Search is a strange new animal in marketing landscape. Why? Because it represents the closest alignment ever achieved between the goals of consumers and the goals of marketers.  In no other medium do consumers broadcast their intentions so clearly than in search – intentions to window shop, to buy, to refer, to rate.

And in no other medium are marketers’ intentions so clearly discerned — even from the advertisements themselves.

• Ad placement indicates the relative investment a marketer is willing to make to acquire a customer – which is, in itself, an indication of the advertisement’s relevance to the consumers search request.
• The text of the advertisement makes clear – in 35 words or less — the marketer’s value proposition.
• Landing pages are constructed to provide immediate verification of whether marketers and customers are aligned around the same objectives, and to provide the shortest purchase path for a qualified prospect.
• Even the presence of competition, and the strategies that competition is using to differentiate itself, are more apparent in search than in any other marketing method.

Marketers and consumers have the same goals: they wish to invest as little as possible in search, privacy, and acquisition costs. Because of that, search marketing becomes a virtual utopia within the marketing landscape.  It’s quite possible that search-based marketing costs approach the theoretical minimum cost required to acquire the target audience.  Even the consumer’s investment (e.g. search and privacy costs) is as small as it might ever be.

When user and marketer goals are so closely aligned, an interesting side effect results: honesty.  No longer are marketers required to interrupt and deceive their customers into considering their products. No longer are customers forced to hide their desires – which creates added cost for both consumer and marketer.

But this honesty builds efficiencies far beyond the marketing landscape as well. When consumers are honest about their intentions, and when marketers are able to believe what consumers tell them, there’s an opportunity to truly optimize the supply chain as well as the marketing channel. And where does an optimized supply chain lead to? Lower costs.

To the extent that direct marketers – indeed all marketers – embrace this concept and focus on the efficiency within their campaigns, customers will be increasingly motivated to share accurate information across the entirety of their consumption profile. That will lead to lower costs for marketing campaigns, lower costs for manufacturing, and lower costs for service delivery. Everybody wins: consumer surplus rises in the cost of doing business goes down.

Search still represents a tiny portion of the overall marketing spend, but it has a great deal to teach us with regard to user intentions and marketer goals.  If we could develop that sort of honest conversations that characterize search marketing within other marketing channels,marketers and customers would benefit, and operations managers and CFOs would see results as well.

This sort of “aligned intention marketing” (AIM)–where customer and marketer goals are in synchronicity — is the most important lens through which new marketing channels should be viewed.   Search marketing is merely the tip of the spear; it’s the best current example of how these new marketing tools might be used.