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Modern marketing is the result of many years of study in communication. Every part of human interaction has been analyzed and dissected; even as far as to how the brain responds to different phrases and associations.
Just when we think we know it all, there comes a new form of communication and we start the process all over again. Seven years ago, conventional marketing coordination had a theme across several channels: a unifying access to the brand through the key that pulled you in. For example, there might have been a celebrity on your cereal box, in your magazine or newspaper and on your TV promoting the same message.
We have before us now a veritable buffet of options to convey a message with precision to a consumer. Traditional and social media marketing, Web and mobile devices, apps and participatory software allows businesses many different ways of communicating to customers. Do we focus on one or spread ourselves across many?
Are We Spoilt For Choice?
The new marketing information, the new data gathered and the new methodologies are all involved in lively discussions among those in the know. The communications professional then has the challenge of conveying that knowledge, and the risks that come with the new options, to their clients.
While this may be easy enough for some communications professionals, who only have to communicate with a couple of people across a boardroom table or desk – there are those who deal with many organizations, or much larger ones. Sometimes the communications professionals or clients represent long established brands, internal structures and thinking. These invisible influences can guide or destroy a communication campaign before it has even begun. Are they brave enough to follow an approach contrary to their organizational programming?
Marketing Evolution
Modern communication is bold and encompasses marketing that consumers can interact with, on many levels and socially as well. It focuses on what makes a particular brand. We see beer ads that attribute importance to taste and a level of sophistication to their beverage, which in starkly contrast to those years of masculine conformity defining what it was to be ‘a hard working man’.
Businesses are communicating with consumers by giving them access to the brand as never before. You can be liked on Facebook, you can have your ad on television, you can have something go viral (such as having your product feature in a music video) or you can do something that brings you to the attention of the media, for better or worse.
People are interacting with their favorite brands and owning it. With so many ways to connect with others – comments, social media, web forums – the older marketing methods are perhaps riskier now, and can seem less personal than other, modern methods.
Marketing strategies that involve just one channel of communication and the other, traditional approaches across mediums are being left behind in favor of the more wide-spread, multi-medium approaches.
What Do We Want In The Marketing Melee?
When you weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of each marketing approach, across the segments and budgets that influence our consideration, we must ask ourselves what do we want from all this noise?
What we want is a better relationship with our clients – something that comforts, but and does not overwhelm, them. Something that brings them into our product and makes them not only want to stay, but spread the message as well- what Seth Godin calls “Sneezers”.
We can use all the marketing channels at our disposal to further that relationship – an email with an enticing offer, a Facebook page to like, a website to inform, a television ad to amuse and to provoke a discussion – and a text perhaps to thank them for their custom. We can concentrate on building our brand by the promises we are keeping to our customers – whichever marketing channel was used to make the connection.
About the Author
Donna is an experienced marketer in media and broadcast fields. Her background is in indie film and reality TV marketing.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012