In his new book, Joseph Jaffe argues that heated, impassioned conversation is the antidote to consumer disempowerment

By: Samar Farah

Joseph Jaffe is all about embracing change, anticipating the future, sloughing off the dull skin of marketing convention. His was one of the first voices forecasting the demise of the mass-marketing model. He’s a regular blogger and podcaster. And at his strategic advisory group, crayon, he encourages employees to habitually congregate in the virtual world of Second Life. (Editor’s Note: Jaffe also has a business partnership with Deliver magazine, which supports his podcast and offers a branded segment within it.) Yet, by Jaffe’s own admission, there’s something very old-fashioned about the central idea behind his latest book, Join the Conversation.

Released in October, the book challenges marketers to abandon “communication” as a conceptual framework for reaching their consumers. The problem with most marketing, according to Jaffe, is that it’s too often a forced, disingenuous monologue aimed at the consumer. Jaffe envisions this model being replaced by “marketing conversation,” an idea that harkens back to the noisy haggling in the rowdy bazaars of Aladdin’s day: The futurist takes a cue from the medieval past.

Jaffe argues that conversations nay, arguments between merchants and customers in old-world bazaars were authentic in a way that most communication between brands and customers today are not: They were unpredictable and brimming with passionate disagreement and negotiation.

Join the Conversation asks marketers to revive that authenticity on both a macro and micro level. On the one hand, marketing conversation is a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between the brand and a consumer as open, honest and bilateral. On the other hand, it includes the execution of any and all tactics that keep the discussion between a brand and a consumer alive and honest, from corporate blogging to telephone follow-ups for a direct mail campaign.

Above all, marketing conversation is an art form, according to Jaffe. Deliver caught up with the author to discuss a range of issues, including where the future seat of conversational marketing should be in a corporation, why it’s not necessarily true that the consumer is in control and why marketing’s recent obsession with ROI is misguided.

Deliver: Your first book, Life After the 30 Second Spot, discussed the demise of mass marketing. What inspired Join the Conversation?

Jaffe: The first book drove a stake in the old-time model. It looked at what tactics marketers were trying instead of the 30-second spot, like experiential marketing and branded entertainment. The second book goes beyond the tactics that have replaced the 30-second spot and pushes for a massive paradigm shift a conceptual as well as tactical shift from communication to conversation.

D: The central premise of your book is that we are now operating under a “many-to-many” model. Explain this.

J: In the old world it was “one-to-many,” but now it’s “many-to-many,” in which there is no dominant player. Today, there is no hegemony, only partnership. In the book, I use the example of a disgruntled Internet service provider (ISP) user who recorded his phone call with his provider’s customer service, then posted the audio recording on a blog. His posting became a viral phenomenon that eventually landed him on a morning talk show. The TV interview then became a sensation on YouTube. This outcome could hardly have been predicted by the customer when he first recorded his phone call.

Even so, the consumer is really no more in control today than he or she was in 1955, which is when the remote control was introduced. Consumers have always had the option of changing the channels during a commercial. To say they are in control now just because they have a DVR doesn’t make sense. It’s not simply that the consumer is empowered. It’s that we’ve become powerless because we continue to try to message the same way in the face of new media options for the consumer forcing our messages through old channels and failing to engage in two-way conversations.

D: Still, isn’t it true that today’s consumer has more absolute power than the consumer of five or 10 years ago?

J: They certainly have more tools or more means to discard or zap us from the Do Not Call registry to DVRs to pop-up blockers. But the fact that consumers have more opportunity to avoid marketing messages is only half the problem. There are so many more distractions now, so many more kinds of media competing for attention.

There’s no doubt that there are a lot more stimuli, which is as much a factor in marketers’ powerlessness as all these “skipping technologies.” Just because a campaign meets its quota of clicks and page views doesn’t mean it’s actually getting through to the overloaded consumer.

D: Speaking of goals, your book criticizes brands’ emphasis on ROI. Does this emphasis distract from building conversations with customers?

J: Accountability is, was and always will be important, now more than ever. But it’s wrong to use old metrics to measure new opportunities or new marketing, especially when the old metrics aren’t 100-percent reliable in the first place. First, go and figure out how much money you’re wasting on the 30-second spots and the newspaper ads; figure out with 95-percent certainty how much you’re getting back for your money on those campaigns. Then subject all the new marketing approaches, from virtual world to blogging to podcasting, to the same standards. We are pioneers in a sense, the Christopher Columbuses of the marketing world. It seems insane that we would give up on these new approaches just because we haven’t yet figured out a way to measure them reliably.

D: So you don’t think the marketing promise of the Net was over-hyped?

J: The promise of the Internet wasn’t ever really capitalized on. But for every deluded or misguided marketer thinking about clicks and conversions, there’s a marketer using the Web truly as a transformational tool. That means harnessing the Web’s network capabilities to build partnerships through conversations and shared experiences in virtual worlds like Second Life and Cyworld.