Sky & Virgin Television…a Disgraceful Episode.
...that exposes “Top Down” management at its worst!
So Sky & Virgin, you obviously don’t think that you ought to start a regular dialogue with your subscribers!
Because the disgraceful public row you both have had very recently provides enough evidence that you really still haven’t got it.
Your advertisers are not that important to you, certainly your very own Top Management is not important to you, after all they are in the process of ruining your business!
As they said in a recent American Presidential Election…”It’s your viewers stupid.”
This headline says it all. “Sky channels disappear from Virgin cable TV.”
And, low and behold, in the day when viewer/consumer empowerment is causing great concern to the advertising/media industries.
These companies decide, arbitrarily, to remove Sky’s basic channels from Virgin’s cable platform “in the early hours of yesterday morning after an extended and unedifying public spat between BSkyB and Virgin Media”
Obviously they haven’t heard the word “empowerment”!
Empowerment is a very overused word.
However in the near future the primary strategic marketing communications battle will be to see who goes furthest in empowering their customers, and this little spat between BSkyB and Virgin Media confirms that the Top Down Management in these companies prefer the words “Just do as we tell you”.
So OK BSkyB and Virgin Media here is your first lesson in “empowerment”
To empower your customers you will have to:
1. Provide them with far more information than you currently do.
2. Allow them to make decisions about you and your company together with your resources.
3. Give them plenty of choice.
4. Give them the perception of control!
5. Allow them to feel that they are running your organisation!
Because anything that tightens your relationships with an existing customer increases the revenue you get from your customer.
And the only form of communication that can do all the above so that you do tighten your grip on your customer is…. Interactive communication!
Here is your second lesson BSkyB and Virgin Media and this time it is on the meaning of “Communication, which again you don’t obviously understand!
After a little thought, most people come up with a definition that is about transmitting and receiving information. A little more thought might produce the word exchange. This is more satisfactory, but still assumes that communication is about moving something about conveying, or sending, or delivering, some commodity called ‘information’.
In fact, the word has quite a different root meaning. It derives from the Latin communis, meaning ‘common’. Or ‘shared’. It belongs to the family of words that includes communion, communism and community. Until you have shared information with another person, you haven’t communicated it. And until they have understood it, the way you understand it, you haven’t shared it with them.
Communication is the process of creating shared understanding.
There is nothing “shared” about this little gem from yesterday’s press, “Virgin cable customers will now be unable to watch Sky One – which carries popular shows such as Lost, 24, The Simpsons and Battlestar Galactica.”
Virgin was paying Sky approximately 60p per subscriber per month for the affected channels. It then charged its subscribers from £11 per month.
Some pompous person from Virgin Media had this to say, which I don’t believe for one moment, after all you can prove anything with research!
“We have carried out customer research and a clear majority would rather we reinvested our money to give them a richer content package,” he said.
“We have been constantly enriching the Virgin media experience for the last six months.”
Perhaps the reason for this hanging on to the past way of doing things is the persistence of mass media, which came about as a result of the needs of business as a way of reaching mass markets.
Like the management of large corporations, broadcast advertising partakes of the same top-down style of command and control.
Customers were told what to do – shop hard – but not asked in any substantive way for their input or opinions!
And, sad to say, command and control remains the order of the day. There is much talk today these days about the empowerment of consumers although corporations still communicate their demands by broadcasting them to demographically determined abstractions of whom they know very little about and have no genuine relations with at all.
IS IT ANY WONDER THAT CUSTOMERS ARE MOVING AWAY FROM OLD MEDIA AND MOVING TO THE WEB!
The Author pioneered interactive communication to the advertising and marketing communities some twenty-five years ago. The communication issues he addresses have been neglected during the explosive grown of advertising in the 60s, 70s and 80s, these are Cognitive Dissonance, Selective Retention and Selective Exposure.
Would you like to discover the incredible results to be attained by using interactive communication? Well these are revealed for FREE at http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com or contact Paul directly on paul.ashby@yahoo.com
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