Harvard Business Review Article Reinforces The Core of Custom Publishing
The new January 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review has a fabulous article called Rethinking Marketing. It is a must read article for all chief marketing officers but even more so for agencies who make their living by supporting marketing initiatives and have seen their traditional advertising business continue to erode.
The article correctly identifies a fundamental shift in marketing that custom publishers have benefited from over the past ten years. This trend has resulted more than ten straight years of increases in custom publishing spending by marketers while mass media advertising has fallen dramatically. The secret that custom publishing “gets” is that customers today expect to interact deeply with companies, and with each other to shape the products and services they consume. It is the customer who has the control to determine whether a product is successful and no amount of traditional advertising can change that.
In order to be successful, HBR points out that companies must shift their focus to building their long-term relationships with their customers rather than trying to “influence or push” customers to buy. Today it’s about understanding the complex needs of customers, nuturing them, cultivating them and retaining them for the long run. Smart marketers are shifting from measuring product profitability to measuring customer profitability. Just as importantly, traditional marketing goals like brand equity and market share are being replaced by new objectives like customer equity and customer lifetime value.
Customer, rather than product objectives have been the core of custom publishing for more than a decade. The essence of custom publishing has always been focused on building long-term relationships between marketers and their customers. The unique ability that custom content has enhance customer relationships and increase lasting loyalty is the secret to custom publishing‘s stellar growth. Custom publishers have a ten year head start on traditional advertising agencies on understanding how to use content to build customer relationships. With the explosive growth of digital delivery channels giving customers instantaneous access to content as well as each other, custom content providers will continue to flourish as more and more marketers shift from pushing individual products to building long-term customer relationships.
