding is that it is really state-of-the-art stuff.”

Internet guru Arthur Goldstuck noted in the same report that the city’s World Cup website appeared to be using technology that was already available and it did not require new software to be developed. “It doesn’t make sense for that kind of money to be spent on this kind of site,” Goldstuck added.

It may be tempting to take advantage of a naive client, but a professional business would understand that this is the time to be the “trusted advisor.” AdaptIT, are doing this site. They have reportedly declined to comment and appear to be an IT company and not a internet marketing company. The site has a communications role.

If all this is true they are doing the entire industry a huge disservice. This is still a new industry and we really don’t need to be seen as fly by nights.

. . . is this a case of “Trust me I’m a doctor?”

Understanding shifts in power may be fundamental in understanding the new marketing.  In Powershift Alvin Tofler describes the generic sources of power as violence, wealth and knowledge. He sees power moving along a continuum Starting with violence which can only being able to be used negatively, wealth which is potentially both positive and negative and knowledge which is empowering and therefore positive.

During the Industrial Revolution, power shifted from the nobility which relied on violence to industrialists and financiers who acted through wealth although often used negatively. Power derived from wealth is now being overtaken by power derived from knowledge.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. In this video he talks about linking data and making a more powerful and more equal sharing of knowledge.

Our business education teaches us about power and control, we learn about planning, implementing and controlling. We manage all our business processes by measuring and adjusting them in order to keep them in control. When we study the top marketing texts we learn from prominent authors such as Kotler and Keller who talk about the process of marketing and the process of branding and the management of brands, in which marketers exercise control.

It’s a discussion about power.

The underlying assumption is that organisations have branding power because largely they have control over the information that the consumer gets. Certainly the information available in store and in the media.

But more and more research is showing that there is a gap between the way organisations value brands and the way consumers value brands, this thought is explored by John Gerzema in The Brand Bubble. He regards it as potentially catastrophic.

So what is this all telling us?

The power shift process that Tofler was telling us about is a fact and it is  the most fundamental societal change that we will experience during our lifetime. This change has been accelerated by the process that Sir Tim describes in his talk at TED. It will be future accelerated by the windows that all of mankind will soon have to the machine that is the World Wide Web, access through computers, notebooks but ALSO through cheap $100 cloudbook or netbook computers, but maybe even more importantly through the window to the www provided by the ubiquitous cell or mobile phone.

The marketing and business challenge.

We must learn that we have to give up the illusion of control that we have over our brands. I say illusion because the force that I describe is irresistible, its take up in the rural areas of Kwa Zulu Natal may be still a way off, but not that long a while.

We have to understand how this new world citizen lives, how he interacts, and how he uses this knowledge. We need to understand very quickly how he or she transforms and shares the knowledge and the communications instruments he or she cheap editing software through blogs, vlogs, twitter and online sharing sites such as YouTube, and how quickly this information spreads around the world.

We need to understand that brand will no longer be in our control, because we don’t control the information. The brand is in the control of our customers because they have the knowledge, the access to data and the ability to share that data through the Internet.

What business, Ad Agencies and everyone in marketing needs to understand is how to let go, how to let consumers co-create our brands.

We have to give our customers, our fans, the tools to allow them to use those tools to build our brands with us.

This is not as scary as you think.

Photo from tattoodjj’s stream on Flickr

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