Energize Your Marketing Applications With Higher Voltage Communications

"Smart internet marketers earn consumers' confidence once they are self-disclosing and able to make fun of themselves," said Randy Siegel.

Unhappy with the impersonal quality of much of their daily lives, Americans are seeking to reconnect and construct stronger relationships. "In all walks of life, we see a trend toward wanting to convert impersonal transactions into personalized relations," reports famed futurist Daniel Yankelovich.

Connection, or the feeling of belonging, is one of the top three human needs, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow, soon after physical needs. In our well-fed society, nearly all of our physiological and safety needs are becoming met, but for quite a few the need for connection just isn't, and smart businesses are responding.

The image of organizations nowadays is getting altered, says futurist Faith Popcorn in her bestselling book Clicking. "Business will be no longer seen as being a war being won by trouncing the competition, but viewed as being a complicated mosaic for being developed, one relationship at a time."

Sharp marketers forge stronger connections with their constituents by building deeper relationships that result in trust, and this trust is built on the four Ps of higher voltage communications.

Personhood: Personhood calls for corporations to be self-aware, self-accepting, and self-disclosing. To be able to be self-aware and accepting, many marketers use a tool referred to as "gap analysis." During a gap analysis, investigation is conducted to figure out if a company's recent reputation matches its desired one: if it doesn't, further exploration is necessary to uncover why. If it is due to consumers' perceptions, entrepreneurs know they need to do a greater job of advertising, and if it is a real problem, they understand changes must be made.

Personhood also calls for staying authentic, and right after the corporate scandals of 2002, staying authentic has by never been so significant.

"In the current environment, it is time for brands to rethink their basic brand foundation and contemplate adding a pillar around trust. They must clarify their company's values and synchronize them with their customers' values," says Ed Keller, CEO of RoperASW, one of the world's most respected market research firms.

Wise marketers earn consumers' trust once they are self-disclosing and willing to make fun of themselves. A superb example is when Jaguar confronted its reputation for mechanical problems and turned its organization around by advertising, "We kept what you loved. The rest is history."

By putting a face on a product, issue, or organization, substantial voltage marketers use personhood to personalize their solutions. But a pretty face seriously isn't sufficient; these are also using storytelling.

"The power in the story is upstaging the sound bite in advertising," writes Melinda Davis in her book The New Culture of Desire: Five Radical New Strategies That will Change Your Business and Your Life. An excellent story is far more individual and credible than a contrived advertising slogan, and we will remember a story long after a catchy tagline has faded from our memory.

Dave Thomas of Wendy's, Scottie Mayfield of Mayfield Dairies, and Chrysler's Lee Ioccoa are excellent examples of how marketers have used personhood to promote goods. These CEOs are comfortable talking about themselves and are capable to connect their stories to customers' demands. Personalizing and storytelling work mainly because they help men and women form emotional bonds with the organization and its inventory.