Join the Conversation

Followers of Joseph Jaffe’s blog and podcast ‘Jaffe Juice’ - www.jaffejuice.com - will be familiar with his unorthodox approach to marketing, also encompassed in crayon, the marketing company of which he is president and founder.

Join the Conversation develops the arguments initiated in Jaffe’s best-selling book Life After the 30-Second Spot, and explores the changing ways consumers give and receive information, which is in turn creating new possibilities for marketers to engage with potential and existing customers.

Jaffe’s insights are targeted at marketers but would arguably have relevance to any business unit. The author clearly hopes to inspire brands to capitalize on what he believes to be the untapped opportunities which lie outside the traditional approaches to communications associated with advertising and PR.

Citing The Cluetrain Manifesto, the marketing tome which posits that all markets are human to human conversations, Jaffe claims current marketing techniques continue to communicate in a one-sided, one-to-many fashion in spite of the opportunities provided by the internet to create far more personal, two way dialogues.

As he puts it: “if engagement is an active state we strive for our consumers to exhibit, then we need to do likewise”.

Jaffe discusses the marketing implications of growing numbers of what he calls ‘prosumers’. These are the producers of content such as blogs who are also consumers, and likely to be part of ‘generation i’ - namely, those involved in the social side of media.

Such individuals, in Jaffe’s view, are rewriting the rules of persuasion - ‘production is the new consumption’. Bloggers who are also consumers are extracting power from and imposing influence upon their communities, and building on like-mindedness and trust.

Control has switched from the marketer to the consumer, who can increasingly avoid unsolicited promotional messages and as a consequence ‘missed opportunities are conversations not capitalized on’.

This backdrop is identified by the author firstly as an opportunity to build connections, such as the support, exposure and encouragement embodied in Weight Watchers.

Source: WARC