Executive Thought Leadership

The Changing World of Marketing

The familiar world is always more comfortable than the new world. But change is a fact of life. Like it or not, the comfortable old marketing sofa is on the trash heap. The revolution in communications heralds a major shift in the world of marketing. The revered standards, laws, and models forged in post-war America are being taken over by changes in technology. Understanding and embracing the new marketing world will make the difference between success and failure for 21st-century companies.

The archives of early television help us see the old marketing world being born. Red Skelton and Milton Berle did standup vaudeville routines in front of a passive, but receptive, home audience that hung on every word, then sang commercial jingles all the way to the grocery store. Based on the "interrupt" model, marketers caught their targets in front of the TV or on the pages of the daily newspaper, then held their interest with enough creativity to deliver the sales pitch.

"How do we get their attention?" was the focus that gave the world the ad man and the creative department. And creative they were: With few media venues and a virtually captive audience, the one-to-many broadcast model flourished from the 1950s well into the 1980s.

But in today's new world, that era looks like a world in slow motion, especially since the broadband boom. Our audience is no longer passive. The power has shifted from the marketer to the consumer. Prime-time television isn't the magnet it used to be. Digital video recorders like TiVo allow ads to be skipped and scheduling to be customized. Commercials are becoming an annoyance, a theft of the viewer's shrinking time.

Consumers have become moving targets with plenty of options. So what are our options? How do we get and hold the attention of this fickle audience?

Consider paid search. The Google model of this offers advertisers a place of honor on their search pages, targeting customers who are predisposed to absorb their messages. The quarry can now choose whether or not to be caught. The phenomenon of audiences creating their own content is becoming the norm. You don't need to look beyond Google Video, YouTube, and podcasting to see that the change has already happened.

But there is more. New media options crop up nearly every day. The choices seem endless: bluecasting, videocasting, videogames, text messaging, RSS, blogs, product placement, IPTV, and the list goes on. And distinctions are blurring: you can watch TV on your cell phone and get voice messages in your e-mail.

How do marketers adapt to this new wave of communication? The simple answer is "give them what they want." Marketing will have to move from selling to service.

Now consumers, not marketers, decide what they want to hear and when they want to hear it. With so many new devices and channels to reach consumers, messages that are irrelevant in the moment are ignored or skipped altogether. Marketers don't even have a chance to interrupt. But the silver lining is on the service side. When consumers are interested in your product category, you can make it easy for them to access your message. They are predisposed and motivated to buy.

The key is sophisticated targeting to find those most likely to be interested. Using analytics, you can gain insights into individual customer behaviors (Amazon.com's system is a good example) and then target people who will be predisposed to accept your message. Customer relationship management software is proliferating based on the hard reality that what is extraneous data to most people is critical information to motivated shoppers. If you're looking for a digital camera on Google, those ads are helpful, not intrusive. This does not mean that traditional media are dead. It just means that you pilot new ideas in the innovative media while keeping a solid presence in the traditional media. That is the paradigm for the future.

The law of adaptation has not changed, and the current version of technological evolution still supports it. This is an exciting time to be in marketing. New options open up each day, as do new ways to reach the customer and move into the winning position.