Reception Marketing: A New Era of Connection

Every so often, marketing goes through a revolution of sorts. Sure, there are changes every day in the world of marketing. New tools pop up, new problems arise and new solutions are provided.

But over the past 100 years or so, we’ve seen some major shifts in what effective marketing looks like. Sometimes those shifts are caused by technological advancements. Sometimes it’s economic challenges. Other times societal or cultural interests tip the scales.

Regardless of the cause, these macro factors change how consumers, who are (believe it or not) actual people, behave. Our challenge, as marketers and business leaders, is to understand both why and how they’re changing and respond accordingly.

The ultimate goal would be to sniff these changes out early and proactively adjust, but historically we as marketers have settled for reactive measures to follow the markets once they’ve shown us where they’re going.

The Evolution of Marketing

In the 1930s the business world changed forever with the development of daytime radio programming specifically designed to support commercials for household supplies.

At that time the largest segment of the listening audience was female homemakers so there was clearly relevance. In fact, for radio—both as a channel and at that time—this was remarkable targeting, all things considered.

The ads and the programming were a success, paving the way for this content, which we now know as soap operas, to eventually make its way onto television. In 1941, just prior to soaps crashing the TV scene, Bulova Watch Co. ran the first television ad, a 10-second spot before a Major League Baseball game.

From there, it was off to the races.

Television programming expanded and with that came more and more opportunities for brands to enter the homes of the consumer. The peak, of course, came during the 1960s and 1970s with the Mad Men era.

Television and radio advertising became big business. Creativity was at a premium and a spotlight was beginning to be cast on marketing like never before.

There was just one problem with this approach.

It relied on interrupting the audience to deliver the message. People would tune into the programming because they wanted to watch the show or listen to the ball game and every so often their experience would be interrupted by a commercial. Whether or not what the commercial was selling was of any interest to an individual viewer was inconsequential. Everyone saw the same commercial at the same time.

That’s not how you win over consumers. Nor is it the best way to target your ideal demographic.

We know this now.

But, for many decades, this was the only way.

Brands had no better options and consumers knew nothing different. Thankfully, with the advent of the internet and the sophistication of digital technology, newer (and better) methods of marketing emerged.

Interruption Marketing vs. Permission Marketing

In 1999, author and marketing wizard Seth Godin introduced the concept of Permission Marketing, which he pitted in stark contrast to the challenges of traditional advertising. In a stroke of genius, he labeled the old way “Interruption Marketing”, which struck an adversarial tone compared to the much more welcoming idea of “Permission Marketing”.

Of course marketing would be better and more effective when delivered with the audiences’ permission. Just like the name implies, Permission Marketing requires the individual consumer to grant the brand permission to market to them.

Why would any marketer want to interrupt when they could get permission instead?

Godin’s coining of the phrase coincided with the increased adoption of email marketing and as new tools began to emerge, email surfaced as one of the most effective channels to reach consumers in a less intrusive manner than ever before.

As a result, email marketing became the gold standard example of marketing with permission.

Still, just because someone gave you “permission” one time in order to receive access to a whitepaper or a coupon doesn’t mean they want to receive every promotional email you will ever want to send them. It doesn’t even mean they want informational or educational emails if they are unrelated to the topic that originally brought them to you.

In the second half of the 00s, social media took off and consumers expressed their consent by liking and following brand pages and profiles. This created additional opportunities for Permission Marketing.

More recently, as technology continued to evolve, other methods emerged along the spectrum as more permission than interruption. Strategies like retargeting advertisements or highly targeted ads driven by social network algorithms allowed marketers to much more closely align with the anticipated interests of their audience.

For a while, everything seemed to be going well. Email marketing tools popped up everywhere. Social advertising took off. Marketers could not only better measure their efforts, but they were seeing dramatic improvements in their returns.

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Except there was a problem brewing. Two, in fact.

The Problems With Interruption and Permission Marketing

There are two problems with both Interruption and Permission Marketing. They weren’t always an issue, but as the world has changed and marketing has evolved, challenges have emerged.

The first is that they’re intrusive. We’ve discussed and I think it’s pretty clear why Interruption Marketing is intrusive, but Permission Marketing was positioned as the non-intrusive alternative to interruption.

