Promotion dominated the field of marketing in the 20th century. Although evaluating opportunities was important, advertising, especially on TV, was what drove budgets and strategic thinking. Today, however, digital technology has enabled us to re-target consumers when they respond to a message and that has changed marketing forever. In effect, we must make the shift from grabbing attention to holding attention.
Due to this brands will have to learn to be more like publishers and develop content skills. It also means marketers will have to create a genuine value exchange rather than just coming up with catchy ad slogans and price promotions.
In the past, we focused on rational benefits to entice consumers to support our brands. Show that your brand is better in a clear, rational way and you could build a loyal following. While some energy went into tactics further down the line, the thinking was that awareness was a tide that lifted all boats. Most knew that the notion wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was true enough that it worked and played a crucial role in building our most beloved brands.
That model is now broken because 60% of television viewers are surfing the Internet while they watch (Chmielewski, 2013), so the action that a TV ad is most likely to elicit is not a trip to the store, but an Internet search. That’s a very fundamental change and it means we need to do things differently.
Once a consumer begins to research a category purchase online, their data trail will alert your competitors, who will re-target those same consumers with new offers based on their surfing behaviour. In effect, by building brand awareness you are also building category awareness and allowing your rivals to line their coffers.
Marketing strategy has always been numbers driven. We survey a small selection of the population and then scale up those samples to make decisions. Unfortunately, our numbers are always wrong. They are backward looking, fraught with error and based on confidence intervals that virtual guarantee that they’ll be wildly off one time in twenty.
However, big data (Arthur, 2013) is enabling an entirely different approach. Rather than wait for the results of controlled studies and then analyze them to glean insights, we can collect massive amounts of data in real time. Instead of fooling ourselves into thinking we have it right, we can become less wrong over time.
Adobe polled 1,000 marketers in the U.S. and found that most strongly doubt their skills, effectiveness, and ability to measure the impact of their campaigns. The study, Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night? (Adobe, 2013), exposes new insights into the industry’s attitudes toward e-marketing.
So, while Kotler reconciled marketing with the standards of business, over the next decade we will have to reconcile marketing with the standards of technology. Quite a challenge to take on.
A word to the wise: Either adapt to change, or get left behind.
