mobites - ideas, inspiration, insight

I was attempting to relax the other night by watching some TV on my 324-channel cable hookup when it occurred to me that by the time I navigated my way through the endless list of programs most of them were already over. Not only that, but a whole new set of 324 choices was in front of me. Taunting me with its bounty of mediocrity.

Add to that this darn Internet thing and you have enough communications stimulation out there to keep most business people higher than Andy Dick on a four-day weekend.

Enough is never enough

Why, there are so many new vehicles for communicating with customers and prospects and so many competing forces jockeying for position on them that the resulting traffic jam of clutter makes it almost impossible for anyone to get through to anyone. And if your job is to get through to people, then you have every right to be as nervous and jerky as a Baghdad parking valet.

As technology gives customers more access and more choices for getting the information they want, the way they want it, wherever they want it, whenever they want it, things will only get worse. But clutter is not the problem; fragmentation is.

So let’s get the issue straight

It’s not so much that there are so many new and different media to deal with. (Even though many of them are untried, untested and undecipherable.) It’s not even the fact that they’re emerging so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up with it all.

The real issue for business marketers in this new paradigm is that messages are being fragmented like an overripe watermelon at a David Letterman fruit drop from the 82nd floor of the Sirajul and Mujibur Souvenir City warehouse. Splat. Kaboom. Disintegrate.

And when messages go from being segmented to diluted, to broken apart, to pulverized until they turn to vapor and disappear completely, then brand promises and brand image, and even brands themselves, can’t be far behind.

Time famine sweeps the planet

But wait, there’s more. Add to all that a little ditty called time famine. It goes something like this: There simply isn’t enough time to assimilate the growing mass of messages. There isn’t enough time to cope with the volume of traffic going through our brains. There isn’t enough time to sort out the valuable from the mundane.

So increasingly we let it all pass through us like a bad bean burrito. Only in this case, it passes through unnoticed.

Complexity and overchoice reign

And if that’s not enough, let’s add another idea from Alvin Tofler called “Overchoice.” He says, “We are racing against the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are canceled by the complexity of the buyer’s decision-making process.” There are simply too many messages chasing after too few openings in buyers’ minds.

All of which is a long way of saying that you can’t expect a series of unfocused, disjointed, single-medium programs strung together by strategy to add up to any kind of long-term or even short-term gains any more. Your audience simply has too many choices and too little time to pay attention to high frequency, low-imagination, irrelevant, not very memorable, inconsistent message fragments.

You have to bring the fragments together with more than just strategy. You overcome fragmentation by executing an overriding, compelling, creative concept that unifies each and every brand contact point.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.