Free Gift Inside!!: Forget the Customer. Develop Marketease

Customers? Customers?? Customers??? Don’t talk to me about customers! I’ve had it up to here with customers. Haven’t you?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against customers. Some of my best friends are customers. Customers are a good thing, by and large, provided they’re kept well downwind. But there is a limit. They’re starting to get uppity. They’re beginning to think that they know best. I ask you. Who are these people?

Of course, we only have ourselves to blame, since marketers have been chanting the mantra of customer orientation for forty-odd years. It’s time for a change. It’s time to stop kow-towing. It’s time to forget about customer focus. It’s time to tantalize, tease and torment them, to play hard to get. It’s time, in short, for Stephen Brown’s Free Gift Inside!!

Marketing, he demonstrates, is not about customer-orientation. It is about selling stuff. It is about selling stuff to today's sated, sophisticated, super-skeptical consumers, who have an infinite number of near-identical offerings to choose from.

The aim is to make choosy consumers choose yours.

Although his name is unfamiliar to most managers, Stephen Brown is the Antichrist of marketing academia. He is disdainful of customer-centric approaches to marketing and, as a consequence, has clashed publicly with numerous luminaries. Professor of Marketing Research at the University of Ulster, Stephen has held visiting positions at Northwestern University, the University of California and the University of Utah, among others. He has written or co-edited 13 books, including Marketing Apocalypse, Postmodern Marketing and Romancing the Market. His papers have been published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Business Horizons and many more, winning various awards along the way. Additional information is available on his website, www.sfxbrown.com