MARKETING - What Makes Digital Marketing Fundamentally Different?

What Makes Digital Marketing Fundamentally Different?

Greg Satell, Contributor

The marketing world, in large part, can be split into two camps.  The traditionalists believe that nothing has really changed except the tools.  Digital advocates, on the other hand, are sure that the realm of communication has changed so completely that the old rules have lost relevance.  Who’s right?

Having spent ample time in both camps, I’m somewhere in the middle.  I’m equally frustrated with those who try to fit new media into old models and those who are sure every shiny object represents a new paradigm.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that something fundamental has changed and, in my view at least, it starts with one of the most primary assumptions in the marketing world. 

The Purchase Funnel

The purchase funnel should be familiar to anyone involved in sales and marketing.  It has been a staple for decades and many different iterations have arisen, but here’s the most basic version from Wikipedia:

The funnel is a graphical representation of the AIDA model that’s been in use for at least a century and appeals to our basic common sense.  You get a prospect’s attention, inspire their interest, overcome their objections and get them to act.  The implicit assumption is that the more people you put into the front of the funnel, the more sales you’ll get out the end.

This led to marketers to focus on building brand awareness, mainly through TV campaigns. While some energy went into tactics farther down the line, the thinking was that awareness was a tide that lifted all boats.  I think that everybody knew that the notion wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was true enough that it worked and played a crucial role in building our most beloved brands.

That model is now broken because 60% of TV viewers are surfing the Internet while they watch, so the action that a TV ad is most likely to elicit is not a trip to the store, but an Internet search.  That’s what’s fundamentally changed and it means we need an entirely new model.

The Three Pillars of Digital Brands

Once a consumer begins to research a category purchase online, their data trail will alert your competitors, who will retarget those same consumers with new offers based on their surfing behavior.   In effect, by building brand awareness you are also building category awareness and allowing your rivals to line their coffers.

To respond to the new challenges many marketers have developed path-to-purchase models.  Like purchase funnels, there are multiple versions, but here’s the one that I favor:

 

At first glance, the contrast may seem mostly cosmetic.  After all, you still have the same major elements, simply rearranged.  However, what used to be a linear process has been replaced by a continuum and that makes all the difference in the world.

In short, marketers need to shift from grabbing attention to holding attention and that will require a change in skills, mindset and organizational integration.

From Big Ideas to Pervasive Brand Experiences

In contrast to the old model, where marketers strove to come up with a “big idea” which they could promote with massive ad spending on TV, now marketers need to create pervasive brand experiences that keep consumers engaged even after they have made the sale.

Case in point is the Nike’+program, which has developed an entire ecosystem that helps consumers track their own training programs through a fuelband that monitors their activity, devices implanted in basketball shoes that can record how high they jump and interfaces with both the Apple iPod and Microsoft Kinect platforms.  They can even link their profiles with friends and compete with them.

To succeed in this new environment, marketers need to move away from one-way communication and towards a true value exchange, where consumers interact with the brand continuously because they are getting more than just a slogan, but an experience that transcends the product itself.

However, the shift requires tight integration of a much wider set of skills than in the old “big idea” era.  Beyond making ads, todays marketing effort requires technologists, usability experts community managers, retail specialists and sometimes even a mathematician or two.

My question is this:  If marketing practice has changed so fundamentally, why do our marketing organizations look so much the same?

It boggles the mind.

- Greg