Marketing has changed a lot since Al Gore invented the Internet. While direct response campaigns used to take weeks to conclude, e-mail direct response campaigns can be wrapped up and evaluated in a matter of days - with 90+ percent of the results being available in 48 hours.
It's easy to look back and see what you wish you had known you would need to know today:
- How much more effective advertising in e-zines would turn out to be than advertising via banners.
- How to negotiate better for advertising.
- That CPM (cost per thousand) would eventually fall from $150 to well under $10 on general interest sites.
- That even Yahoo could be talked into CPA (cost per action) advertising.
What will you need to have mastered five years from now? Where will you have wasted your marketing energy that hindsight could have avoided? Will you wish you had implemented more strategic partnerships? Will you wish you hadn't waited so long to implement partner relationship management (PRM) software? Will you wish you had signed onto some XML-based privately managed privacy initiative?
What will marketers be worrying about a year from now? Five years from now? What should the topic of marketing conferences be? What should marketing courses be teaching today to prepare future marketers to deal with the hot issues in the future?
Top Marketing Issues for 2002
- Managing lists
- Relevance
- Data overload
- Partnerships
- Privacy
Managing Lists
Managing lists and growing lists will be the number one concern in the next five years for marketers. The trend to look to our most trusted sources for information has only been exacerbated by the atrocities of September 11. For consumers, this manifests itself when they look for the Eddie Bauer edition of an SUV, for the Real seal on a frozen pizza, or for the opinion of their favorite restaurant critic for advice on dining out. Effective marketers will grow the number of consumers with whom they have personal, trusted relationships. GE, which now markets directly to its existing customer base via e-mail, figured this out within the last year. Why doesn't Coca-Cola build loyalty that way?
Relevance
Personalization has metamorphosed into relevance. Personalization was about providing the information marketers thought you might care about based either on your previous behavior or on the behavior of others who share traits in common with you - typically demographic or affinity traits. Relevance is about providing you information about what you care about in the context of when you care about it. Baby formula companies have been doing this for years. When a woman in America is seven months pregnant, she can pretty much expect to have at least one case of baby formula arrive on her door step. I'm three for three. It might not be welcome, but it's relevant. Sending baby formula to all women would be personalization - see the difference?
Data Overload
Information overload is defined as "the point at which someone tells you more than you want to know." For example, your seven-year old asks, "What does hegemony mean?" You answer by saying that hegemony is from the Greek hegemon, meaning leader, and it refers to a country having a lot of often-unwelcome influence over other countries, and that there was a time when some countries owned other countries and that was called empire, but today, since it's not as acceptable for countries to have colonies, they instead exert influence through military strength and foreign aid, and that's called hegemony. In the mean time, your child has resolved never to ask you what a word means again.
Marketing data overload works exactly like that, complete with the glazed eyes. Marketers are going to have to get shrewder about asking for marketing data from IT, agencies, and software vendors. Ask the right questions, you get the right answers. The right data leads to information, and ultimately to intelligence.
In the next three years we'll see an increase in the number of channels available for direct data collection - comparable to the Internet. Specifically: interactive television, wireless devices (of some sort), and electronic paper. All of these mean even more data to sort through. Get the data-to-intelligence path paved early so that this additional data doesn't obscure more than it enlightens.
Partnerships
Perhaps partnerships should be higher up the list. The most cost-effective way to establish a trusted relationship with new consumers is via partnerships with those consumers' trusted brands. Refer back to the Eddie Bauer Ford SUV. Find out whom your target consumers trust and take them to lunch. Particularly if the economy stays on the skids, partnerships will pay off big time.
Privacy
Ahhh, privacy. This is one from which you cannot escape. Ignore it and it will not go away. Show your consumers that you take it seriously. Participate in the development of private-sector privacy initiatives (see Technology is the Answer). And, for goodness sake, stop funding the privacy industry via its various "public-interest" organizations. So far all we've seen from this group is hysteria-inciting press releases, law suits against companies, and proposals of legislation. They are not on the side of industry. I don't even think they're on the side of consumers. They're on the side of more money and press for themselves. The private sector has got to come together around the P3P standard, or TCML, or something else.
I'm sure you have your own ideas. Please feel free to send them to me. I'll publish yours in a follow-up column if they differ from mine.
Alexis D. Gutzman is an author, speaker, and consultant on e-business and
e-commerce topics. She's the producer of The Online Marketing Report. Her most recent book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12
Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena, was named one of the
30 best business books of this year. For up-to-date information about her research and speaking engagements, visit The Alexis Gutzman Group's Web site.
