It's all about listening. We're now transforming how we (marketers) gather information about the consumer and how we monitor them through the entire buying cycle. The end goal of our efforts is making sure they become brand/company advocates (the ultimate form of marketing). They must need, love, desire your product. It takes a great product to achieve success, but if you don’t have outstanding customer service, you created a bad product.

A very important responsibility of a company is to listen and respond to what they hear. This could be for hundreds of reasons: trying to launch a new product, responding to a compliant, performing market research. The more creative you listen, the bigger the advantage you have over your competition.

Listening now is much simpler than in the past. In the past you had to perform market research studies, questionnaires, focus groups, product testing groups, panels, etc. Now, because of the way we communicate as a society, we have a place where you can find all of that information in a matter of a few hours. Call it what you want: social networking, social media, inbound marketing, behavioral marketing, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is how it’s transformed how we communicate.

I tried launching this blog last spring and didn’t have enough knowledge of the subjects I want to cover to provide you with valuable, original content. I will be discussing the marketing revolution.

Mark K.