Remember the Borg?  It was a race on Star Trek that assimilated worlds into a collective intelligence to conquer the universe.  It used the thoughts of billions to outsmart the thoughts of millions.  They collaborated throught telepathy.  Well, substitute digitally for telepathy and you can start to wrap your brain around the collective intelligence of the Net Generation.

The Net Generation lives in a world where it can collaborate with its members spontaneously.  Want to know about life at a university, find a FaceBook page on the university.  Go to Youtube.  Look for student produced videos.

Insert any product that the Net Generation is interested in and you’ll find a collective intelligence about that product.  You’ll find ideas to make the product better.  And you’ll find members feeding off one another to brainstorm and develop better products.

If two heads are better than one, are two million heads better?  Maybe when it comes to creativity.  If you believe one creative thought leads to another, potentially better creative thought than maybe two million brains working on a problems is better than two.  Regardless, marketers can use this drive to collaborate to their advantage.

We’re doing market research using social networking sites as a platform to involve respondents and it’s working very well.  The involvement of our respondents is deeper than typical focus groups, we’re not bound by a 90 minute time frame and we don’t have to sit behind a mirror eating Peanut M&Ms.  We’re exploring brand identities, testing strategies and learning better ways to engage this audience.

If you’re selling to the Digital Borg, otherwise known as the net generation, they will gladly help you improve your product, communications or service delivery.  All you have to do is tap into the collective intelligence.  You may not immediately know what they’re thinking, but you can beam yourself in digitally.  But remember, Captain Picard always won.

Live long and prosper.

Some experts quoted in “Grown Up Digital,” say we taught them that they are special.  They believed it.  Not only did they believe it they internalized it to the point where they have no doubts.  Well that’s one explanation.

Other experts have said, this is the most narcissistic generation ever.  It’s all about ME.  They have been pampered in an attempt to raise their self esteem to the point where the only thing that has been raised is their self centeredness.  That’s another explanation.

My explanation is “non of the above.”  Customization is important to them simply because it is basic human nature and technology has made it easy.  Brands have always been an expression of who we thought we were, or who we wanted to be.  Now, we can customize our brands to reflect the nuances of who we think we are.   Contrary to an ever increasing number of “expert opinions,” there’s nothing new about this customization trend.

Customization is as old as the caveman.  Not the Geico cavemen, but the ones that used to draw on the walls of caves.

If you’re old enough, think back to the days of muscle cars.  The gear-heads of my generation bought mag wheels for their Chevy Nova, souped up the motor, added pin-striping and went looking for girls.  The gas crisis hit and that genre of car vanished and the trend toward hot rods waned.  Still, everybody who owned one looks back fondly on their car and how it made them feel.  Somehow a Toyota Celica never replaced that feeling.

Fast forward.  Technological advances allow you to customize nearly everything.  One size fits all evolves to one size fits one.  The iPod allows you to program your own radio station.  Pandora.com programs your own radio station on the web and on the fly.  Because there are so many choices for everything, you can put your own persona together.  And why wouldn’t you?

Do you know the personas of your customers?  Do you know how your product or service adds to, or defines their personas?  If you blindly market without that understanding, it’s a craps game and you’re just playing the odds.  And the one thing to remember about a craps game is that they didn’t build all those casinos in Vegas on winners.

If you’ve grown weary of this recession, join the club.  Here’s a suggestion.  Take advantage of it.

There are deals to be had, and market shares to be won.  All it takes is a little courage and a vision.  Here are five ways you can take advantage of this economy:

1.  Expand–there are plenty of good people on the streets who are tired of their livelihood being dependent on the whim of the economy and somebody else.  You can find partnerships to expand your distribution, open new locations and sell to new markets.  And you can do it for a fraction of what it would have cost you a year ago.

2. Negotiate–If you’ve got a budget left, now’s the time to put your agency to work negotiating better deals with the media.  Don’t be afraid to walk away from your favorite station and you can multiply your share of voice.

3.  Zag–Now’s your opportunity to be different.  Avoid sameness.  Do creative that’s loud in the market place.  Make your little bit of money work like a lot of money.

4.  Shake new trees–If the trees you’ve been shaking don’t seem to bear any fruit, shake new ones.  Think about new markets, new prospects, smaller prospects, bigger prospects.

5.  Increase your marketing budget—What?????? In this economy????  Are you nuts????? If you could, wouldn’t it be a great idea.  So if it’s a great idea, why not do it?

Advertising Perceptions Inc, released the first in a series of bi-monthly polls tracking confidence of top advertising executives called Advertiser Optimism Reports.

Here’s the surprise.  Cable TV is rising amid the economic uncertainty in the general economy.  While execs are still optimistic about online advertising, significantly fewer of them are predicting increases in spending than the previous survey.  In fact, intentions to increase spend online are declining faster than any other medium.

The report suggests that advertisers are retreating to the safe harbor of TV advertising…particularly cable TV advertising.

Our suspicion is that while all the hype for the past couple of years has focused on online advertising, results haven’t followed as expected.  It’s a truism in today’s society whether you’re talking about Wall Street or Madison Avenue, that bandwagons start fast and drive hard, only to slow when faced with a hill.

If you view marketing as an investment, and we hope you do, then you hold your investment accountable for a return.  Marketers race to the newest best thing, only to come back to the reality that there is no silver bullet.  Only creativity, persistance and intelligence.

EPIPHANY!!!  A recent survey of marketing executives by Datran Media points out the change.  Sixty-three percent of marketing executives interviewed indicated that  the most important priority was the acquisition of new customers.   Nearly forty-three percent said that retention of current customer was most important.  Duh.

The study goes on to note  marketing directors expect mass media expenditures to decrease in importance in 2009.  I guess if you don’t have much of a budget that would be the conclusion.  Meanwhile, activities that cost less and are trackable like e-mail and search will experience an increase in spending as a percentage of the marketing budget.  Kind of a double duh.

Studies and factoids like these brew marketing Kool-Aid.  They support our belief that the world as we know it is changing.  The funny thing is that the world as we know it is always changing.  Change is the oldest thing in the universe.  What’s newer than new media?  New, new media?

We embrace these changes, but we try not to be awed by them.  We use them to our clients’ advantage and try not to get caught up in the hype while still being excited about the possibilities.  If we were to get caught up in the hype, we would recommend activities to clients  on the basis of the hype and not the expected result.  We would end up forgeting that our goals are to take care of current cleints and get new ones…that never changes.  And that is the epiphany we should be paying attention to.