By Rod Granger
Total Access: Giving Customers What They Want in an Anytime, Anywhere World
By Regis McKenna
240 pp. Harvard Business School Press, $27.50
Marketing, as we know it and have understood the process in the past, is disappearing, and it is being reinvented by the rapid development and ubiquity of technology. As a result, the true aim of marketing must shift from its concentration on promotion to that of ensuring customer satisfaction. This, boiled down to its essence, is the important message delivered by Regis McKenna in his provocative book, Total Access.
As practiced today, marketing is becoming increasingly separate from product development as well as management, sales, distribution and other functions. It focuses on one-way promotional methods designed to sell customers specific products or services, and McKenna argues that this approach has been ineffective in building long-term customer relationships and loyalty.
Today's high-tech world is increasingly one of "total access," in which the lines of communication have become interactive, and marketing "vanishes into the network of relationships and responsibilities." Computers and other machines now handle the bulk of customer interaction and relationship management, and the traditional role of marketing is becoming outmoded, according to McKenna, "for the simple reason that its tasks are being automated and assumed by the mysterious and hidden power of computers, software and networks."
At the same time, many consumers are becoming prosumers, or proactive consumers, and total access provides them with the tools and information they need to shop in a more considered, competitive way than ever before.
Marketing is in for a "shock," McKenna says, because all this greater power and choice, combined with an ever faster pace of living, leads not to brand loyalty but instead brand erosion.
So, instead of brand managers and the like, future marketing will involve machine-to-machine interaction, real-time transactions, and the need for immediate response within a trusting relationship. The concepts of mass customization and self-service, according to Total Access, are the future.
McKenna also talks convincingly about the importance of "persistent presence," which he defines as recreating a familiar experience by maintaining consistency at all access locations. Using such examples as ATMs and Starbucks, he demonstrates how we've increasingly come to trust those processes that deliver the same experiences the same way each time.
To succeed in the future, McKenna believes, creativity must be present at all levels of an organization, and marketing must become a corporate-wide responsibility.
The age of total access is fast approaching, and in order to thrive in this new world, McKenna says that marketing "must be recognized throughout the enterprise as a coordinating, value-building architecture that integrates people and resources with the mission to serve customers."
Marketing is dead. Long live marketing.
Rod Granger is a Public Relations consultant in the media/new media environment. His experience includes positions as Director of Corporate Communications for VH1, and Vice President/Corporate for Trylon Communications and The Lippin Group. Rod also has extensive experience as a media journalist, and has held staff positions with such publications as The Hollywood Reporter, Broadcasting & Cable, Electronic Media and Multichannel News, where he served as Marketing Editor. He can be reached at rhdgran@yahoo.com.
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