by Milton Johanides

Created on: August 02, 2009   Last Updated: August 04, 2009

As consumers become more sophisticated and less easily persuaded by catchy jingles and catchphrases, which has been the staple of advertising campaigns for decades, companies need to know far more about their customers than ever before in order to be able to create marketing that hits the "g-spot". The "g" stands for "Give-it-up". It is the point in the buying process where intellectual considerations give way to pure emotion, and the buyer can no longer resist putting his hand in his pocket.

In order to achieve the "g-spot" moment, companies have to get into bed (not quite literally) with their customers. This is known as relationship marketing. It requires a pesonal, intimate, working knowledge of your target market sector. These days a jingle is not always going to do it. More likely big branding requires big music, something in the charts or even pre-charts, which is being rapidly downloaded.

It requires clever symbolism and epic story lines squeezed into a one minute ad. It requires characters who are familiar around the world, famous A-list faces from big movies, or, failing that, new personalities who touch people's hearts in an instant. But in order to know which music, which face, which storyline is going to motivate your buyers, it is essential to know exactly what makes your buyers tick.

Relationship marketing is about building up a friendship with your target market, adopting a chummy approach. As their friend, you must appear to care about them, to give them something for nothing (occasionally), but best of all, to let them know that by hanging around with you they are going places they have never been before. Microsoft's tag-line "Where do you want to go today?" encapsulated the demands of an entirely new generation of punters, who believed that they were in charge of their lives, completely empowered by the huge availability of exciting and liberating product available to them.

"Excitement" and "liberation" are key modern buzzwords in advertising today, qualities that are perhaps easier to convey if you are selling the latest cellphone, but not quite so easy for soap powder manufacturers who have been packaging the same formula for the last fifty years. However, even soap powder manufacturers can hit the "g-spot" with the right emotional motivators.

The key is to ask what it is that your particular target sector demands, what are their main lifestyle components? Nearly everyone enjoys sex, but is it romantic sex or passionate sex they prefer? Do they go for nostalgia or science fiction? Are they intellectual or down to earth? If you know the answers to these questions you are ready to go to the drawing board, if not ask again.

The more you tickle your customers' g-spot the more likely they are to support you in the good times, and stand by you during the bad. In the good old days of simple transactional marketing, you would make a statement about your product and sit back while the buyer chose from one of two or three competitors. That is no longer enough. The companies that say we are here because we have always been here, and do not make the transition from transactional marketing to relationship marketing, at some point in the future are going to find themselves without friends.

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