Digital Minds Forum

Where is digital marketing heading?

Written by Marie Page on Monday 8th March 2010 at 6:12 pm

Last week CIM published a new Shape The Agenda paper titled “What hasn’t happened yet. The shape of digital to come?”

I read it before a class I was teaching and, not having planned to, found myself referring to the paper frequently during my lecture. Realising therefore that there is plenty of  meaty info within its pages, I thought I would give you a whistle stop tour through some of the best bits.

Introducing the paper, Mark Stuart, head of research at The Chartered Institute of Marketing and author of the paper said;

“It’s a myth that people explore the world the internet has to offer – the reality is that most people stick to eight or nine websites that they regularly visit. This means that businesses need to inhabit the spaces their customers inhabit, in order to build the brand, create awareness and generate a relationship with the customer. There are some good examples in the paper including Waitrose successfully doing this, but American Apparel getting it wrong on Second Life.

The need to create a dialogue with customers is easy to say in theory; how do you do it in practice? Practising marketers need to live online the way their customers’ do; that’s the best way to create offerings that customers will like and respond to, versus being intrusive of personal spaces and becoming an unwanted third party. It means you find insights that lead to products and services. It also means you spot problems on the horizon and have the time to deal with them.”

I love the illustration that Mark uses in his Foreword. He cites Arthur C Clark writing in 1962 about 2010, where he states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. How much of what we take as normal today would Clarke’s readers have viewed as magic? Devices (GPS) which tell us where we (and our friends – Google Latitude) are, messages received on the other side of the world milli-seconds after being written, monetary transactions through the atmosphere with no cash changing hands.

Stuart proposes that if technology has become magic then marketers are the alchemists. However, key to the magic forumula is fristly the creation of dialogue with the customer followed by a maintainance of the dialogue. Methods which blur the line between advertising and content – where content incidently markets a product – is significantly more successful than the interruption marketing techniques of old.

According to the paper (STA), some 17% of companies surveyed say that online advertising spend has overtaken offline spend, predicted to be 50% in five years. My own research (sourced from the Digital Britain report) shows that  UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June 2009, a 4.6% year-on-year increase. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.  The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets. Nike and Orange have indicated that in future they will only be advertising digitally. And finally the shift in usage by older people is now being reported.

Much of the STA paper centres on the research finding that “Most of us choose to belong to particular ‘villages’, small clusters of people with whom we regularly communicate, and use a small number of websites that we visit frequently“.  With that in mind it encourages companies to inhabit the spaces their customers already inhabit, such as Amazon, BBC, Facebook, Google, Sype, Twitter etc. Rather than trying to drive traffic to our own sites, we should go to where our customers are already comfortable. It says “There is a quiet revolution going on, in which the word of a complete stranger can influence our purchase decisions more than any marketing. We still talk about targeting customers when we shouldnt be talking about customers – we should be talking about people. And we shouldn’t be targeting them, we shoudl be talking with them”.

Peter Sieyes, Global Digital and Relationship Marketing Director at Diageo is quoted as saying “In the digital era, much of the energy has shifted from marketer to consumer in the networked tribe and the communications process is less linear.” The paper is awash with examples of ground breaking digital practice from Cadbury’s relaunch of Wispa Gold following a customer driven Facebook and Bebo campaign to 3M using social sites for recruitment resulting in a quadrupling of application rate for a quarter of normal budget.

Issues of measurement are raised. We often consider digital to be infinitely measureable but as companies such as Dell have found, the $3.5 million it made in six months from Twitter distributed disciounts, may well have been cannibalising existing sales.

The paper confirms the continued consolidation of digital-only suppliers (such as Amazon) over the competition and predicts that the digital revoluation has not yet reached the top of its curve with growth continuing and still room for expansion. We are currently witnessing media convergence of devices and applications and this is set to continue.

The digital marketer is seen as playing a traditional shopkeeper role in these self selecting villages “You liked this DVD? Here’s another film you will like”. (A process academics cal collaborative filtering.)

In another chapter we are challenged as marketings to live online, the way our customers do. It showcases examples of companies getting this right (like Sainsburys posting recipe ideas on Yahoo! Answers) and companies getting it spectacularly wrong (like American Apparel on Second Life). Yet the need for companies to be to degree ‘hands-off’ as they let the virus to its job will challenge the control freaks amongst us.

None of this should surprise us as consumers that already inhabit our own digital villages. We know many of these things instinctively, and yet with our marketing and work hats on, we so often slip back to being product and company centric, to forgetting that our customers are people who like to be personally communicated with, and are excited by their favourite brands being found unexpectedly in their online and social spaces. Read the full paper – its worth the hour or so it will take, and students will find the examples and bibliography helpful in their studies.

For a copy of the full paper, email CIM.  info@cim.co.uk

Tags: ,

Leave a comment

Category: Emerging Trends, Marketing, Social Marketing, Training & Education

No Comments

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.