The power of peer influence: traditional marketing is on its way out. In its place, America's most innovative companies are implementing new, more authentic techniques based on peer influence and community building.

• Author: Lee, Bill

CONSIDER FOR A MOMENT THE ANNOYING, INTERRUPTIVE, often obnoxious nature of traditional marketing. Dinnertime phone calls from strangers in noisy call centers. Glossy pictures of the latest fashions worn by models that barely look human. Crowded store shelves with head-spinning arrays of options arranged in no discernible order ("I just need some toothpaste!"). Company websites that give us no clue what the business actually does. Hype. Spin. Pushy salespeople.

It's hard to believe these are the methods and tools of a profession designed to attract and persuade us to become customers--especially when "we the buyers" increasingly ignore them.

A number of studies are showing that people no longer pay much attention to traditional marketing as they progress through the "buyer's decision journey." Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. It seems clear that marketing as we currently practice the discipline is on its way out.

The inability of traditional marketing to engage buyers hasn't escaped the notice of CEOs, the ones who approve their companies' budgets. A pair of wake-up-call studies by the Fournaise Marketing Group in London in 2011 and 2012 found that more than 70 percent of CEOs think that their chief marketing officers (CMOs) lack business credibility, lack the ability to generate acceptable growth, and lack the ability to explain how their programs will lead to increased business. Nearly four out of five CEOs complained that CMOs can't explain how brand equity can be linked to recognized financial measures such as firm equity.

A bitter pill for mainstream marketing executives, perhaps, but you can hardly blame the disgruntled CEOs when you consider the logic behind traditional marketing in light of today's world.

Think about it: Companies hire people who probably come from outside the buyer's world and don't share his or her interests--employees, agencies, consultants and the like--and expect them to persuade buyers to hand over their money. Yeah, right! There is no respected research on group behavior suggesting that such an approach is conducive to influencing people to take action or change.

Of course, not everyone in the marketing world clings to worn-out methods. In fact, there is a pioneering group of C-level, forward-thinking marketing executives who are successfully replacing this...