Only a few years ago, the strange mantra emerged that "Content is king". Sensibly, in the last year, people have spotted that this phrase contained a typographical error. In fact what people meant to say was "Context is king".
At long last people are beginning to realise that the real dividend of the new media revolution is that it is finally possible to take targeting to a new level - not only reaching the right people, but reaching the right people at the right moment.
If this seems outlandish, bear in mind that Google (which targets people by a 'when', not a 'who') now has greater UK advertising revenues than the national newspapers. "I'm not really bothered by your demography", says Google. If your pressing current need is to find out about "perennial shrubs" then I’ll tell you about local garden centres.
This is not to say that the old style of decontextualised advertising is dead, of course. But the power of reaching people at a moment when they are interested in what you have to say..... well, it's pretty useful, isn't it.
To me, an instant feedback system does the same thing in reverse. It listens to people, and provides them with an outlet, at the very moment when they have something to say. In a sense, it is the Google of market research. It means you spend your time listening - and responding - to your customers at the moment when your brand or service has really meant something to them. Right in the eye of the hurricane, in other words - at the very moments of truth where lasting brand impressions are actually forged.
So much research is decontextualised - it is thoroughly disengaged from how people actually experience a brand. Put me in a suburban house two weeks after I have last stayed in a hotel, and in the company of six other seasoned business travellers, and within minutes the conversation will degenerate into category conventions: "Aren't the minibars expensive?". A reassuring restatement of the obvious. The real insights will be lost. The real singularities - the things good and bad which make for an experience will remain unsaid. In fact, by then, they may even be forgotten.
The peculiar universality (and anonymity) of SMS means that an instant feedback system will solicit many responses which traditional research loses or ignores. And at a point which is early enough for remedial (or reaffirmative) action to be taken. It does this in real time. But over time it creates an aggregate picture of a business and its stimuli which any sensible marketer would kill for.
Someone once asked me what one attribute I thought all good communication (in any medium) had in common. I thought it was a great question. The answer (it's always the way) only came to me a few months later. All good communication is tremendously respectful of the consumer's time. Whether it is the TV commercial that at least has the decency to entertain people who can't afford the product, or the six-word poster which somehow explains the proposition to a speeding motorist. Instant feedback extends this same decency to research - a discipline that has in its time been responsible for more wasted evenings than any other.