Atomic Theory

Unit 7’s Loreen Babcock explains the ‘Atomic Theory’ in Relationship Marketing Building - the mastery to connect, unite, react and interact with consumers.

“We’ve seen an explosion of creative approaches in the online space over the past several years”
-Loreen Babcock

Connected consumers are at the center, but the center may not be where you think it is.

Relationship marketers find the question, “Why has the customer become central to marketing and branding?” a puzzling one. Most marketers would claim that the customer has always been at the center of their efforts. Perhaps the answer lies in another question: “What is it about ‘the center’ that needs to be discovered?”

The defining characteristic of the beginning of the 21st century is the phenomenon of connectivity and its implications. Many people are experiencing some form of multi-way communications for the first time, while an enormous and expanding demographic have never not known this connectivity. Everyone able to instantly connect to everyone else and all available information provides the experience of being immediately proximate to everyone else and all information. This is the world of “ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity (UCaPP)[i],” into which we are moving.

In a UCaPP world, where consumers have the ability to instantly connect with one another and all the information available about a product, where do we locate ‘the center’? Assuming that the consumer is in the driver’s seat, or that the consumer is making the rules, points to a profound change: consumers now have a practically unlimited ability to meet on ground where they create their own ‘marketing messages’ for the products and services on offer. Each connected consumer stands on her own ground, at the center, and your marketing message is only one of many in the mix.

What we’re discovering about the center is where it is.

There are many opportunities for relationship marketers to connect with consumers on this new ground. We’ve seen an explosion of creative approaches in the online space over the past several years, increasing in sophistication as advances in technology are absorbed and leveraged by marketers and consumers alike. Creating communities as part of relationship marketing efforts has proven to have enduring success, particularly when marketers establish the conditions for user-generated content. A good example is a community we designed for migraine sufferers. The key insight that led us to create the community was that universally, migraine sufferers did not feel understood and did not feel they had a voice or an advocate.

We named the community MORE (Migrainers Organized for Relief and Education), and the promise to that community was that the brand would be their advocate by creating a forum where they had a voice and would be heard. Our active facilitation of conversation and connection among migraine sufferers was perceived by the community to be a potent form of advocacy.

Consumer response to the opportunity to join this community surpassed all expectations. There was no incentive beyond participation in this forum. The program succeeded with no coupons, no rebates, and no freebies.

The best results for relationship marketing will rest on an insight that embraces the reality of UCaPP: the real power of RM today is our ability and willingness to connect consumers to each other and to embed this as a primary success metric for relationship marketing. When we facilitate these connections, we enable brands to connect, unite, react and interact with consumers, like atoms linking to form molecules. Connected consumers are actively revealing what is relevant and meaningful to them in exchange relationships. Whether praising or pounding a brand, they are freely handing marketers powerful insights into their motivation and behavior that point the way to mutual and binding relationships.

[i] Thanks to Mark Federman of the University of Toronto for sharing his concept of UCaPP with us.