Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

IMAGE: psychoanalytic-couch.jpg

In our ‘old’ CRM world, targeting is a Freudian affair. We collect as much data about an individual customer as we can; we profile, segment and profile again based on various individual-customer insights.

We behave like a psychotherapist, trying to understand the ‘soul’ of a patient, digging even deeper in the vain quest for the Holy Grail of one-2-one marketing.

But what if this is not enough anymore? What if the new approach, imposed on us by social media requires we start from the other side? To tone down Freud and dial up Jung.

One of his sentences – regularly quoted by the social media evangelists – is this one: ‘I’ need ‘We’ to truly be ‘I’.

The new ‘social native’ (my label) generations almost can’t comprehend privacy as being something different from what they share with their friends (and, often unwittingly, the world at large). They are what they share; and they share what their friends find amusing.

So, shall we start from this other side? Shall we target people by targeting their influencing friends first? Note my deliberate use of the word ‘influencing’, as we now know that not all friends on Facebook are equal.

Or, shall we start building a profile of the target consumer by listening to what their friends are telling THEM, not just the other way around? And then, not talk to the customer at all, just to their friends, with the hope that our message will then be passed on from a more persuasive source?

In for a happy match of a data and a PR agency, anyone?