Rise of the Always-On Marketing Ecosystem
Posted on 18. Dec, 2009 by Ian Wolfman in Blog, Trends
If you missed Augie Ray’s post, 2010: the Year Marketing Dies, on the Forrester blog I’d encourage you to give it a thoughtful read. I think he offers an articulate if not blunt perspective and supporting evidence of the ongoing changes in marketing environment and how the landscape is shifting under our feet. One of the main motivations for RelationshipEra.com is to help marketers better understand how marketing is evolving and explore how they can adapt to this new period of incredible opportunity. I’d like to briefly expand on a couple of areas that Augie touched on in his post.
Thinking about digital as another channel is limiting. We can no longer approach digital and emerging technologies as channels, separate and distinct from those we traditionally view through the lens of mass marketing and advertising. Digital is the thread that increasingly connects consumer touchpoints and enables all-way communication and social organization. I will add too that social connection and engagement is driven by peoples’ choices and preferences rather than marketing goals and objectives.
Relationships between consumers and brands have expanded beyond dialogue to an always-on marketing ecosystem. The logical extension of conversations between marketers and their audiences is not merely the individual connection with a person, but the rise of an infrastructure that enables people and brands to interact more like the relationships we have in our personal lives. Think about how you communicate with your friends and family. There are obviously some differences, but marketers today have to learn, deploy, manage, optimize and occasionally build an expanding network of touchpoints that enables interaction and that supports a brand’s ability to respond intelligently (and even thoughtfully) at the individual level. But brands have the added challenge of having to do this at scale—and this is a variable that can vary greatly depending on the size of the brand’s typical audience and engagement triggers that tend to cause large numbers of people to be intensely focused at time-sensitive moments.
The new system within which marketers must operate depends less and less on a CPM to persuasion to transaction and repeat approach, and more on contribution to the ecosystem of touchpoints within which a person actively, passively, and socially navigates. It is this always-on ecosystem that’s been enabled by digital and now social media that impacts both trust with a brand and level of transaction.
Just a few thoughts to consider as marketers and brands are thinking about how to move forward in the Relationship Era. Any thoughts?
[Read Winning in the Relationship Era to further explore how leading brands will flourish in a new era of marketing.]
