How to Become 'Their Brand': Engaging Today's Fickle Customers

Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel, and react in ways different from June Cleaver some 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive, and disloyal to describe the modern consumer.

Just what do these terms mean? Mainly, they mean that consumers have too many choices—multiple brands, brand extensions, and sub-brands—and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move.

And yet, marketers continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on segmentation analysis and other research, hoping to understand and predict the behavior of these fickle consumers. It's as though they're still chasing June Cleaver when neither her modern counterparts nor today's consumerism as a whole bear any resemblance to the past.

So what can marketers do? They can start by grasping the profound societal and technological changes that define today's new consumerism.

Rather than predicting a consumer's next move—which is not only imprecise but also impractical—marketers should focus on forming meaningful brand relationships by listening to and actively engaging consumers as they negotiate the major changes in society and their lives.

Identity Crisis

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Manila Austin is director of research at Communispace Corporation (www.communispace.com), which creates and manages online customer communities.