A lot of smart people will tell you: show, don’t tell. And that’s true. But plenty of marketing, advertising, and communication, in general, is still about telling.
Often, even when we show something, it is really just another way of telling the story we like our audience to react to. The real difference between telling and showing is often smaller than you think.
There is a lot of science and literature on segmentation, targeting, and other tools of mass marketing, so it is easy to become engulfed by all the data and consumer insights.
But in today’s reality, there are simply too many people and too many companies trying to pour out their commercial messages for one company to stand out this way. We consumers become numb and disengaged unless we are offered something else, something more.
I think that for a lot of companies what could really make a difference is for them to rediscover the forgotten art of listening.
If we are too busy pushing our own message, too obsessed with our amazing product offerings, and too eager to sell, listening actually becomes surprisingly difficult. But it offers something else that the twin sisters of telling and showing can achieve on their own – it offers a deeper and more real relationship with the consumer.
We know this from our personal lives. Nothing can make a dinner party feel like a Wagner opera than being trapped next to a bad listener who, in a spell of verbal diarrhea, insists on telling you every conceivable detail about himself.
Of course, companies should talk about their products, and perhaps even more so they should talk about themselves and their visions. Today’s marketing is not just about touting the product and its amazing features but about selling the underlying idea or the values or identities inherent in the product and the authentic company that stands behind it. But companies should also listen. They should listen and engage the consumer, not just communicate. And that goes for their other stakeholders too by the way.
Ultimately, it is about building trust and affinity as a company – or what Shahar Silbershatz would call corporate character.
If you listen, you learn, but you also gain more credibility and decisions that some customers might not like they will be more willing to accept if they somehow feel understood.
It sounds so easy. But of course, it is not. And it is not about the platform. Just because a company decides to start using social media in its marketing does not automatically mean its becomes more engaging or actually starts to listen.
Often, in fact, a social media presence will very clearly expose that the company is really not listening. So, listening starts by understanding that the approach needs to be fundamentally different. It takes a commitment of resources and likely also a new set of KPIs and other metrics for this change to take hold and be successful.
If you keep measuring just how much your organization shouts, you should not be surprised when the noise eventually ends up deafening.
You can change company policies and make sure that top management is on board – and you should – but the focus in the end should be on the people who actually shape the customer experience. Recruit people who understand how to listen. Train the ones you have.
The microcosmic view of your consumer equity is the dialogue your people have with the customer. If you can make them listen more intently, you have truly succeeded in making it about the customer and not about you.
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