The consumer is a hijacker, a burglar and a gangster.  The consumer is now holding big companies for ransom in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago.  Our businesses have been tied up, gagged and forced to submit to demands and rules we cannot afford to pay or play by.  How did we allow this to happen?  Where did we go wrong in not bringing up the man or woman in the street to be obedient, docile and compliant?  Why are they not watching what we want them to watch, behaving how we want them to behave, buying what we want them to buy?

Perhaps we should learn to listen.  Instead of telling them how it should be, how we know better, how our rules are better for them in the long run.  We should have seen the writing on the wall ten years ago.  When the Internet allowed them to create, to communicate and to converse without depending on our media.  Now we must all listen to how they need us.  Because they are calling the shots.  The consumer is in control.  And we must get used to it.  OR suffer at their hands.  Over the next twenty years it is our belief that the most successful brands will merely be facilitators in what we might term “Conversational Marketing.”

Our role will be to merely encourage consumers to talk to each other, and to us, through interactive discussions, websites, mobile technologies, communities, television and retail.  Nothing will be sacred or specialized.  Everything is both a voice and an ear.

Advertising is dead.  Long live advertising.

Instead, we prefer to call this mission the creation of “opportunities to speak and hear” for our brands.

If we are really clever, we shall not advertise to them.  We shall converse with them.  We shall hear.  We shall create new ways of showing them how our products can fit into their lives.  We shall ask them.  They shall decide.  We shall create web sites and interactive communities that are their province, not ours.  We shall show them how to do things they are interested in.  And we shall involve our products in these discussions.  Rather than making us the hero, they will judge our usefulness in how they choose to live with us.  And we still consider ourselves fortunate to have realized.  Before it was too late.