From 'One-to-One' to 'Many-to-Many' Marketing

Regular Inside Marketing readers will recall the Otago Business Forum reported upon in two columns late last year.  Hosted by Otago University’s School of Marketing, the forum’s key theme was the marketing paradigm entitled ‘service dominant logic’. To recap, ‘service dominant logic’ mindset places the entire customer experience at the center of a company’s focus, rather than as an adjunct to marketing.

One of the forum speakers was Professor Evert Gummesson, of Stockholm University’s School of Business in Sweden, who spoke on the theme “From One-to-One to Many-to-Many Marketing”.

Gummesson’s contention was that marketers’ increasingly prevalent focus on customizing services and products to the individual user has missed an important fact – that people are all part of complex and numerous networks.  He posed the question “Why have relationship marketing; CRM and one-to-one marketing not become as successful in practice as their advocates had hoped?”.  His answer was that such a focus on the individual misses the point – because services and products, as they help (or hinder) us in our daily lives, so too also influence our relationships with others, consciously or otherwise. 

As a result, relationship marketing should not be limited to a CRM system that tells you customers’ birthdays and what they last ordered.  Instead, Gummesson defines relationship marketing as the enhancement of a company’s interaction within customers’ own relationship networks, or the fostering of “many-to-many marketing” as he named it.

Citing 30 types of relationships that organisations can have, Gummesson stated that “many-to-many marketing describes, analyzes and utilizes the network properties of marketing”.  Readers at this point may be thinking that this is little more than the more formal utilization of word-of-mouth or viral marketing, or possibly refer-a-friend plans.  However, it’s often difficult to establish either of these as part of a given marketing plan or they may not appear to suit a given product or audience.

At this point Gummesson provided examples that illustrated how both conventional and unconventional businesses utilize many-to-many marketing by embedding themselves into customers’ networks and lives.

One such example was the Shouldice Hernia Centre in Toronto, a hospital that fosters relationships between patients by rooming pre-op patients with post-op ones, thus facilitating an immediate exchange of experiences and expectations.  The inter-patient network is further enhanced by the annual “dine and dance” held for all past patients (called alumni), which may sound strange but which runs at a profit whilst also inserting the hospital’s presence into patients’ social networks and winning massive word-of-mouth referral business.

To quote Gummesson, marketers have to stop focusing on the “high tech” and focus instead on the “high touch”.  The ultimate result is to have a “Chief Network Officer” to accompany the Chief Executive Officer.  The Chief Network Officer will not primarily focus on the relationships a company has with its suppliers, staff, customers, media outlets and other groups in the network, but instead will focus on the company’s performance within each of these groups.  This means trying to find a way to have a relevant role within each group, be it as traditional as sponsorship or as unusual as a hernia hospital’s alumni.

In summary, Gummesson  believes that marketers’ attention should be drawn to the roles that their companies have within all the networks participated in, by all the people connected with their companies.  It’s no longer enough to build a relationship with, say, female-household-shoppers-with-preschoolers; a marketer should think about the role his or her product or service could have amongst these shoppers’ friends, families, work colleagues and neighbours, and seek to enhance that – rather than simply firing off sales messages into the void.

Jonathan Dodd