Engagement marketing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Engagement marketing, sometimes called "participation marketing," is a marketing strategy that invites and encourages consumers to participate in the evolution of a brand. Rather than looking at consumers as passive receivers of messages, engagement marketers believe that consumers should be actively involved in the production and co-creation of marketing programs.
Ultimately, engagement marketing attempts to connect more strongly consumers with brands by "engaging" them in a dialogue and two-way, cooperative interaction.
For decades, consumers would simply watch a commercial or look at a print ad that advertisers produced. That’s one-way communication and doesn't qualify as engagement, where consumers participate, share, and actually interact with a brand.
Author and consultant Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore, founder of the UK-based Community and Engagement Marketing Company [SMLXL], published a book about engagement marketing entitled [Communities Dominate Brands.] In addition, Dan Belmont, the chief marketing officer of The Marketing Arm, an Omnicom agency, has spoken at various industry conferences on the subject. Alan Moore is the originator for the term, philosophy and principles of Engagement Marketing. He started working on the concept in the late 1990’s, which, culminated in his founding of the first specialist Community Engagement Marketing company in 2001 SMLXL
[In an interview ] with [Henry Jenkins DeFlorz Professor of Humanities] and Founder and Director of the [Comparative Media Studies Program] at MIT. Alan Moore said...
Engagement Marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create. And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. At the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity. This is described as [Psychological Self-Determination] the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition. The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication. Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media. The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, social search, The Guinness Visitor Centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre
Alan Moore's [Second interview with Henry Jenkins]
Last Friday, I introduced my readers to Alan Moore -- not the comic book creator but the brand guru -- a cutting edge thinker about the ways that grassroots communities are reshaping the branding process. Moore, with Tomi T Ahonen, wrote a book called Communities Dominate Brands. The book spells out their vision for where media is headed -- towards what Moore described last time as a "connected society"-- and what it means for the branding process. Here, Moore gets deeper into some of the issues which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog -- the economic value of fans to advertisers and media producers, the issue of compensating for user-generated content, the case of Pop Idol as a global media franchise, and the concept of transmedia planning. Moore will be speaking at the CMS colloquium later this term and we hope to make a podcast of his remarks available down the line.
