Every marketer – and I mean every single one – should read this iMedia Connection interview with integrated marketing expert Don Schultz. It has so much insight into the role of marketing in conversation-based markets.

High points:

• Marketers are trained to talk, not to listen. Talking doesn’t work any more.
• Consumers don’t have to listen to marketing messages any more. They are going around marketing departments.
• Many marketers interpreted the dot-com implosion as a sign that nothing had really changed and went back to doing things the way they had always done them. They missed the underlying shift that now threatens to capsize them.
• Customer focus and customer-centricity are two different things. Customer focus is trying to sell more things to the same customers and it doesn’t work. You have to put the customer at the center.
• Businesses have done a lousy job of integrating their online and conventional media marketing. Most of them need to blow it up and start over.
• Marketers’ new job is to create “placeholders,” or brands that stick in the customer’s mind as being associated with a certain want or need. Think iPod.
• Mainstream media is becoming less and less effective, yet marketers are pouring more and more dollars into it. This is crazy.

I’m paraphrasing and perhaps oversimplifying, but those are some of the main points. It’s a long interview but worth every minute of your time.