Marketing More Intrusive, Less Productive

Consumer resistance to increasingly intrusive marketing and advertising has reached an all-time high, causing marketing productivity to plummet. So says Yankelovich President J. Walker Smith in a recent speech at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) Conference in Miami.

Smith describes consumers drowning in an overabundance of data and information that fails to meet their needs and desires, and suggests that marketers can reverse this trend by doing what consumers prefer. This means moving toward a model in which marketing practice itself is viewed as a source of competitive advantage and away from the current pattern of marketing saturation, clutter and intrusiveness.

An accompanying study found that 60% of consumers have a much more negative opinion of marketing and advertising now than a few years ago, and 65% feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising. Smith cites 'spam and telemarketing, guerilla marketing, intrusive ads covering every blank space and less targeted, less informational communications' as culprits and hints that 'The era of consumer resistance and control has begun'. 53% of consumers polled said that spam had turned them off to all forms of marketing and advertising.

Consumer saturation with marketing is evident from the fact that 69% are interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing, and 33% even say they would be willing to have a slightly lower standard of living to live in a society without marketing and advertising.

According to Smith, 'The power and productivity of marketing are declining rapidly and, thus, so is the contribution of marketing to profitable, high-value growth. Even with more sales, declining productivity does not bode well for marketers. The marketing industry thinks that spammers and telemarketers are the problem, but our data clearly identify a huge problem for mainstream marketers'.

'It's not that marketing is no longer effective, it's that current marketing strategies are based on a marketplace and a consumer base that are not what they used to be. So the rising cost to be effective in the face of growing consumer resistance is lowering marketing productivity', Smith said. 'But advertisers have a new opportunity to turn marketing practice into a source of competitive advantage for a brand. The marketing itself is now part of how consumers view a brand. Differentiation on the basis of marketing practice can boost brand perceptions. And when it happens, the results can be dramatic'.

The Yankelovich MONITOR(r) study, running since 1971, gathers and analyses trends in consumer values and attitudes and reports on those that will have the biggest impact on marketers over the coming year. The 2004 survey involved 601 respondents age 16+ in late February.

Yankelovich Partners' web site is at www.yankelovich.com

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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