Mobium

You’ve got your micro sites, your mega sites, your mini micro sites, your marketplace sites, purchasing sites, mall sites, your e-this, that and the other, as well as wireless phone displays. Even the screen in the office elevator. And watch out, world. We’re buying space on your fruit, coffee-cup sleeves and urinal cakes.

The pool of media pollution grows deeper and wider everyday. In fact, it is now more expansive and all encompassing than a Carly Simon yawn.

Out of the quagmire

The way out will not be found by adding more media with which to bombard people with one-way, self-serving messages. The new imperative is to use the right traditional and, more importantly, non-traditional media to develop a dialogue with customers and prospects that is highly identifiable, relevant and engaging and that looks, feels and sounds consistent from one medium to another.

In other words, your messages will have to be engaging. And they’ll have to stand out like Drew Cary in a Day-Glo thong.

The idea is to use information and emotion to create value around your brand that customers will actually seek out. The paradigm has shifted from controlled, interruptive monologue bombardment to dialogue with customers and prospects when they want and need to talk. Dialogue communications, if you will.

Dialogue through the prospect’s decision process

Throughout this dialogue process, relevance, creativity, emotional engagement and executional consistency are the ways out of the morass of slimy, decomposing messages and brands. But how do you do all that at once?

First, you might want to start with a firm understanding of your customers’ and prospects’ buying process. (By the way, their purchase process is seldom the same as your sales process.) That includes knowing who is involved, what role they play and when in the process they play it. And of course, what’s important to them when they make a decision. But even more important, what kind of information do they need at each stage of the decision process. And how you can help them move to the next stage.

Relationships; no dumping

Second, you might want to consider posting a “no dumping” sign on all your brand communications. That’s because you simply can’t dump on people all the information you’d like them to retain all at once. Otherwise they’ll be more confused than Al D’Amato on Celebrity Jeopardy.

The goal is to know what’s important to them and what they want to hear at each stage of the purchase process and give them just enough information, advice, incentives or offers to push them to the next stage.

I like to think of it as the communications equivalent of goosing. It’s the thing you do to get people moving. With each goose down the purchase path, customers and prospects deepen their knowledge and involvement with the brand through experience rather than interruptive corporate belching.

The law of “no dumping”

• Simplify messages at the early stages of the purchase path.

• Divide all brand information up into component parts.

• Prioritize messages according to their relevance and importance to different audiences at each stage of their purchase process.

• Spread them out along the buying path to take each audience from awareness through purchase and repurchase and to build and deepen involvement in the brand.

• Make each and every one of them highly memorable, engaging and identifiable with your brand.

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