Let’s be brutally frank. That’s always fun and appreciated.

After several decades of information manipulation, reality spinning and one-way monologues carefully crafted to tell people what to believe, most companies’ emotional bank accounts with the people they serve are more overdrawn than an M.C. Escher doodle pad.

The disparity between what companies think they sell and what customers and prospects really buy is yawning like George Sanders watching a fishing show hosted by Alan Greenspan.

Repetitious, interruptive, self-obsessed messages about your products as opposed to customer problems are about as popular as Marla Maples at a benefit screening of “First Wives Club."

Shift to the rescue
Fortunately, mega-shifts in practically all market dynamics are redefining the game.

In fact, business marketing is being altered more dramatically than Luther Vandross' tuxedo.

Most of these alterations are driven by customers and prospects gaining control of information, communication and the purchase process.

If understood, all this shiftiness gives business marketers and communicators an unprecedented opportunity to claim pivotal positions in their customers’ value chains. Positions that go beyond even product/service offerings, into areas of value creation based on information, emotional support, connectivity and reciprocal relationships.

If you let it
Listening, understanding and responding to customers’ and prospects’ information and value offering needs is the means by which business marketers will establish their value positions with customers in this new market order.

We call the actions by which this listening, learning and responding takes place "dialogue communication."

And without this personal two-way communication, the chasm between you and your customers will grow so large in this new paradigm it’ll make the Grand Canyon look like the space between Japanese rail commuters.