The important idea delivered in the first chapter of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark is, as Bob Dylan so compellingly sang, ‘Things Have Changed’. [mp3]

[Note: This is the first of a chapter by chapter review - if you haven't read it yet, you may want to read our overall review of the book first.)

Using the famous Pavlov experiments in conditional reflexes and reinforcement as a simple metaphor for the rise and fall of traditional marketing, the argument is made that consumers no longer respond to stimuli in the same quantity and intensity as they once did, primarily because they’re now more savvy, have more access to information, experience and define brands differently, and now require more complex and personal interaction to motivate action.

The Pavlovian argument doesn’t last long, however, as the book title’s payoff comes quickly with the assertion that people are more like cats than dogs anyway, with the chief distinction being our desire to please ourselves rather than whomever is stimulating us.

And then comes the book’s thesis:

Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing. Marketers must now reach beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic, and extend themselves into the more intimate world of sales and customer relationships. They are now responsible for creating powerful ‘persuasive systems’ that anticipate and model customer needs, personalize information and process to meet those needs, and then measure the return on investment for every discrete process in that system.

If you can fully grok that (a word I’ll admit to having first learned from Jeffrey about 9 months ago) then you just might not have to read this book. But for most of us it takes the rest of the book to expand on and surround this great paragraph to make it all start to sink in – let alone define the specific actions we need to take as a result.

• “Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing.” That covers a lot of ground. Yes, a conversation that is different than an advertisement. Beyond interactivity the quantity has also changed, as has the control of when and where – as pointed out earlier in the chapter. And if the nature of something has changed it makes sense that we’d have to do it differently.

• “The traditional role was raising awareness and driving traffic.” A simplification to be sure, but certainly how a lot of it was done. Sometimes it was nothing more than bell ringing. I find it interesting that this is (I think) one of only two references to the concept let alone the phrase ‘driving traffic’ in the whole book. A sure-fire best-seller on online marketing that isn’t about driving traffic. That sure makes the point.

• “The more intimate world of sales and customer relations.” Here’s the hard part. You can’t mass produce intimacy, so this is going to take some real work. (They admit as much, but being smart fellows not until chapter 29 – the end of the book.) We can’t hide in marketing anymore and leave sales to those other guys. Customer relations, wait isn’t that a totally different set of people? Now I’ve got to do all that? Darn this is going to be hard. What happened to the good old days when I could just make pretty pictures and be clever?

• “Creating ‘persuasive systems’ that model needs and personalize to meet those needs.” Here it is, the core of the core. This is what the book is really about. Not entirely how to do it, but as much why you really really need to do it. To bad we all need so much convincing. I mean it makes sense – someone recently wrote (I think it was Hugh Macleod) that if people talked the way ads do they’d get slapped (sorry, just looked and can’t find the link). The Eisenbergs on the other hand are advocating actually thinking about the person to whom you’re communicating and then tailoring the communications to that person. So what’s the opposite of getting slapped? A sale?

So this is where we’re left after just one brief chapter. The theory that all we’ve got to do is let people know that our products exist (in some way that elicits fear or desire) and they’ll come running with wallets in hand is exposed as obsolete and/or fantasy. The former inmates are now in fact in charge, as our brands are ‘defined by their personal experiences’ and they’re ‘attentive only to information that matters to them’.

In just six pages the dogs have become cats and the control marketers had is gone. The stage has been set. Let’s see where it goes from here.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Next is Chapter Two. Reader comments are highly desired.