By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine
"Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published May 2010
It’s the day before Good Friday and boy am I looking forward to the Easter break. The first quarter of 2010 has been a tough one for us. Not particularly due to the effect of the economic situation (although we have faced our challenges in this area as have most businesses in this country) but rather, because we have been striving to keep up with (and make sense of) what is nothing short of an explosion in weird and wonderful marketing and communications channels, driven, almost exclusively by online technology.
Social media, mobile marketing, digital channels, Facebook, Twitter, e-commerce, e-marketing, traditional agencies, digital agencies, SEO specialists etc. etc. etc.
Does your business have a Facebook Page? Are you tweeting your customer and prospect base and are there enough of them following you? How’s your Linkedin.com strategy going? And what about your ad agency? Are they traditional specialists or digital specialists? What are your marketing metrics telling you or do you even have a dashboard on which to track and measure your marketing effectiveness and ROI?
And those questions are just the tip of a marketing communications iceberg that is revealing itself to be bigger and bigger almost by the day.
How are mere mortals (let alone marketing consultants!) supposed to make sense of a marketing landscape that has changed out of all recognition in the past couple of years ago.
The good news is that the answer is pretty straightforward.
The concept of marketing has not changed (and will not change). The concept of marketing planning has not changed (and is unlikely to change). The role of marketing sitting at the centre of the business universe has not changed (and will certainly not change).
All that has changed is the way in which business and their customers and prospects connect, communicate and add value to their mutual relationships.
The channel choices have grown exponentially and will continue to do so. The nature of those channels and the opportunities they present to marketers to connect with and communicate with customers & prospects are greater and more sophisticated than ever before. The term “communications” can now (must now) take on its proper meaning in the context of business and marketing – it is a two way, not a one way, process.
No longer will it be acceptable for major brands to simply pour squillions of dollars into traditional advertising campaigns where all the communication is coming from the advertiser to the target. Now, and in the future, the market will talk back in a way that it has never before been able to do. And we need to know how to listen, process and respond to what the market says.
The consumer is now in the driving seat to a far greater degree than ever before. And that won’t change in the foreseeable future, if ever.
But then that’s only going to be a problem for you if you are intent on treating your customers with contempt or mugging them or just regarding them as the well from which you draw money.
The basic premise of successful business is the identification of needs and wants and the fulfilling of them, at a profit, time after time after time.
The basic premise of marketing is developing and nurturing profitable relationships with customers.
The basic premise of marketing communications is the investing in targeted, relevant and compelling communications with customers and prospects which result in needs and wants being met and those mutually satisfactory and profitable relationships resulting.
The dynamic world of “new media” simply provides us with a constantly changing panoply of channels and vehicles through which to accomplish this more quickly, more effectively and, most importantly of all, more inclusively (meaning customers are now more involved in this communications process than ever before).
Customers can now tell us, in an instant, what they want and how they want it.
Customers can now tell each other, in an instant, how well we are doing (or not) in meeting their needs, wants and expectations.
Customers can now be our greatest advocates or our most powerful enemies. And they can switch from being one to the other ,in an instant.
And they can do all of this from their mobile phone.
Should we be afraid?
Or should we be excited by the increasing opportunities to develop long term, sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships with carefully targeted, well served and, ultimately, loyal users of our products and services?
For business with a proper understanding of the business and marketing concepts coupled with morals, ethics and integrity, the answer is clear. The future of marketing communications is a truly exciting one.
But for those who have some other agenda, watch out – the future is here and it will bite your bum.
And that can only be good. For the greater good.
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