Wikipedia, LEGO and John Sergeant

Ever wondered what Wikipedia, Lego and John Sergeant have in common? Read on.

Ok, I’m sorry. You must have hoped that that by now you had heard the last of the social and cultural phenomenon that is, or was, John Sergeant. But please bear with me.

And lest you have just returned from a far flung galaxy, and even there you might have heard the news, or been sharing a cave with Mr Bin Laden, here is a short précis. If you have been to neither of these places, you can skip the next paragraph.

Mr Sergeant is a TV political correspondent previously better known for being brutally shoved out of the way by Maggie Thatcher’s press Rottweiler live on TV sometime in the early 1990s. This clearly was not fame enough and so he chased the limelight again on a prime time Saturday evening dance competition cum entertainment show. He can’t dance but every week The Great British Public, believing it to be an entertainment show, which I thought Saturday night TV was for, kept him dancing to the annoyance of the judges, to dance professionals and to the much better amateur dancers TGBP booted off. With me so far. There were Facebook sites, blogs and online campaigns dedicated to keeping him on the show. The world may be going to hell in a handcart, banks going bust and the environment being destroyed but the survival of Mr Sergeant was our main preoccupation. And then thinking it was getting a wee bit OTT, he did the decent thing, fell on his sword and danced his last waltz. The nation was up in arms, it was headline news and I am pretty sure that Gordon Brown, seeing a bandwagon passing by, must have jumped on it and demanded resignations at the BBC. It was a JFK moment, a Thatcher resignation flashback, a Neil Armstrong landing on the moon memory. We will all remember where we were when we heard the news. Me? I was in a queue when it came up on a TV screen and those around me called friends, family and even strangers to spread the news. I kid you not. It was a phenomenon.

Ok we are now all up to speed. Now let’s get serious and consider what is going on here. And I think this has implications for business and how it markets itself in the 21st century.

I believe that the age of businesses talking down to customers or viewers through traditional marketing tools, techniques and communication channels, is over. The You Tube and Facebook mindset is here, and that is not just an age thing as even a digital immigrant like me has been seen on Facebook. This mindset is no longer satisfied with being told what to think, feel and do, or even who they should watch dancing. We want to participate in the process.

Traditional talk down marketing will continue to have a place, albeit on the margins, but the advance of web 2.0 or user generated content capabilities is making it increasingly easy for us as individual consumers to circumvent the wiles of traditional marketing techniques. Today the action is happening on social networking sites such as the sort we are banned from using at work, on notice boards, blog sites and community forums. The challenge for businesses and even TV dance competitions is how to engage through these channels of communication and to reflect and to stay ahead of its views and opinions.

The online communities set up to canvass support for Mr Sergeant’s dance floor stroll to music is a powerful demonstration of this. And conversations and chatter like this are happening online right now about many big name businesses, products and services. Scary and powerful.

The fate of many consumer businesses is no longer in the hands of the big bold brassy TV ad in the break at Coronation St persuading you how to think, feel and act but in our anonymous online digits spreading chatter, thoughts and opinions to places not reached by a Coronation St ad break.

Businesses must now engage in conversation with their customers and with their markets, find ways to build a true and meaningful dialogue instead of the marketing monologue that has been the practice of marketers to date. And that we must find a way to use the technologies that are out there to start these conversations.

And at the same time consumer expectations for choice and control have risen off the scale, and with them demands for greater customisation. The ‘you can have any colour you want so long as its black’ approach to product development has gone. Look at all the options now available to car buyers. For a business which is prepared to take the risk there are dedicated communities of advocates who are willing to contribute ideas and opinions and to co-create the next generation of products and services. Even help co-create dance competitions masquerading as Saturday night light entertainment.

And if you want some other examples of this beyond our combined efforts to use the new technologies and mindsets to wipe the smug smile off the face of Craig Revell-Horwood, think Wikipedia though it does frighten the pants off me that this is now a prime source of reference for today’s younger generation. And LEGO famously invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then reward those people whose ideas were taken up. And does Amazon not allow all of us to become a critic and contribute our thoughts and opinions on a book, a CD or DVD.

So this kind of marketing, which I call 4 C marketing can and does work. Just ask John Sergeant.

And here is this week’s Big Question. The first snow flurries have this week arrived but why do we now close schools at first sign of a fall in temperature? I come from a frozen extremity of the country and from a time before global and warming never appeared in same sentence but I don’t remember ever missing a day of school just because we had to scrape ice from the car, indeed we did not even have a car. It made me the person I am today. Are today’s children frightened to leave their warm centrally heated environment? Or is it down to that scourge of modern society, the most economically damaging three words in history, health and safety? Your thoughts please. All I can say is that we should be grateful our kids don’t live in the Alps or somewhere where it really snows. Sure we would do really well at the winter Olympics but would our children be able to read and write?
Have a great week. Ave atque vale. Et este fortunatus.