By K. Mishra & M. Krishnamurthy

At the beginning of the millennium, it is time to take stock of the way manufacturers, marketers, and service-providers communicate with their customers. It is not that we need to undertake a review of existing practices in customer communication just because it happens to be the start of a new century. Radical changes have been taking place in all spheres of the economic spectrum in the last decade, and the beginning of a new century has only added urgency to all efforts to meet those challenges .

In this context, it is imperative to examine the effectiveness of existing customer communication practices. The rapid increase in the number of media vehicles, audience fragmentation, a continuous shortening of spans of customer attention, and unlimited media clutter all call for a technique that can deliver communication effectively without a huge hike in communication expenditure.

Today, marketers can no longer afford to compete with each other for a share of the customer's mind. Information-overload and clutter has put paid to such efforts. Instead, communication will revert to its original function: to communicate rather than to persuade, brainwash, or prejudice.

As global brands predominate, companies will strive to build a universal brand image; economies of learning will precede those of scale; and mass individualisation will force them to get better acquainted with their customers, every single one of them.

Thus, the ad agency of the future will be structured along the following lines:

• It will be a full-service provider offering everything under one roof and developing in-house skills for each specialised service.
• It will be a service-integrator which outsources specialised services on behalf of its client.
• Or it could be a niche player focusing on one or two activities of the advertising value-chain.
• Business, not creativity, will be the driving force behind the new agency.
• Advances in technology will have long-term implications for the advertising agency, both in terms of learning to cope with technical complexities, and new ways in which customers are exposed to communication.
• The multiple-agency concept will gain prevalence as companies with diverse portfolio of brands seek agencies with expertise in dealing with different types of brands.
• The advertising industry will enter the consolidation phase with a slew of M&As. Larger agencies will become larger while the smaller ones will grow more focused. However, this century could witness the end of the mid-sized agency, which has neither the muscle or the clout of the large agency, nor the focus of the small one.
• The new ad agency will become a service-partner of the client, combining forces to shape strategy, build brands, determine the marketing mix, and help navigate the treacherous terrain of the Net.

Thus, for ad agencies, the challenge of the millennium lies in reinventing themselves. The task at hand is not easy: They will have the responsibility of creating and communicating a brand's benefits to a global audience. In this millennium, companies and their advertising agencies have to work towards deriving the maximum benefits from the number one reason for these developments: the Net. Web-advertising isn't just important for Net-only brands; it is critical to real-world brands seeking to reach out to the Net-generation.

This millennium is also certain to see the emergence of dialogue-based communication and marketing. Instead of broadcasting a message to a large number of people, the company identifies relevant customers, seeks their permission to tell them about the product, and enters into a dialogue with them.

These customers will demand-and get-more information about the product. Ad agencies will have to develop and package this information. In return, however, these customers are likely to become loyal and profitable accounts. The utility of this approach: fewer wasted messages. It may be difficult to maintain a dialogue such as this in traditional media that do not allow interactivity. But it's tailor-made for the Net.

This millennium comes with new rules for the marketplace; rules that will shape the way sellers communicate with buyers. A key competitive advantage will be the ability to provide the customer with relevant information. The traditional value chain will now feature another node: information vending.

Companies and agencies which will collect and manage more information about the customer will steal a march over their rivals. Communication-management in this century will be a function of 4 variables: the ever-expanding role of information-technology, the emergence of a global economy, the rise of the network as the new marketplace, and the shift to a knowledge economy.

This century will see the discipline of communication management reinvent itself around information, and the ability to leverage new technology to target micro-segments. Traditional customer-agency, customer-company, and company-agency power equations are certain to be rewritten. Already, at the beginning of the millennium, the customer has the freedom to decide what communication she will receive and what she won't. Thus, companies and agencies face the task of communicating to the customers in an easy-to-accept form. And with technology making mass customisation possible even in communication, we could see different messages for different audiences; even different messages for different individuals. Only agencies and companies that understand and react to these changes will survive in this century.

K. Mishra & M. Krishnamurthy are second-year students 
at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

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