Letting Consumers Control Marketing: Priceless

By Stuart Elliott
New York Times

ORLANDO, Fla.
REMEMBER the old advertising slogan, “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat”?
Marketers of all sorts are now being urged to give up the steering wheel to a new breed of consumers who want more control over the ways products are peddled to them. Exhortations to bring consumers into the tent dominated the agenda of the 96th annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, which took place here Thursday through yesterday. The nearly 1,000 people who attended the conference — a record for the trade group — heard one speaker after another describe a need to replace decades worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches.
“The power is with the consumer,” said A. G. Lafley, chief executive at the Procter & Gamble Company. “Marketers and retailers are scrambling to keep up with her.”
• Procter has long dictated how shoppers should perceive its products, from Gleem toothpaste (“For people who can’t brush after every meal”) to Jif peanut butter (“Choosy mothers choose Jif”). Today, “we’re on a learning journey together” with the consumer, Mr. Lafley said, watching customers “choosing when to tune in and when to tune out” advertising with technology like digital video recorders and satellite radio.
“Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation,” he said. “We need to learn to begin to let go” and embrace trends like commercials created by consumers and online communities built around favorite products.
The examples Mr. Lafley offered included an animated spot for Pringles snacks created by a teenager and put up on YouTube and a campaign for Pantene that encouraged women to cut their hair and donate the clippings to make wigs for cancer patients. “Most of the experiments don’t work,” Mr. Lafley said, “but we have to be out there, trying.”
Stephen F. Quinn, senior vice president for marketing at Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer, echoed Mr. Lafley.
“Today, the customer is in charge,” Mr. Quinn said, “and whoever is best at putting the customer in charge makes all the money.”
Wal-Mart, struggling to stimulate sluggish sales growth, is “in transformation” and looking beyond its traditional base of rural, low-income customers, Mr. Quinn said. It is aiming to woo a more affluent and suburban “selective shopper” who must be convinced that Wal-Mart has merchandise “up to their quality and taste standards,” he said.
Although “it’s safe to say we have a long way to go,” Mr. Quinn said, “you’ll see a different Wal-Mart in 2007.” For instance, more stores will be customized by location, following a model store in the upscale Dallas suburb of Plano, Tex., which is “proving Wal-Mart can appeal to the Cadillac set,” he added.
“We can sell a $200 bottle of wine,” Mr. Quinn said, adding: “And by the way, the savings on that bottle of wine is $65. Just because you’re affluent doesn’t mean you want to pay more for everything.”
At Mini USA, part of BMW of North America, the fact that so many customers choose to customize their cars showed executives that “we’d never have complete control over the brand,” said James L. McDowell, managing director at Mini USA. About 60 percent of the estimated 40,000 Minis the company sells each year are customized.
For instance, Mr. McDowell said, some Mini owners dress their cars in naughty costumes for Halloween, and two investment bankers mounted mock shark fins atop the roofs of their Minis.
“It’s a great thing every day to wake up and see what consumers have done to the brand,” Mr. McDowell said, even though “it’s not a culture we necessarily would have come up with on our own.”
One brand that has long cultivated a naughty, playful persona is Burger King, with brash campaigns involving new media like YouTube, MySpace, video games and iPods.
That is deliberate, said Russ Klein, president for global marketing, strategy and innovation at Burger King, because with a principal competitor, McDonald’s, owning the family-friendly image, “it’s more important for us to be provocative than pleasant.”
“If you have a global brand promise, ‘Have it your way,’ ” Mr. Klein said, quoting the Burger King ad theme, “it’s about putting the customer in charge,” even if they say “bad things” about the brand.
As consumers “wrest control away from brand-management control freaks,” he advised his peers, “get over it,” because “turning your brand over to the consumer is taking control — and in fact, if you do, they’ll return it to you in better shape.”
• Mr. Klein’s “que será, será” attitude was endorsed by a speaker from MasterCard, whose “Priceless” campaign has been ardently adopted — and adapted — by consumers.
“We can’t manage what happens out there,” said Lawrence Flanagan, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at MasterCard Worldwide. “It has taken on a life of its own.”
When “you’re tapping into that consumer desire to have a piece of it,” he added, referring to a brand or product, “you have to take the good with the bad.” MasterCard, for instance, has tolerated and, arguably, benefited from the spate of profane or off-color parodies of the “Priceless” campaign.
One way to minimize the problem, said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer at Yahoo, is to reach out to consumers who already like a particular brand rather than to a wider audience that may create “something you’re really uncomfortable with.”
For example, Yahoo Music asked fans of the singer Shakira to contribute video clips of them performing her song “Hips Don’t Lie,” and the submissions were culled to produce a fans’ version of her music video.
“I call it participation marketing,” Ms. Dunaway said. “Allow them to help you shape the brand experience.
“Content is no longer something you push out. Content is an invitation to engage with your brand.”


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