So how is it that Permission Marketing is now also intrusive?

When compared to Interruption Marketing, the idea that consumers would be empowered to initiate who they received marketing from and how, it was clearly the preferred method. However, when consumers receive permission marketing is still not of their choosing.

An email (even one they’ve opted in to receive) still fills their inbox among non-promotional emails from friends and family or co-workers. Reading (or mass-deleting) them interrupts their other work. That is if the email even reaches the inbox and doesn’t get sent to the promotions tab or **gasp** the spam filter.

A social media ad, even one from a company they follow, still interrupts their scroll as they seek out cat memes and photos of their college roommate and his family.

In either case, the consumer isn’t going to their inbox or scrolling their Facebook feed seeking those messages.

Even if a consumer once gave permission to be marketed to, if they’re not actively looking for that information at the time they are presented with it, it’s still an interruption from what they’re doing.

The second problem is both Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing are based on a push marketing approach. This relies on brands pushing out their message and/or products in a manner that is of the brand’s choosing, not the consumers’.

A more ideal way is for the brands to create marketing that they don’t have to push out to their audience, but that instead pulls the audience in. To do that you need two things: compelling content that educates and helps to solve your audience’s problems and a clear understanding of what those problems are.

But Permission Marketing Made Sense. What Changed?

Since the turn of the century? A lot. Most consequentially in the marketing world has been the dawn of the age of consumer empowerment.

Technological breakthroughs have led to consumer expectations of information on demand. Think about it. Smartphones in every pocket. An abundance of streaming apps on every TV.

Consumers are in control and they’ve come to expect that control at every stage of their buying journey.

That has the potential to create problems for marketers who have historically relied on captive audiences to force-feed marketing messaging. Of course, with every problem comes an opportunity.

And the opportunity before every marketer today is to acknowledge the newest evolution in the marketing spectrum: Reception Marketing.

Introducing Reception Marketing: A New Era of Connection

At the end of the day, effective marketing is all about drawing consumers toward your brand, service, or product to entice them to buy from you. Reception Marketing does this in a way that Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing never could. It prioritizes consumer connection by aligning the marketing assets directly with consumer needs – even if what they need right now isn’t your product or service.

What is Reception Marketing?

Reception Marketing is all about recognizing that consumers are operating on their own unique frequency as they move through the buyer’s journey. Depending on their problems, needs, concerns, pains, etc. that frequency ebbs and flows.

It’s the marketer’s job to identify when their audience is most receptive to certain messages and where they will most likely be at that point in time. Then, we align our marketing messaging to match the frequency signals of the consumer.

This approach is challenging to do at scale — how do we create custom marketing to reach every individual’s specific need, concern, and pain point?

Owned Asset Optimization (OAO) is the most effective strategy to capitalize on the opportunities and satisfy the challenges that come with Reception Marketing.

OAO is different from other marketing because it is asset-first and channel agnostic. It requires marketers to evaluate consumer intent data in order to understand their problems and desires in a way that channel-first campaigns can’t.

Armed with that knowledge, brands can develop marketing assets that they own (i.e. those they have full creative and technical control over) and further distribute those messages across other assets and channels they manage and/or leverage.

As opposed to channel-driven campaigns, OAO allows brands to really tap into the individual needs of a consumer and use the right asset at the right time to pull them into the brand’s ecosystem.

This is the critical first step in developing meaningful consumer connections that replace ambivalence with trust and transactions with relationships.

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Connections Create Conversions

For brands to fully realize the true value of their marketing efforts (beyond just transactional ROI), marketers must recognize the importance of real consumer connections.

Brand/consumer connections lead to conversions. Not the other way around.

Sure, you might make a sale and grow that customer into a loyal devotee of your brand after the sale, but that initial sale is so much harder to come by (and more expensive to obtain) when the relationship begins as a transactional one.

Instead, we should start thinking from a place of consumer service rather than customer service. Provide value to your audience when they’re in need before they’ve bought anything from you. Earn their trust.

And then, when it comes time to make a purchase, will they choose your transactional-focused competitor or you, the trusted brand that led with value first and guided them throughout their journey?

BONUS READ – Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase chats about the evolution of ABM in this webchat with MarTechSeries: