A chasm has opened up betwee Advertisers and Customers.

Consumers are deaf to the babble of the advertising class. It is true to say that all the advertising in the world won't bring the customers back!

Spending a huge fortune on TV advertising?

Rest assured these days your advertising slipped into the huge gulf of mistrust, disbelief and total lack of interest that now separates the Advertising Class from everybody else.
This gulf is so full of disbelieved advertising and ignored blogs,sales promotion gimmicks,direct marketing and irrelevant banners/radio commercials.

The cynicism about advertising is so pervasive that it embraces almost all marketing activity. Use a statistic? It's a lie. This cynicism extends to the media, all advertising is seen as fiction inside an untruth wrapped in piece of spin!
Most advertising proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree of trust. As if the message was still getting through, still be listened to, still being weighed up. It must be hard to be in Advertising and to carry on if the truth were faced.

For example, the rubbish that the food industry has fed people for decades, along with its (literally) toxic products and the lies and omissions that it has disseminated, well now is the time to challenge this concerted project of misinformation, corruption and silence together with the programme to keep people as ignorant as possible about factory farming. Myths trotted out regularly.

The incredible plethora of choices consumers now possess has a downside, and it's called exhaustion. An overwhelming number of possibilities complicates every buying decision. Add to that all the other more baroque aspects of modern life, such as two-income households, frequent divorce and remarriage and blending of families, increasing traffic, shortening news cycles, and 100 channels of cable television, and you wind up with a consumer group that feels very over loaded and harassed.

Stand back. Stop thinking like the operator and start thinking like a customer. Better, talk to real customers. Or, better still, to real non-customers. What do they want? What is missing for them?
Customer focus is important all the time, and is one of the main advantages that small firms enjoy over their apparently stronger and more profitable larger rivals. In good economic times, it's almost inevitable that, for big companies, the needs of customers will drop down the list of corporate priorities, to some degree. This creates an opportunity for small firms with a distinctive customer offering to move in and clean up.

Knowing your customers is especially useful at times of abrupt and unexpected change - a recession, for example. Having a strong sense of why people buy from you as well as what they buy can help you to avoid damaging knee-jerk responses. Is everyone else in your sector rushing down-market in anticipation of a boom in demand for cut-price 'value' offerings? If you stick it out at the top of the market, you might be able to grab for yourself a big chunk of the tasty high-margin business that remains.

Now, in future you must remember this, engaging your audience is key to your future successr
You should focus on "engagement", "relevance" and "customization" to make an impact with consumers.
Additionally the rise of new media has ushered in the era of "performance marketing".
Businesses hoping to derive the maximum benefit from digital media must provide customers with information tailored to their individual needs, be it on mobile or the web, or analogue mediar
Communications should also take the form of a two-way conversation, with consumers being able to customise the content they receive in line with their personal preferences.

This means adopting a truly interactive communication mindset. The age of push marketing is behind us. What counts now are dialogue, engagement and relevance, Digital channels that can deliver consumers with established interests can charge handsomely for that capability.

Customer focus is important, because it can help you to see beyond industry orthodoxy and understand why people buy from you rather than go somewhere else. It requires a different mindset and the ability to cast aside those cherished, but often erroneous, shibboleths about what can and cannot be done, that all businesses create for themselves.

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