Customer, Sell Thyself

Clickstreams. Hypertext. Digital cash. Forget CPM and mass mailings. These are the sales and marketing tools of the 21st century, and they're triggering a revolution in the way companies think about the fundamentals of winning customers.

Consider TV, characterized by that glib 30-second pitch to sell you something. The flip side is the Internet: 90% information, 10% persuasion. The Net has turned marketing on its head. It's not about selling anymore; it's about people choosing to buy. It's not about mass marketing; it's about tailoring products and services to a market of one. It's not about us versus them comparisons (Coke vs. Pepsi); it's about empowering the customer to do the comparisons for you.

"The new premise," says New York Web marketer Larry Smith, "is that people will sell themselves, so long as they have the information." As never before, consumers decide what messages they're exposed to.

If that sounds like bad news for traditional marketers, then here's the good news: because they're self-selective, Net customers tend to be more committed (read: lucrative) over time. They are also willing partners, providing instant, ongoing feedback for creating new products and shaping new value propositions.

Not that you can sit back and wait for the orders to roll in. To help harness the power of the Net, use this Fast Company guide to understand its complexities -- both as a new marketplace and as a resource for accomplishing traditional sales and marketing functions more efficiently. Just because you build a Web site doesn't mean they will come.

The internet is transforming the world of sales and marketing. Nearly all the old precepts you once lived by -- advertising efficiency measures, mass-market economies of scale, distribution value chains -- don't quite work anymore. If you're feeling disoriented, use this primer to navigate the big-picture changes wrought by the Web.

New Paradigm: The purpose of business, Peter Drucker once said, is not to make a sale, but to make and keep a customer. Think about the Net in the same way. Most companies spend 80% of their marketing dollars on acquiring customers and then do a lousy job of keeping them satisfied, notes veteran Web marketer Larry Smith of New York-based U.S. Interactive. "The Web," says Smith, "is a killer tool for generating brand loyalty." The key is to leverage the medium for what it does best -- interacting with the customer. That means using e-mail for quick-time customer service, discussion groups for building a sense of community, and database tracking of buying habits for customizing products.

Link To: For a rich study of the conceptual marketing issues of the Internet, visit Project 2000 http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu , a research program at Vanderbilt University. The anchor paper, "Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments," places the Internet's attributes in the context of traditional media. It concludes that a successful Web strategy must incorporate elements of both the short-term exposure of TV and the longer-term nature of reading detailed information, as in a newspaper.

New Paradigm: The classic "P" elements of marketing -- product, place, price, and promotion -- are being turned upside down. Thanks to two-way multimedia communications and transactions, just about every step between the producer and consumer of a product or a service -- warehousing, wholesaling, retailing, advertising, order-taking -- is being eliminated or refashioned.

Link To; Net.Value http://www.owi.com/netvalue/ , a monthly Web magazine, is a good source for finding virtual vendors of everything from condoms to financial services and studying how they are revolutionizing their own marketing processes.

New Paradigm: Information as a brand asset. Indeed, many experts are coming to consider information itself as the value proposition.

Link To: Wonder why Toyota's home page http://www.toyota.com highlights fitness articles, career advice, cultural chat areas, and other features devoid of automobile propaganda? Even if Toyota successfully establishes its "Hub" lifestyle site as a hip center for active young adults, there's no guarantee that they'll buy a new Celica. But Toyota stands a better chance of getting them at least to consider a Celica when they're ready to buy -- and that's half the battle for any marketer.

New Paradigm: Forget the old assembly-line model of promoting products to the masses. The Net's inherent interactivity between vendor and customer is yielding a new model of customized production and individualized distribution. It says: "The easier it is for you to tell me what you want, the more efficiently I can tailor a solution just for you -- and lock you in for the long term."