New Year’s Resolutions for 2009 - Video Transcript

Last month we talked about the three eras of marketing. The local era, where a lot of commerce was done within your community, was categorized by a highly personalized service and a high degree of interactivity between the buyer and the seller. The second era of marketing was the mass era, where huge economies of scale were brought about by mass production. The communications in this era were mass communications and were categorized by an environment of one-way communications and a disconnect between buyers and sellers. Brands then evolved as a way to try to understand who I should trust and where I should buy. The third era of digital marketing that we are currently in is an era where the best of both of the previous two eras are coming to life through some new technologies.

What we have now is the potential to utilize all of the things that people really liked about the local era, which include being highly personal, highly interactive and having a sense of community, through technology with the huge efficiencies that were brought about in the mass production era. Now I have got a plethora of goods that I can buy from anywhere in the world, at prices that are just optimized to my particular value proposition.

So now that we are moving actively into this new digital era, the role that marketing plays is being incorporated into this new digital environment. Because of this, there are a few things that I believe are going to be really important themes for marketers in 2009 to keep in mind.

The first one is personal. How do you move to a much more personalized form of marketing? We have talked about one-to-one marketing in the past, and that was typically looked at as a direct marketing, kind of database-oriented approach. However, I think there are opportunities to think about personalization in a very new way. One of those is in the way you target your markets. Historically, targeting has been demographic-based or adjective-based, in that I am targeting women who are 18-24, I am targeting men who are 25-54, or I am targeting small businesses that are in particular industries, for example. It is kind of a noun-adjective descriptor.

Well, what that unfortunately does not take into account is that people with similar demographics can be very different in their behaviors. So looking at behavioral targeting as a new way of thinking about how you reach your market, thinking about verbs instead of adjectives, and talking to me, as John, versus another person, such as one of my managing partners, Tom, whose demographics are almost identical. We are about the same age, same education, same career, same demographic-adjective descriptions. But I spend a lot of time playing golf. Tom really likes driving cars. I travel for triathlons and running events. Tom travels to go to car shows and visit the Green Bay Packers. So our behaviors are very different, and our interests are different. If you are a marketer, being able to understand who we are as individuals makes a huge difference in the way that you will attack people and the kinds of marketing programs that you are going to put in place.

So think about behavior targeting, not just from the online technical definitions of behavior targeting, but from looking at intercepting people based on their interests and the way that they behave. So that is the first thing: getting personal and looking at behavior as a new way for approaching personalization.

The second is community. We are going back to community, and the new iteration of community in today’s context. This new iteration really has to do with people wanting to hear from people like themselves when they are looking for information about a purchase decision. People trust other like-customers more than they trust the company that is offering the product. They trust like-minded people more than they trust anybody else. There is a variety of forms that this information is being disseminated around. Certainly social networks are a part of this. This includes Facebook and the whole growing plethora of social networking environments, as well as LinkedIn on the business context side. There are ways of using social networks as a means to exchange information. Importantly, customer feedback, customer ratings and customer rankings on your website or in other forms of communication where your customers can be your advocate play an important role. Let them talk to your other potential customers, because they trust them more than they trust you. So how do you facilitate that customer-to-customer dialogue that is the form of community that they used to get by talking over the fence to their neighbors? Now you can talk over the Internet to someone you do not necessarily know, but has some very similar interests.

The third key theme I believe will be important for 2009 is interactivity. In the old days, interactivity was this dialogue you could have in your local community. But interactivity now is slightly different in that I want to be able to get information anytime, anywhere. I want to be able to get information from a salesperson, that is not necessarily a physical salesperson, but a virtual salesperson. That means the website, your website, is now one of your most critical ingredients in communicating the value you offer to the marketplace. It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Importantly, it is becoming more available and accessible from more than just your computer. New devices that are becoming available, such as the iPhone, I think are beginning to change the way people are accessing information over the Internet. So the iPhone, looking at other types of wirelessly or wireless-enabled sites, allows somebody that is in a buying mode and looking for information the ability to get it from anywhere at anytime. Build a really strong Web presence that is your chief advocate and make that available to customers 24/7 on any device, anywhere in the world.

So if you look at 2009, here are a few things to keep in mind. How do you evolve to a much more personalized approach to marketing and look at behavior targeting as a component of that? How do you really embrace community and let your customers talk to other potential customers and be your advocates for you? And how do you provide the interactivity that people need to get access to the information they want from anywhere at anytime? If you do those kinds of things, you are going to be way ahead of your competitors. So, good luck with that.

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