The Chartered Institute of Marketing - Shape the agenda Research Report
There is an assumption that the internet opens up, to the customer, a world of possibilities, but, in reality, people tend to stick to the same five or six sites that they know and trust. Within these small ‘villages’, the marketer is replacing the shopkeeper – offering the customer things they might not spot themselves, recommending and suggesting alternatives, and frequently acting as post office, doctor, travel agent and village gossip along the way. With people self-selecting the villages they inhabit, marketers need to ensure they have a presence in those places, rather than trying to drive customers to their own sites, which is increasingly a much harder proposition.
We are reaching the point now where there is so much information being produced daily that we don’t have the brain capacity to deal with it. As a result, we are relying on computers to do much of our information processing for us. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means that customers want their computers to do more of the hard work.
Key to effective digital marketing is creating a dialogue with the customer, and then maintaining that dialogue. This is easy to assert, but a challenge to do successfully in practice. The answers include listening first and marketing second. Find ways of successfully blurring the line between advertising and content: desired content that incidentally markets a product is far more successful than our current default position. Don’t ‘target customers’: talk to people. A culture where failure is accepted as part of the development process is needed, and the fact that the internet is so measurable must not allow it to
be demoted to an acquisition tool.
A vital component of keeping the conversation going is trust. Again, this is selfevident, but the challenge comes in creating and maintaining that trust. One of the answers is to draw the distinction between impersonal data and personal information, something that, done successfully, could help alleviate fears over privacy.
What hasn’t happened yet: the shape of digital to come? (2.33 MB)
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