Marketing has changed. And it won’t be the same again. The current ongoing crisis has dragged down everything, including those shiny big marketing budgets that were the joy of many marketers.
During these long and, unfortunately, ongoing years of budget cutting activities, marketers faced 2 different phases: the first, waiting for the storm to clear quickly and the business to be once more BAU - “business as usual”; the second, much more productive, the phase of frustration and back-to-the-bone practices, when we suddenly realize that nothing will be the same.
What happened to companies as well as consumers is something unique, a once-in-a-lifetime event (hopefully!) that has dramatically changed the rules of the game: no more unconditional trust to businesses, financial businesses especially, and that strong leadership business culture that once used to inspire respect, transparency and trust, has completely disappeared, gone.
In this catastrophic setting, marketers began to look for new ways to convey their messages to the wider public, be it B2C or B2B makes no difference since – and this is the first real awakening – we just discovered that they are all people.
In such an uncertain landscape, I think there are some trends that will be important in the next future in order to give effectiveness to the marketing efforts – especially working through the main asset of marketing, ie the brand – and that can be essential part of the strategic marketing mix.
1. The social revolution
In the recent years, marketing has mostly been technology driven, trying to unravel the secrets of web 2.0 and include them into the marketing strategy. This digging into the darkness of the web, has allowed many marketers to gather quite a big experience on how to use it and to get on the social networks bandwagon quite soon. All of it, has given rise to new marketing instruments, like social brands or the virtual focus group communities, useful to get onboard the new audience that lives most on their social life online.
2. Rethinking the marketing model
On average, according to a research from Procter & Gamble, the insight marketing budget is made by data crunching activities by 80% and only by 20% by innovation and creativity. An astonishing budget mix that must be reviewed, in a world that is becoming every day less static and in a society which is becoming even more “confessional”, revealing many personal data and preferences like never before. When businesses understand this, marketing will be able to gear itself properly, becoming a fundamental change agent into a “learning organisation”
3. Creative collaboration
Remember how valuable the “collaboration approach” is. Take The Office of Fair Trading for example. It developed a web-based community platform instead of polling people and then spending energies on the data aggregation.
The community exposed the participants to responses from others after initial qualitative interviews. The resulting discussion and collaboration between the respondents meant that the final report suggested new issues and trends that could only have been determined by the community-based discussion
Community-based discussion is nowadays a systemic marketing tool that can be used on a global scale with much reduced costs. To get an insight has never been so easy.
4. Social responsibility is the new pillar of businesses
Before it was just a “joke”, an exercise of good will and charity. Today is about the success of a business. This is the first time ever, when being socially responsible or socially mindful has become to be such an overarching critical success factor. A company’s business is not anymore developed in an abstract world, isolated from the community where it lives and thrives. It must consider itself now as an important part of it, and marketers have now to challenge this “new environment” in order to find a way to engage properly with the people. A “new environment”, where transparency, trust and reputation have become the new businesses’ (and brands’) values.
