Marketing departments, but not as we know them
I have being meaning to blog about this article for some time. McKinsey Quarterly published an interesting article earlier this year entitled ‘We’re all marketers now’.
In (very) short and at its most simplistic, it reminds us that every contact point we have with a brand (from the pack to the call centre to the ad to the website and beyond) influence our opinion of the brand.
But the 2011 challenge it poses is that as products and services become more homogenised, advertising becomes more regulated (my point) and as we create exponential numbers of contact points for brands, “customers no longer separate marketing from the product, it is the product”.
The effort and thought given to delivering a brand’s marketing message through both ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ channels, may all be for naught if an organisation’s does not manage all of the contact points that are influencing opinion of their brands.
The authors challenge the effectiveness of the old ways of evaluating marketing success because how we will be able to disseminate customer data when for example the gaming company Zynga generate 5 terabytes (the equivalent of about 1.5 million song files) of data on customer clicks every day.
And they list a number of routes for consideration, as marketing becomes more pervasive, but most of all they suggest that companies need to fundamentally review their customer contact points and from that design a new kind of marketing organisation to ensure that they optimise their effectiveness and the efforts they put into delivering .
It is worth a read and while it may not give you all the answers you will definitely walk away feeling more informed.
