From time to time I meet up with marketing folk, often as part of an initial briefing, who appear to me to be standing on a precarious ledge from which they are about to throw themselves. What do I mean by this? By the 'ledge' I mean when a marketing executive has decided or been instructed to launch a digital marketing plan regardless of its relevance to their business. In recent years these plans have mostly involved social media and mobile apps. However, the ledge mindset is surprisingly common in other areas too. I think of my job as helping people make sense of the trends and issues arising in digital and networked media. But the fun bit is applying those issues to real world problems. And that means grounding them within the context of an overall business and marketing strategy, which is the part often missing when people are standing on the ledge. They have effectively decided to take a professional leap of faith, something they wouldn’t do in any other aspect of their business decision-making. The ledge mindset is generally created by being overly-focused on technology and specific services that are growing at a very rapid speed. The massively quick adoption of digital tools by consumers (aka people) has a strange affect on marketing executives. Growth of a service becomes the only consideration. So it doesn’t necessarily matter what the service is. Or who is using it. It also doesn’t really matter if the context is right for a brand. Or, occasionally, even if their customers can access it! One particularly colourful example of this in the last few years was...
...the rise of Second Life. The fact that the online virtual world was largely populated by people who wanted to get away from the excessive branding and commercial bias of the real world, was not a barrier to brands who saw it as a good place to set up shop. Literally in some cases. Nor did it matter that these people, broadly ubergeeks, were not likely to be customers for those brands. Finally, it didn’t even matter that most people couldn’t access Second Life at all, as it required double-fast broadband and a super-computer to manage the whizzy 3D graphics. The only thing that mattered was that it was growing quickly.
That said, I do understand how highly intelligent marketing folk find themselves on that ledge in the first place. There is a real Siren's-call quality to the web and digital wizadry for marketers and it’s easy to end up trashed on the rocks. Matters are complicated by it not being easy to sort the signal from the noise. It’s often tricky to tell which new web service, application or online trend is going to succeed. Until it succeeds. And once Silicon Valley's Hype Cycle begins, driven by the gazillions of dollars that Sand Hill Road seems to be able to find regardless of global economic conditions and the media gets on board, it becomes very difficult to ignore the latest fad.
As one of my most web-savvy, bottom-line focused clients puts it: ‘You don’t know if Facebook is going to take over from Google and it probably won’t. However, if it does and you’re not on board, you’ve got some tough questions to answer.’ What begins as an attempt to hedge against the possible explosion of a new online service becomes a shop in Second Life being attacked by the Second Life Liberation Army.
Now that the digital world is becoming more integrated with the mainstream it’s easier to bring the web’s wonderful new tools and opportunities within an organisation’s overall strategic decision-making. One aspect of that is using networked media within the marketing mix, rather than as a novel adjunct. And that starts by taking a step back from the ledge.
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