Engagement Marketing
Why Engagement and beyond social media
Our world of business, media, and communications is evolving from the straight-lines of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics the inter-connective ecology of nature. This interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product and service creation, mass-production and mass media and marketing. It is about the massive flows of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in a manner that has nothing to do with a linear approach too much at all. This is truly an engaged and participatory culture.
For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by a straight-line logic producing considerable economic success. However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of getting stuff done becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the networked society is structural – challenging how markets and organisations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.
This creates a dilemma. And the dilemma is this – How can firms and the people that work in those firms, develop coherent marketing strategies/products and services that are premised upon No-Straight-Line principles – when they have been versed only in Straight-Line thinking – at least for the over 35′s – from birth?
So if the 20th Century was about straight line thinking around commerce, media and communications, the 21st Century will be about a no straight line approach defined as Engagement.
Three questions you need to ask
- Why should a business build Engagement Marketing Initiatives?
- What does it mean to foster Engagement?
- What are the fundamental principals to facilitate Engagement?
The philosophy, principles and tools of Engagement could help sell a product, an industry, a region, or combat a social issue.
Engagement is about connecting large or small communities to an idea/task/goal/passion that they want to be part of, and, that they want to share with their friends driven by a commercial or social agenda.
Engagement Marketing creates stronger customer relationships, greater advocacy and deeper loyalty. Because customers are engaged with the brand, this creates greater value on a business bottom line for multiple stakeholders. It also enables the creation of new business models that make more sense in a participatory culture of no straight lines.
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