The Challenge of Customisation, operations and marketing

There is a new dominant logic for marketing.
This is about just in time rather than just in case marketing and marketing communications.
But let's go back to 1939 Bound for glory America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. In it is a drugstore. Its clapboard sides covered in typographic descriptions of the stores contents: baths, pans, beds, tobacco etc. In many ways it seems so curiously innocent. This little drugstore waiting for people from the surrounding countryside to passby and enter the store to buy something. Its just in case marketing model seems apt and non-invavsive.
But just in case communications becomes destructive and intrusive, like a B52 bomber dropping its payload over a vast area just in case you might be there.
In terms of marketing communications it is called intrusion like any intruder: unwelcome and unwanted.
There are many reports, from the CIM, Deutsche Bank, Yankelovich that have measured and described the varied circumstances of why we feel so assualted by conventional marketing communications. This is what Yankelovich has to say:

Consumers see two principal benefits from marketing and advertising? The social benefit of helping the economy and the personal benefit of providing useful information. In fact, perceptions of the information value of marketing and advertising have increased somewhat from 1964 to 2004. The top dislike that consumers had of advertising in 1964 has gotten worse. Intrusiveness has always been the one thing that consumers dislike the most about marketing and advertising. The greater percentage of consumers mentioning this dislike in 2004 arises from the exponentially greater degree of clutter and intrusiveness true of the marketplace today.
Negative opinions and concerns about intrusiveness give rise to consumer resistance to marketing. And this resistance reduces the effectiveness of marketing and adds to the cost of doing business. The fervor with which consumers are resisting marketing suggests that the impact on marketing productivity is considerable.
60% describe themselves as a person who tries to resist or avoidbeing exposed to marketing and advertising.
69% say that they are interested in products and services that enable them to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to marketing and advertising. Contrast these overwhelming percentages with the mere
15% that were estimated by the 1964 AAAA study to be concerned enough about advertising to believe that it needed some attention and change. Marketing resistance affects buying decisions as well. The marketing practices of products and brands can lose customers.
54% say that they avoid buying products that overwhelm them with marketing and advertising.

So what do you do as a business, as a CEO, as a marketer?
Perhaps one way forward is in bringing together Operations and Marketing
The low cost airline Go, so successfully hardwired its marketing communications into selling inventory, that Easy Jet bought Go to take out its fiercest competition, is one example whilst Thomas Cook TV is another? 150m of inventory sold from a? 2.5m operating base.
Streamlining marketing and operations can create new marketspace and a very different type of demand.
At this point marketing becomes a valuable strategic tool as oppposed to the mongrel dog, that it seems so often to be seen as.
As Mike Bayler describes in his the book the Promiscuous Customers we now live in an age when context not content is king. Where meaning customer knowledge and advocacy are now recognised as the fundamental source of competitive advantage.
SMLXL have undertaken research in a number of industry sectors. And from this research started to, as Tom Peters would say Re-imagine what the world might look like from a customer perspective. That in turn would deliver growth and increased profitability to companies.