Does the new economy pose challenges to marketing? If so, how? What changed?
Marketing is no more about the traditional 4Ps: Product, Price, Promotions, and Place. Instead it’s about Solution, Value, Information, and Access respectively.
If businesses today—no matter how big or small – don’t get this right, they will never survive. Marketing in the new economy is no longer about expensive outdoor advertisements, full-page newspaper advertisements, and the relentless push that companies use every single day.
In case no one noticed, it’s all changed.
Marketing today is all about relationships; just like it was in the good old days when the owners of the mom-n-pop store in the neighborhood knew every customer by name. The relationship came first, and the sales happened later.
Gary Vaynerchuck almost gets sick of trying to put this point into perspective: it’s the context of your marketing that matters today, and perhaps content comes in next. If customers don’t feel connected, they don’t buy. The buying process today is more emotional than it’s ever been.
With the recession kicking in, customers are more wary about where their hard-earned dollar goes. If it really has to go, it better go where customers are happy enough to spend.
Marketing is all about what those Tweets say about you; it’s about who connects on Linked In; it’s always been about how much customers “like” your products and services.
Kicking all the fancy jargon aside: how many bloggers love you and write about you endlessly? How many people Retweet your tweets? How engaging is your social community online? How passionate are people about your products and services. Gauge that and you have numbers that mean something for marketing better.
The days of reach, circulation, and mass media are all gone; the days of relationship-based, context-heavy, personal or one-to-one marketing are in.
What are you going to place your bets on? 100,000 people who are supposed to read a newspaper or 100 people who can kill for your brand?
