Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Brand Conversations – Is Anyone Listening? (And If So, Do They Care?)

It can be quite hard to be clear about the effect social media has had on brands and the broader marketing landscape.  Some people would have you believe that the online global conversation that social media has unleashed is a revolution that brands simply have to be involved in if they are to stay relevant.  Others say it's only really significant within specific, albeit important, areas of marketing such as customer service.  Either way, there can be no doubt that social media in its many guises has changed people's habits and expectations and therefore it remains an area of ongoing fascination for brands who pride themselves on being close to their consumers and the marketplace.  However, for such brands to join the conversation in a credible way...

That Distant Rumble Is Big Data

‘Big Data’ is the phrase of the moment in tech circles which probably means it will be appearing on the to-do lists of marketing folk soon.  The expression refers mainly to the oceans of information being poured continuously onto the open web and social networks by ever more connected consumers (aka people).  This tsunami comes in the shape of comments, images, scans, tweets, likes, views, posts, videos and a kaleidoscope of other digital expressions.  However, whilst people's everyday lives are providing a big piece of the pie, the scope of Big Data goes much further.  Less obvious but just as vast are the intelligence flows that stem from our web browsing behaviour or location signals from smartphones.  Other component parts include corporations publishing market information , governments opening up public data for others to use, or vast social platforms that encourage smart developers to weave new applications and services.  The result is a share-and-compare economy where people, companies and organisations trade digital views, opinions and information in order to help make decisions - commercial or otherwise.  As ever, this creates challenges and opportunities for marketing and brand folk.  But there’s no shortage...

Software Is Eating TV

In August of this year, Marc Andreessen, the man who built the first commercial web browser, wrote that, ‘software is eating the world.'  Yet, he noted, companies continue to underestimate the impact modern technology is having on their markets.  Andreessen suggested this myopia might be down to bad memories and burnt fingers following the dotcom boom and bust, when many outlandish promises about the future were made and broken. Additionally, he cited a lack of appreciation about the speed of change that continues to take place around us and the subsequent dramatic shifts in the landscape for companies, brands and organisations. For instance, Andreeseen believes the rapid uptake of smartphones that's driving global access to the web will create vast online markets of five billion people. Furthermore, reaching these giant markets is becoming easier as the burgeoning capacity and efficiency of cloud computing continues to drive down the cost of running web services.  ‘Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming’, advises Andreessen who is now one of the world’s most influential technology investors.  It strikes me that his comments accurately capture the current mindset of...

Definitions That No Longer Apply

As digital tectonic plates continue to shift and once separate media sectors merge onto a single global platform, the terrain for brands and marketing definitions remain in a state of flux.  Just take a few recent examples.  Last week Facebook indicated it’s no longer a social network but a 'platform', while Twitter reconfirmed it’s dropping the social tag in favour of a new guise as an 'information network'.  Leaving some questioning, if even Facebook and Twitter are dropping the label, what ‘social’ actually means in context of marketing; other than the constant buzz of a global bazaar.  Additionally, big technology players are constantly redefining themselves and their markets.  Amazon, the one-time online book shop, confirmed it is going into direct competition with Apple, the one-time desktop computing manufacturer, with the launch of the Fire tablet.  The reason being that both increasingly seek to extend their credentials as global media players offering music, TV and films.  Meanwhile, Google, the one-time search business, has bought Motorola, the one-time handset manufacturer, to bolster its own planned entry into the world's TV markets; whilst simultaneously becoming an alternative to a credit card provider by launching Google Wallet.  Elsewhere, Hulu, an online television service that was established by the US TV networks as a defensive strategy to see off Google’s YouTube, is being sold off because it success is undermining the revenue model of the owners' traditional businesses.  (Ironically, the possible buyers include Google, Amazon and Yahoo).  Even the idea of images and photographs is being redefined as demonstrated by the plight of Kodak, one of the...

In Networked Media Links Mean Business

Historically, different types of media were independent from one other and there weren’t really any links between them. However, as all media, including TV, gradually becomes networked onto a single digital platform, the links between them are becoming very real, very varied and very valuable. Today, consumers (aka people) can easily switch from one type of digital media to another, and equally easily to an e-commerce checkout. The result is that the consumer path-to-purchase, that for a long time used to look a fairly simple flowchart driven by Yes/No decisions, now resembles a bowl of spaghetti, such is the choice of routes through the new media ecosystem. Hyperlinks were the first example of valuable connections between different types of media giving consumers the opportunity to follow their own paths of interest. When reading a physical paper the only way to follow-up on an issue or offer was to rip out the article or coupon and file it away. As newspapers became networked this behaviour changed and people could immediately click-through an article or promotion to find out more.  Today, as increasing amounts of media becomes...

