Marketing as a conversation – an interview with Steven Van Belleghem

If markets are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto said many years ago, it makes sense for businesses to think seriously about talking with and listening to consumers.

In a book published last year in Dutch and now available in English, Steven Van Belleghem (managing partner of marketing research agency InSites Consulting, a client of Typeclear) makes the case for a new kind of marketer.

The Conversation Manager is part manifesto, part inspiration, and part toolkit for any business wanting to move on from the death of traditional advertising with a smile and a sense of mission.

I spoke to Steven a few days before he headed to London to present his ideas at the Insight Show.

So you’ve launched the Conversation Manager in both Dutch and English now. How’s it going?

The Dutch edition has already sold over seven thousand copies, and the English version more than 1,500. So it’s going well!

What does a Conversation Manager do?

A Conversation Manager integrates word-of-mouth into the thinking and action of the entire business. He or she facilitates a conversation between consumers, and between the business and consumers.

It’s a role that impacts on all aspects of marketing, which makes it a strategic function. So part of the job is tracking and measurement, but that needs to be done at the right level. It doesn’t involve chasing around trying to handle negative responses from the public, but aims to manage conversations in a more aggregated way.

In practical terms, the key thing to remember is “don’t feed back on incidents”.

Does conversation management tie in to other areas? Product development, for example?

Very much so. It’s important for R&D to listen to what people say and uncover what they think. So they too need to develop the skill of listening and be involved in the conversation.

And the key is not to focus on negative feedback?

The workshops we run often show that brand managers and marketers are actually scared of consumer responses – perhaps because of the high profile PR disasters you read about. You can be reviewing consumer feedback, and even if seven cases are positive feedback and one case is negative, marketers still leave the review discouraged.

But do I believe in sharing good news in a business. So we remind them that a clear majority of feedback is positive, usually by asking them to think about their own habits as consumers. Consumers buy around 100 brands a week, and consistently report satisfaction of 70% to 80%. And we show them that online, most conversations about brands are actually positive.

Conversation management sounds like a change of culture…

Yes. Once, companies could buy brand positioning through advertising. That was nice for big wealthy companies, because they could keep their brand under control. But that ability to control is disappearing.

There’s a paradox that highlights the need for marketers to change. Take the example of a bank: You can walk into the bank and talk to personal advisers in a one-to-one conversation. Meanwhile the marketing manager finds it very difficult to talk to consumers one-to-one. They even feel they need to run stuff past their legal people. But in the end personal advisers are the ones who are leaving the lasting impression on the customer, not the bank’s advertising.

Nowadays, the brand is a consequence of the company’s culture. So it’s likely that human resources and marketing will have to work much more closely or even merge, because employees make the company’s culture. And people skills are communication skills.

Do all kinds of businesses need a Conversation Manager?

Yes, in the sense that all businesses need to create involvement with consumers and brands. The approach isn’t necessarily the same for all businesses though.

The classic example is Harley Davidson – nearly all of its customers are brand fans. Coke Zero is different. Only 3% of buyers account for about 97% of sales. So getting 97% of people involved in a conversation may be wasting time. Instead, Coke should focus on the 3% who are likely to make the most difference.

Business to business marketing involves another variety of conversation management. There’s less focus on social media because word of mouth and face to face conversation has always been at the heart of marketing in B2B. And I think face to face should keep on being at the centre.  But it makes sense to build a layer of marketing online that operates in parallel.

How can a marketer persuade her skeptical boss she needs to be a Conversation Manager?

Don’t mention Twitter. Don’t mention FaceBook. Instead, concentrate on the importance of word-of-mouth, and the need to help the customer.

Once you’ve got agreement on the importance of word of mouth, everything else will flow from that.

- David Harbottle

• Many thanks to Steven for taking the time to share his ideas with this blog. You can check out the events and more ideas surrounding the book at www.theconversationmanager.com.