Understanding what Social Media – or Social Networking, as I prefer to say – really means for a brand will surely redefine the marketing managers job. Unfortunately she hasn’t really thought about that till now.
The market will call for it more loudly from 2010 on!
The corporation already stripped the marketing managers job description bare of Place, Product and Price, just left him ‘alone in the rain’ (as we say in Germany) with Promotion – dwarfing him to a mere communications or advertising guy who has no real means of influence any more. Packaging and Promotion.
Corporations desperately need a new breed of marketing managers. Forget the 4P, adopt the 2C: Cooperation & Communication.
Cooperation must innovate and develop the brand, product, service, value – refine, co-create, co-innovate it together with consumers, fans, followers. Communication must engage and inspire the individual.
Who really understands target groups? Not the masses, but the individual? Who understands their needs? Who identifies and articulates the cravings of a more and more independent, individual and impatient digital native?
Who will amalgamize the product, service, experience with the engagement and communication of consumers, individuals, gate keepers and critics?
Communication may no longer interrupt what individuals do, but has to become their engagement, their longing and ‘talk of the town’. Communication must be derived from the deepest core of the product, the brand, service – will even become a service itself. Will deliver value itself. Will be a service on top of the existing product. Will even be the product itself.
You cannot delegate this to an agency or consultant. Integrated Cooperation & Communication will become the new center of innovation & value at the heart of the brand and company. The spine of the corporation. The only thing you do not source out.
Only the amalgam of the new product development (cooperation) and the new engagement development (communication!) will successfully innovate and create value(s) for the individual.
Addendum
11. December > “How CMOs Can Also Be Chief Responsibility Officers: It’s Your Job to Create and Promote Your Company’s Socially Responsible Agenda, Culture and Behaviors”, AdAge CMO Strategy.