How Context Marketing is Breaking Through Media Noise

Consumers are not listening anymore. They do not have to. Today they are the ones in charge, not marketers. We are living in a new era: the era of infinite media. There is a solution, however, says Mathew Sweezey, author of  “The Context Marketing Revolution” (HBR Press). 

One morning back in 2014, I felt the familiar buzz from the phone in my pocket. It was a Facebook notification from my friend Cliff, who’d tagged me in a comment on the latest article from Forbes. Salesforce, the company I work for, had just been named “Most Innovative Company” in the world for the fourth straight year. But as I settled in to read the story, I felt puzzled. The article, clearly relevant, hadn’t reached me that day. I simply had not seen it. What I saw was Cliff’s notification, alerting me to the story. 

Even though Forbes is a publication I write for, and I follow it online I did not get any notification of this article. While that story would have reached me directly just a few years before, this time it did not, because by then I was fielding thousands of pieces of media each day. Forbes’s emails were getting auto-filed into the abyss of my “unread” tab in Gmail. Similarly, I was getting thousands of tweets by then, only a tiny fraction ever made it into my Twitter feed. 

Despite all my connections to Forbes, the media environment had effectively silenced the company’s marketing. The success of that article breaking through had nothing to do with the might of Forbes’s century- old media powerhouse— and everything to do with my friend Cliff tagging me. Now I understand why:

Marketing as we know it had already died.

Marketers like myself continue to stumble around, trying to get customers’ attention but succeeding only in annoying them with endless intrusions (think: ads in YouTube videos, telemarketers, and auto- playing videos you must hide before reading an article). 

If consumers are not annoyed, it is because they are ignoring advertisers’ extraordinarily costly efforts by blocking ads, and increasingly the channels themselves are doing it for them. That’s the crazy part: more and more, consumers don’t have to lift a finger to avoid you. The environment itself is filtering out brands’ attention-seeking messages with the kind of email and social media filters that hid the Forbes article from me. 

“Consumers simply are not listening anymore. They do not have to. Today they are the ones in charge, not marketers. We are living in a new era: the era of infinite media.”

Infinite media does not mean just more media. It means a radically different media environment in which the possibilities are quite literally infinite. What does all this signify for organizations and for marketers in particular? Such a drastic departure from how things once worked cannot be met with business as usual. It demands not just new marketing ideas but rather a whole new idea of marketing. 

It requires a revolution in what we do, how we do it, and the way we think about building brands and motivating customers. No matter what your business’s size or type, or what level and kind of job you are in, prepare to embark on a mind-bending way of seeing, selling, and growing your brand, defined by a different kind of marketing in a changed environment. 

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The context marketing revolution.

Motivating consumers today requires a fresh understanding of how marketing builds brands and drives action. In the past, brands crafted a single message so compelling that people acted. Today motivation is a by-product of many connected moments, requiring brands to have a systematic effort that is holistic and perpetual. It begins long before a company builds a product or releases a service, and it extends long past the product’s or service’s use. 

This is what I call the context marketing revolution essentially spawns a recrafted model for consumer motivation and building brands: market > sell > build > market.

• Market

Think about Tesla, which built its market for the Model 3 long before it began selling or even making the car. As a result, when Model 3 pre-sales became available, it was cited as the biggest one-week launch of any product ever, pre-selling more than one hundred thousand cars in a matter of hours. Tesla did that by engaging consumers, over a period of time, in a number of experiences.

• Sell

For example, the company’s founder, Elon Musk, built a massive permissioned audience on social media that was engaged around a central purpose: radical innovation to get the world off fossil fuel. Musk’s personal Twitter feed is full of rocket launches, discussions about solar panels, tours of Tesla’s new production facility (aptly named the Gigafactory), and even a video of him launching a car into space. 

All of this is authentic, as it fits directly in line with the value that the company’s audience members expected when they gave permission. Audience members follow both Musk and Tesla for that over-the-top content, experiences that are available in the context of the moment. Tesla then used this deep connection to co-build the car with its audience, asking audience members to fund the production of the Model 3 by preordering. They did.

• Build

But the Tesla experience doesn’t stop there. Even after the order is placed, the company continues its marketing efforts by providing over-the-top customer experiences. For example, a Tesla team member reaches out in a personal way to let each buyer know when his or her car is being made, then follows up to let the buyer choose how the car should be delivered. 

• Market

Finally, team members ask buyers to share their amazing experience with others through an advocacy program where Tesla customers can earn rewards by taking action. 

The result? Today Musk’s audience on Twitter is seven times that of Tesla’s closest competitor, Mercedes-Benz, and the company spends a miniscule amount on advertising (1/150th the amount that Mercedes-Benz spends); yet it sells three times as many cars. The impressive part is the sustainability of this model of market > sell > build > market. It was the same model Tesla used to launch all three of its previous cars, and it continues to work. And in 2018, two years after Tesla launched the Model 3, it became the best-selling luxury car in the United States.

The context marketing revolution isn’t about content, social media, ad blocking, or mobility. It’s about what people derive from instant access, connectivity, and openness. It’s a revolution in what consumers demand, how they make decisions, and how brands fulfill those needs.