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Reading through the Asia Digital Marketing Association Yearbook 2012 recently set me thinking about a colleague who carried out market research projects in the region in the early 1990s. He tells tales of focus groups with local consumers in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia back in the days before mobile phones and digital everything.

How much useful information emerged from a few dozen people chatting over tea and soft drinks for a couple of hours? Compared with what was available back then, it was quite a lot; on the other hand, compared with what’s available now, it was nothing. As a recent ClickZ.asia article noted, consumers in Hong Kong alone now generate 23 terabytes of data every 10 minutes.  Fortunately, there are analytics wizards to make all that data usable; the ADMA Yearbook is a great example of what they can do.

With the growing volume and sophistication of data available, we can look forward to creating effective marketing programs that are ever more powerfully attuned to consumers’ needs. A recent McKinsey article about “on-demand marketing” describes a not-too-distant future of systems, technologies, and messaging combining to create high-quality consumer experiences. Many of the technologies are already available and in place, but what about the consumer experience?

The newsletter syndrome

Back in 1999, Seth Godin popularized the notion of “Permission Marketing.” Marketers would send communication to only those consumers who had shown an interest in a product, thereby explicitly or implicitly giving permission for communication. This was presented as a departure from forms of “interruption marketing” such as advertising; permission marketing was supposed to be less intrusive for consumers, and more effective for marketers.

At its best, today’s email marketing is permission marketing. The figures from a recent global study are impressive – particularly comparing APAC with results from the USA, Canada, and EMEA. APAC scored the highest unique open rate (mean 31.5 percent vs. overall 19.7 percent), the highest opens per opener (2.56 vs. overall 1.95), the highest click-through rate (7.1 percent vs. overall 3.6 percent), and average unsubscribe rates (0.26 percent vs. overall 0.25 percent). Apparently APAC consumers are especially receptive.

Those are certainly impressive figures for marketers but what do they mean in terms of consumer experience? We’re all familiar with filling in personal details on websites in order to receive the information we need or the products we want to buy; giving an email address has become just part of the process. Yet in person, offline, how many consumers would accept having to give the same details to a sales assistant before they’re allowed to buy? Online in many cases it’s no email, no deal; offline in a store, it’s not at all popular.

Most consumers online accept that they have to give their email address, especially on sites that they use frequently; having an account log-in speeds things up. Some may even take the trouble to read the opt-in/opt-out choices; they check a box to acknowledge that they’ve read and agree to the Terms & Conditions because they have to, but who actually reads them? As a result of all this, they get what they came for at the time, but they get more than they wanted in the future; their details are added to the database. Strictly speaking, they have given site owners permission to email them. However, unless they are systematic, they are unlikely to remember which websites they have signed up to, which boxes they checked, and whether they gave permission for “selected partners” to mail them too. Over time, the more they shop online and explore websites, the more updates, exclusives, special offers, and newsletters will be accumulating in their inboxes, along with whatever spam slips through their ISP filters.

There may be some consumers, especially in APAC, who dutifully read every piece of email marketing they receive, and carefully consider what it offers them. Even so, I strongly suspect that the great majority ignore most of it, and delete it sooner or later. Some may even go to the trouble of unsubscribing.

Time to improve the consumer experience

As marketers we love finding ways to enhance the targeting and response rates of our messaging; we celebrate when we devise approaches to improve the scores of our initiatives; we are committed to developing digital tools that yield measurably better ROI on our clients’ marketing spend. At the same time, I believe we should also be asking ourselves whether consumers’ experience has been similarly improved. I don’t think it has; on balance over the past decade, brands and marketers have benefited more than consumers from the great developments in marketing.

We now have even more ways to deliver “interruption” marketing communication in broadcast and print media: that’s good for marketing. At the same time, in a multichannel environment where consumers can pick and choose, we have to earn their attention by making the interruption more rewarding for them; we have to make the messaging as interesting and relevant as possible: that’s good for consumers. Meanwhile in the “permission” model of digital marketing, we assume that consumers have happily volunteered to receive our messaging, which we can push in high volumes at low cost: that’s good for marketing. However, I suspect many consumers keep receiving the emails more out of passive inertia than active interest, and regard a lot of them as digital clutter: that’s not so good for consumers.

