The Case for Personal Engagement

"Marketing communications must be reborn as a consumer-centered craft."

--Booz Allen Hamilton

The Summer 2006 Issue of strategy+business, the Booz Allen Hamilton quarterly, is now out and marketing communicators everywhere will want to read "The Future of Advertising Is Now," by Christopher Vollmer, John Frelinghuysen, and Randall Rothenberg.

Although the piece presents itself as "a field guide for the new marketer," the article is less about "how to" than it is a survey of current trends. Nonetheless, it's still a great source of research and anecdotes reflecting of the current shift away from "push" marketing to what I call marketing by personal engagement.

That shift already has been the central focus of countless marketing books and articles. What's new here is evidence that:

1. Marketers are now starting to believe it
2. There are actual payoffs resulting from the new engagement-oriented practices
3. There are common issues marketers face when adopting these practices

Three of those issues are innovation, tighter integration with IT, and complexity. These should sound familiar. They are the reverse side of the key issues driving the new role of IT (which must integrate more tightly with marketing in order to push its own agenda). And just as innovation has become the key competitive asset of the company, it can't help but be the key marketing asset that demonstrates a difference to customers.

As for complexity, marketing communications has (or should have) a ready-made solution: clarity. As messages, offers, and audiences become ever more challenging, the case for personal engagement must be ever more clear, compelling, and pervasive.