What's The New Normal For Big Brands?

What's the ‘New Normal’ for global brands?  By which I mean that following the collapse of global finance, the ensuing reshuffle of the world’s powerhouse economies and rapid growth of vast technological platforms, what do global brands care about and to which companies and sectors are they turning for assistance? I keep returning to three thoughts. Firstly, that corporations and brand-owners’ aims haven’t really changed a great deal. They want the same business outcomes, such as awareness, sales, loyalty and product differentiation, that create and support Mega-Brands and the shareholder dividends that follow. Secondly, media and marketing remains in the throes of huge waves of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter alluringly called ‘creative destruction’; the painful process by which one economic order is gradually replaced by another.  In the context of media and marketing, creative destruction has come in the form of digital IP technology breaking open the barriers between previously separate industries to create a single global platform upon which vast new networked media oceans surge.  Finally, most global corporates have been quietly shifting their investments into fast-growing markets for years. Now, as growth falters in Europe and the US, these booming economies seem to promise a golden future. Many such as Brazil, India, China and Indonesia see the creative destruction of technology, media and telecomms as a welcome opportunity. They invest enthusiastically in new...  

Will Google Ever Be Cleverer Than Mumsnet?

Now that networked media offers us infinite choice about the way we slice and dice our questions, queries and requests, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed.  While trying to book a holiday this year for myself, my good lady and two small daughters I found myself with so much information and so many options that I felt like I was playing three-dimensional chess.  That country with this accommodation for price one or this country with that accommodation for price two?  Booking through this service directly with separate flights or that agent all-in?  Whilst this country’s currency is strong against the feeble pound its prices are lower than that country which has a weaker exchange rate but is more expensive.  This resort is a longer flight but the weather is good, while this option is nearer but will there be sun?  And last, but not least, there was my five-year old’s very specific request for a pool with a curly-whirly slide.  After a week or so of research using what felt like about four hundred different websites and services, we had narrowed the choices down to about twenty-nine and I don’t mind admitting that my brain froze.  Camping in Wales, I thought? ‘I’ll look on Mumsnet’, said my good lady.  Now I know that Mumsnet is a vast community and has become the UK’s barometer for what is and is not acceptable in terms of parenting, as well as who should be the next Prime Minister.  However, I wasn’t too sure that it would be much help in solving our cryptomatic holiday quandary.  However, about thirty minutes later I received a link to a resort that I opened with very little enthusiasm only to discover the most perfect place imaginable that met all the criteria and some.  ‘It’s got a good write-up on Mumsnet’, was the message that came with it.  And that I believe is what Clay Shirky is referring to when he says that...

Marketing Has An Identity Problem

Digital Identity has long been a fascinating area but it wasn’t really of interest to the mainstream because, for a long while, only geeks had online identities of any significance. Obviously that has now changed. Twitter, blogs, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and Quora are just a few of the many services that people use to maintain their digital IDs.  As a result, the everyday influence of these identities is growing.  Even limiting the view to the professional sphere we can see how important the world of online identity has become.  A LinkedIn profile can get you a new job but a crass comment on Twitter can get you fired.  A great YouTube channel can earn you a living as can a shop on Etsy. An informed blog can help you turn a hobby into a job; whereas a photo on Facebook can be ‘career-limiting’.  And these IDs are here to stay.  In fact, we can expect the range and depth of people's digital identities and the extent to which...

Who Will Survive In The New Networked Media Oceans?

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry.  TV was TV and so on and so forth.  Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was also true of technology and telecoms. However, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, technology and telecomms companies are gradually being drawn.  The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive.  Some will maintain their status.  Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, of course, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud.  The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading.  But why didn’t every big media and technology beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...

'They Do What?!'

The recent rise of Quora, the social net based around (mainly) cerebral Q&A, created the customary reactions, including one that I always find interesting. It’s a common outburst from many people upon being introduced to any type of new web service that goes something along the lines of: ‘They do what?! What on earth!?’, ‘What’s the matter with them?’ and at some point quite possibly, ‘Where do they find the time?’ and, if you are lucky, ‘Don’t they have jobs?!’. Sometimes with some spluttering and eye-rolling thrown in for good measure.  I went through almost exactly this train of thought the first time I saw Twitter.  I remember someone showing me a Tweet from one of their pals saying they were waiting in for the plumber because their boiler had broken and they had no hot water.  ‘They do what!?’, I spluttered, ‘Why would anyone be interested in this?!’.  However, I then caught myself and realised I was about to say everything that people had been saying to me about blogging for the previous few years.  (For some reason the blogging version of this outrage often involved people’s pyjamas evidently implying something about the plight of the lonely.  As in,‘blogging is just about people in their pyjamas writing about...