To help our clients grow and flourish, we’re duty-bound to experiment with ways to grab consumers’ attention, and sell to them. At the same time, we are also committed to enhancing consumers’ experience of our clients’ brands. As ever, marketers tread a fine line between selling and branding. The upside now is that digital gives marketers more scope for creating the sort of experiences that are good for both a brand and its consumers; the downside is the risk of focusing too much on the numbers and forgetting the experience of the consumers they represent.

Being in India means a lot of things, but most of all people everywhere, crazy traffic conditions, characteristic smells, bright colors, Maggi mania, mobile phones, and, of course, chai tea—not only everywhere but also all the time. Incredible? Yes. Fascinating? Definitely!

Telling you about India from a westerner’s perspective, the picture could look like that. While east has been chasing the west a while now, the west has just begun exploring the east. This reciprocation is changing the scheme of things. The fascination with one another is now going beyond the superficial things into a richer territory of deeper values. East is now more interested in the west’s concept of social liberation rather than just greater opportunities, success, and money. While for the west, the increasingly robotic lifestyles have resulted in a spiritual and an emotional vacuum, which is steering them in the direction of east in search of experiences with human rootedness.

As east speeds up and west slows down, the trend is starting to seem like a dog chasing its own tail while circling around an undefined yet highly desired middle ground. From the basis of these observations emerged the idea of our research study. The key question: What are the eastern and western worlds running after? To best approach this study, we picked India and Europe as the representative regions. Our key finding: The aim of both worlds is to experience the flipside of their own in order to find the desired middle ground, which is a mix of foreign and familiar. While the dynamics of the chase continue to vary, the end goal seems to be merging into one.

That said, here is a snapshot of the key trends we observed for each, along with the middle ground:

East: Plugged

Prefer being digitally plugged in to lives that parallel the life of which family/society disapproves

vs.

West: Unplugged

Prefer to unplug every now and then to regain a perspective of real vs. artificial

Middle ground: Take control of aspects of life that have fallen out of proportion in the hope of achieving that ideal mix of foreign and familiar to restore balance.

–

East: Modernity

Indians are eager to adopt things that can get them global recognition.

vs.

West: Authenticity

Hyper-consumption and fusion culture are making Europeans appreciative of things with human imperfections.

Middle ground: Both are using culturally accepted tools to define their unique identities among their respective peer groups. This approach helps them carve their niches without alienating themselves from their ecosystems.

–

East: Freedom

As India warms up to western values, we see an increased demand for personal spaces (physical and emotional).

vs.

West: Framework

Having taken the concept of space too far, Europeans now seek warmth and closeness in relationships (communal space).

Middle ground: A common striving for an emotional safety net in the form of family, so one can explore the extremes of self-expression without the fear of being abandoned.

–

East: Authority

A growing global appeal for eastern social, economic, and political models is infusing confidence among easterners, who are beginning to assume authority.

vs.

West: Humility

Fatigue with material pursuits and the recent economic setbacks are making westerners look east and beyond for more sustainable models of being.

Middle ground: A growing open-mindedness and mutual respect for things and ideas that are foreign.

The above is the executive summary and key trendsightings from a new study by Havas Worldwide India: “Circular Chase Trends: Easternized West or Westernized East.” It was coauthored by strategic planners Jessica Janke and Shradha Dudeja, with help from other agency planners in India, France, and the United Kingdom. Download the full report here.

When Havas Worldwide senior digital strategist Daniel Maree first heard Trayvon Martin’s story: “I wanted to do something about it. I wrote a blog post, then published a YouTube video that night calling for the Million Hoodies march: both a rallying cry for justice as well as an effort to show how stereotypes lead to these types of incidents.”

Hacker group Anonymous retweeted Daniel’s call to action and the Million Hoodies march went viral. Five thousand attended the first march in New York; there are now 50,000 people around the country organizing Million Hoodies chapters to push for change on issues like gun legislation and youth empowerment.

“Looking at Trayvon’s photo, I think of him like a brother,” Daniel says. “To know that I was able to bring his family some sense of relief and solidarity was pretty amazing.”

Hear Daniel speak at TEDx earlier this year.