Coming to Concurrence:Addressable Attitudes and the New Model for Marketing Productivity

Nearly everyone in business today knows that there is something wrong with traditional marketing. Even as large companies chase scarce space in vaunted venues such as Super Bowl television spots and pay soaring prices for it, experts agree that it's not working.

The average consumer is targeted by an astounding 3,000 to 5,000 ads a day, in every place from public washrooms to bus stops, from shopping bags to pop-ups on their PDAs. No wonder people are doing everything they can to tune out marketing messages.

Traditionally, marketers have been taught to think in terms of “the four P's of marketing”: product, place, promotion, and price. But as J. Walker Smith, Ann Clurman, and Craig Wood argue in our summary of Coming to Concurrence, a newset of tools is needed to meet today's changing market demands; in other words a new framework for rethinking the entire approach to marketing.

All three authors are experts on consumer motivation and senior executives at Yankelovich Partners, the renowned marketing consulting firm. In Coming to Concurrence, they outline such a framework.

This blueprint for tomorrow’s success is based on the four cornerstones of “Concurrence Marketing,” which they refer to as P&R 2: precision, relevance, power, and reciprocity.

As we’ll explain, marketers who use this new approach can overcome the enormous wall of customer resistance that has arisen in the past decade, and by doing so they can realize dramatic gains in marketing performance and productivity.