Have you heard the news yet?

Advocacy.

Buzz.

Whatever your preferred term, it's become a critical aspect of any marketing strategy. Indeed we'd go as far as to suggest that it's never more important.

Why? Well clearly there are multiple factors at play, not least of which:

• The return on investment crunch -
  we seem to always either be in a period of media inflation (which always outstrips RPI) or there's restricted capital available to support marketing because we're in a recession. Either way, it's a fact that just delivering the same old, same old, will offer increasingly less good returns.
• The demise of mass communications coupled with the growth in commercial messaging - this alone means that the balance has had to change between what brands and organisations actually do in terms of products, services and value over and what they say.
• The explosion of brands -
  fuelled by the growth in cheap investment capital (during the peaks) and the forthcoming growth in takeovers (during the post recessionary era) relatively unsupported brands are being pushed to the fore
• Consumers changing views of brands - with consumers increasingly relishing their new found control, brands need to think, feel and act in different ways.
• A significant breakdown in trust between the public and big business....the reasons behind which are glaringly obvious!
• A genuine concern for the environment & real interest in corporate attitudes to CSR. Yes these factors may have taken a temporary step backwards for economic reasons but they are clearly on the rise.
• A greater degree of transparency and consumer vociferousness. Clearly this is not exclusively driven by technology but it's certainly been the catalyst and leant greater creativity to the consumer voice.
  

P.S. On Tuesday we've got one of the guru's of advocacy , Emanuel Rosen author of The Anatomy of Buzz and David King of Berry Brothers & Rudd Spirits talking to a select bunch of clients and agency partners at our Polestar launch event about best practice activation of buzz. A great opportunity to compare notes. More later.