One-within-many marketing

Spending lots of money on advertising will not produce as many sales as publicity and word of mouth marketing. Instead of selling to each customer a company has to build a community of customers.

With the web you can empower customers to build a great viral marketing community. There are tools available to let customers exchange ideas and bring in new members.

The Howard Dean campaign is a great illustration of this phenomenon. 600,000 people contributed $40 million, the most money raised by a democratic candidate.

To save money, and build a community faster, the Dean campaign empowered supporters to go out and recruit more members and develop policies that changed the political landscape.

I think a community is the most efficient and profitable way to manage the exchange of ideas between a company and its customers. You can get ideas from your customers using one-to-one marketing. The payback from a community discourse is the production of the best products and services that satisfy the needs of the majority of your customers.

If you are concerned that your company will not be able to meet the expectations of your customers if you set up such a community, don’t worry; the customers will do the horse-trading for you. The community of customers will come to a consensus of what they need and don’t need.

Your company will be seen as the member of the community that can contribute more ideas and resources within your community.