New limits on advertising

My favorite quote from a recent MotiveQuest 2-pager sums up one of the major changes brought about by social media:

"Marketers have to recognize that the ability to overcome product perfomance that does not meet consumer drivers is rapidly diminished with the rise of social computing and the distrust in mainstream advertising channels."

At a holiday dinner table discussion about customer service (everyone had a horror story about cable,telco or a bank) someone made the point about how much advertising Comcast is doing and how the customer service and the actual service delivery falls far short. What if they diverted money from advertising into the customer experience?

Can advertising save them?

Comments

[mjmantey]

For Comcast, I think they continue to look at the acquisition end of the funnel. Bring in more people than you lose . . . keep rolling along. Why do it differently if that is working marginally well? In their case, the competitive options are slim. The satellites have gotten increasing complicated and Verizon has proven to be just as focused on the same end of the funnel.

I'm baffled by it as well. Spending hundreds of millions on advertising and communications with little regard for building loyalty and evangelism.

I've always been miffed (as a long-time Comcast customer spending hundreds a month) that they don't communicate with me at all, other than a flimsy direct mail piece about lineup changes periodically. They know what we watch on our TV(s); how about sending an email promo (or text message) of relevant programming from time to time.

The social media switch isn't happening because you can't justify the investment as immediately as the current internal organizational models that were built to support traditional spend justification. In the end those traditional models are just predictions. We have to be willing to do the same modeling to justify an increased share.

[John Bell]

Your points are dead on, MJ. It makes intuitive sense that cablecos and telcos woudl adopt customer-cherishing programs but the econimic model and performance measurement is all centered around churn and acquisition. Perhaps there is an opportunity for an industry rebel to challenge the status quo.