Archive for the ‘Our Ideas’ Category
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 86
If they are to be worthy of their stakeholders’ enduring trust, corporate brands need to be managed effectively throughout the life of the company, not just during brand launch. And when you consider what needs to be managed-alignment in all the inter- faces between corporate vision, organizational culture, and stake- holder images-it is clear why corporate brands come to be valued as strategic assets. The combination of vision, culture, and images represents in one way or another everything the organization is, says, and does.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 85
CRM has caused consternation among upper management, since it doesn’t seem to be delivering the returns its users had expected. Any Luddite could tell you the reason why: You can invest in systems upon systems, but there’s no guarantee you’ll sell any more stuff. The reason for this is simple-marketing hasn’t been added to the CRM mix. CRM also means “can’t replace marketing” – all of the best intentions to help a company cross-sell, or upsell, or just sell differently cannot happen unless marketing participates in the effort.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 84
Are brands more important or less important in e-space? In a world where bargain hunters seek out the cheapest product, and comparison sites can lead you through decision making, consumers may not seem as loyal to product or retailer. However, while in our perpetual information overload, brands can serve as the lighthouse, shining bright in the sea of clutter. How to navigate branding in this new world is one of the most important issues facing our clients today.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 83
Promiscuous customers in digital markets remain unimpressed by sentimental attempts at building loyalty in the absence of au- thentic meaning and trust. They respond quickly, decisively and negatively to interruptive communications, and any unreason- able delays in service delivery are punished by immediate erosion of brand loyalty. As we’ve seen above, these little ‘betrayals’ at- tack both meaning and trust, fundamentally undermining any at- tempt to deliver value, and of course placing anything resembling loyalty way out of reach. Only when these complex challenges are fully met by busi- nesses, will on-line relationship-building initiatives finally find any sort of fertile ground. Every single encounter – no matter how fleeting or apparent- ly unimportant – with brands in digital markets provides a real- time opportunity to either incrementally build or fatally wound this fragile bond with promiscuous customers. We need to accept that the effort and cost involved in satisfying their fickle and ever more demanding needs may, in more than a few cases, simply not be worthwhile for the business.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 82
In the age of consumer control, it’s imperative for marketers and their agencies to figure out new ways to tell their stories. It’s no longer enough to think in terms of print, or cable or online. Now the focus is on the customer-and how to best reach and serve that customer, no matter what medium is used.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 81
It bears repeating that a brand is created, not only as a result of a marketer’s activities (the stimulus or “input”) but also, critically, as a result of the consumer’s reading of and reaction to those activities (the “take-out”). From the marketer’s perspective, a brand is a prom- ise, a covenant. From the consumer’s, it is the set of associations, perceptions and expectations existing in his or her mind. Brand associations are created, sustained and enhanced by every experience and encounter a consumer has with the brand.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 80
Calls for accountability make branding professionals uncomfortable, especially since they sense, as the Cluetrain Manifesto underscores, that branding power has shifted away from them. Advertising, PR and other marketing generated by a department or agency can no longer establish a brand. The activities that create a brand today, such as quality, service, fulfilment and innovation, consistently delivered over time, are in the hands of process owners in logistics, manufacturing and information systems. Look at the latest buzzword to sweep through the world of branding – ‘experiential branding’. Regardless of the merits of that strategy, the responsibility for delivering an enhanced experience is in the hands of almost every department – except for marketing.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 79
Ad agencies are well positioned to take on the responsibility of marketing integrators as long as they respect the valuable roles other functions can serve in a multimodal campaign. This would be best accomplished if they separated the integration function from the advertising function and developed a compensation program based on their integration work alone. The danger of not doing this is that some other entity, most likely a management consultancy with marketing expertise, will move into the void.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 78
To gain consumer confidence online, you need to create a very tight filter around the customer value proposition. Ultimately, the Internet has shifted the balance of power from retailers, producers of goods and services over to the purchaser. What the Internet has really done is erased a lot of geography and given the choice to the people. We’re all competing with a subset of competitors that we’ve never seen before, because the Internet is strictly global and will get more global over time. In this highly fragmented, competitive market where geography is erased, we really have to hit customers with our best shot up front, and say what it is that the customers want. What value do they want from me? Do they simply want the best price, the most relevant information, a combination of best price and relevant information in a context of a totally useable interface which is updated regularly for me? These are the types of questions that I think brands really need to think about constantly.
Ideas for a New Marketing World: Day 77
Three realities In the globally integrated consumer oriented societies of 21st Century, there are three realities all marketers must eventually come to terms with when advertising and marketing a brand: • Customers have very limited attention spans; • They devote little time or effort to processing information about brands or stores; and • They have access, desire, or ability to retrieve easily only a few bits of information about brands or stores included in their long-term memo- ries (see Olshavsky and Granbois, 1979; Kassarjian, 1981).
Navigation
- HAve a look at marketeers most important Social Media Buzzwords for 2010: http://bit.ly/b4aqMB
- How to pitch Social Media: http://bit.ly/9VN8EQ
- How Viral Marketing on Twitter works - #moonfruit: http://bit.ly/bXi21k
- Good reasons to stop auto linking facebook and twitter: http://bit.ly/9Mlmm2
- How to use confrontation to build a fan base: http://bit.ly/bfmlhD