Just when “advanced” thinkers and marketers thought they had it all figured out, it sounds like teens are moving on from MySpace.

MySpace No Longer Their Space? – New York Times

BRANDS, for teenagers, are fleeting things.

For big, slow-moving corporations, this presents a problem. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquired the community site MySpace nearly a year ago, the site was at the height of its popularity. But now there are indications that the teenagers who made MySpace cool may be moving on to other things.

But there are reasons, and teens aren’t stupid.

Popularity with a mainstream audience is just one problem. Another may be the increasing reports — true and otherwise — of MySpace’s being “dangerous” and full of predators.

There is another type of predator in MySpace.  Traditional marketers.  There are a host of marketers who have developed sophisticated scripts to sign up “friends” in MySpace, and it doesn’t take a modern teen to recognise they are being sold something. 

Another development is traditional companies attempting to emulate the success of MySpace with their own attempts at social networking.  These attempts are clumsy, because they are all thinking about internet as a marketing campaign.

Successful companies in the new age, will be those that re-engineer themselves with customer centric visions, which recognise new realities.

Here are some pertinent examples, summarised from a new marketing manifesto (PinkoMarketing):

• brand promises are not trusted
• product quality matters
• peer opinion matters:  The ‘masses’ will decide what is ‘mass’ and what is not
• The voices of the community, your employees and your competitors are more valuable than anything you could ever say
• From this point forward consider any outgoing messages – as innocuous as they may seem – to be SPAM
• Stop thinking in military analogies. No more campaigns. No more market penetration

Relevance to Bankwatch:
All this suggests Banks must focus on the part they can control – the product and the channels they are serviced through.  Find ways to listen to your customers and learn how they want to be talked to.  Its a new world with new rules.

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