Remember the marketing textbook from University? There were all these marketing principles, rules, and graphs, marketing funnel must be one of them.  I don’t think we need further explanation on the tradtional marketing funnel with Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, and Loyalty.

This graph by Forrester explains the new marketing landscape, most of us rely hugely on recommendations before purchase. With the help of social media and other communication platform, recommendations, peer reviews, and user generated content really play a really big role during consumers’ purchase decision. As the graph suggested, the landscape these days is more complicated than ever!

This is the question that most Digital Marketers have thought about. In a recent research by Sherastone, only 2 digital marketing “tactics” had increased in budget in 2009; they are email and social media.

Social Media is NOT killing Email Marketing

I don’t think email marketing is dying. I think marketers need to really see social media as a strategy, and email marketing can be one of the “social media marketing tactics” when they are integrated well.

To give, not to sell through email

For example, social media as a whole is a great channel to collect relevant email addresses because it allows us to target personalities and interests through conversations, the key to be successful in email marketing is to provide value to the subscribers. Instead of thinking about what they might be interested in purchasing, marketers should think about what they might be interested in receiving. Instead of following the Direct Marketing nature of Email Marketing, marketers should use it more as a branding and community building tactic that goes hand in hand with social media.

Although measuring is way more complicated than direct marketing, there are still ways to do it with well-planned KPIs.

Email “Selling” is Dead

Direct email marketing (email selling) is dead, people don’t just “purchase” after seeing email promotions. However, with the help of social media, email marketing can still be a very powerful and profitable tactic when the message and execution is tailored to the target.

Parody in advertising can gain more attention than the original piece if it’s done well. This piece definitely went viral. Specsavers, an online glasses shop created this great viral piece that mocks an older advertisement by AXE. AXE has always been selling sex appeal in their ads, Specsavers’ ad is clever enough to take advantage of all the buzz AXE has.

The original Ad by AXE

And here’s the Specsavers’ ad

Dolce&Gabbana has always been the leader in technology among other fashion brands. In 2005, D&G broadcasted their fashion shows live on it’s official website. In 2008, they started to get into the mobile market, established dolcegabbana.mobi to create a more interactive way to communicate with fans, then a free iphone app was developed after.

They just announced few hours ago (Feb/19/2010 12:46 PM Milan Time CET) that they are going to offer fans the opportunity to watch the upcoming Fall/Winter 2010/11 season fashion show live on iPhone and Android Mobile Devices. The live show will be available at live.dolcegabbana.mobi on February 25th 3:00PM (GMT+1).

It’s another case showing how important smartphone users are for businesses these days, can’t wait to see how they will execute it to create the buzz, I’m sure many social media elements will be included.

I’m not a good listener in conversations, but I’m pretty sure I’m the best listener on others’ conversations in public places. I was at a dinner tonight in a local restaurant, just one of those casual Hong Kong restaurant and I got inspired by some random influencers.

So people from the table behind me were talking about iPhone plans, they said Hong Kong telco Three (used to be the exclusive iphone provider in Hong Kong) sucks at it’s 3G network and customer service, and that he actually switched to Smartone (telco that started offering iphone service 2 weeks ago), even though his phone contract was yet to end. And he was saying that he loves the service provided by Smartone now.

Anyways, the point is, I’m a current Three customer, these people are not my friends, I have no idea who they are, and judging by how they spoke, they are definitely not experts in technology. Why did I trust their piece of advice and actually thought about switching?

Random Influencers influence others by not being influential. I prefer feedback from real users who  have no connection to the company or industry because I’m seeing it directly from a user POV.

Now think about an expert site/ blog that talks about a product, comparing to some random comments by the public. Although not many people are as nosy as I am, but with the growth of social media, these random influencers are becoming very powerful since you can easily see what they are saying online. In general, I would say the influence of 5 random influencer can beat the influence of one expert these days when it comes to purchase decision making.

Therefore, depending on the product or service, marketers these days should not focus too much on getting experts/ publications to talk about your brands, all these years, we tend to go for the way of influencing the influential ones, and get them to influence the “random influencers” (left in image), but now maybe it’s time to influence the “random influencers” to influence the “experts” (right in image).

Photo Credit: _rogers

It’s hard to gain new customers, but it’s even harder to keep existing ones. I was about to switch to another hosting company this morning, but a 5-minute online chat stopped me from making this decision.

If you own a website/blog, you should know that the customer lifetime value in web hosting industry is very high, which means one customer can bring hosting company long-term revenue, similar to mobile network companies. This is why hosting companies invest so much in customer relationships to keep existing customers happy.

I was thinking about switching all my hosting services to mediaTemple because of their great reputation on speed, and all the positive comments I heard from friends. I even contacted them for information about the services and they responded me in no time. I was going to switch when this current hosting plan expires, which will be next week.
As I was trying to create my Posterous blog (which will be launched soon) with this current hosting with IXwebhosting, I had problem with the DNS settings, so I got on to the 24/7 online support. In 2 seconds, one of the representatives greeted me and asked how he could help, I told him the problem and he set up everything for me from his side in 5 minutes in excellent manner!

I was very impressed and promised him that I would publicly thank Vadim Chichkanov from IXwebhosting.
So that quick 5 minute chat kept me for at least 2 more years in their company.

While marketers are considering shifting funds from traditional media to social media, a recent study done by Ofcom finds UK teens are starting to lose interest in social networking.

Among the age group of 15 to 24, the growth of social networking has been slowing down since March last year. Number of people who created or own profiles on social networking sites fell 5% in the last year and a half. On the other hand, number of profiles created by 35-54 year old adult has an 8% increase since then.

Although it is only a UK focused study, it might be a sign that can wake up companies that are blindly going digital without knowing the social media landscape.

Is social networking not as exciting as before for teens? Will this same group of teens jump back on to more social networking activities when they get to the 35-54 age group?

When there were less competitors in every industry, consumers purchase only for the functions and usability of products. Companies then realized they had to differentiate themselves when more and more competitors came up and shared their profits in the industry. Similar thing is happening in social media.

As the graph above shows, the importance of branding and packaging grew since production era. Many companies these days set prices higher than it needs to be in order to cover their marketing expenses. Although I do think that quality of a product is what matters, many consumers still buy products that they don’t really need, thanks to the smart marketing campaigns!

When people started to build content, visuals/ graphics didn’t matter, all people cared about was text content. Similar to the previous case, increasing amount of social networks and blogs forces content creators to attract attention in a different way. #FFFFFF background and #000000 text don’t impress people as much these days on the Internet.

I had a conversation with Thomas Crampton and Nic Tinworth about data visualization, they are both visualization gurus and we all agreed that many people get overwhelmed by all the blog postings they get directed to each and everyday. Visualized data worth a million words when it is created in a creative, and simple way.

I am not a Bottled Water fan, I just don’t see the value in paying for a branded bottle of water to cover their marketing costs while I can easily get water for free. However, I’m always interested in seeing how these brands try to position themselves among the others.

Here’s a very funny one by Evian, targeting baby-boomers (and parents).
Technorati Tags: Evian, Advertising, water, marketing, branding

Found this great article “Future of Marketing and Advertising… Is Gaming?” from futurelab by Taylan Kadayifcioglu.

We expect faster and easier communication, information and technology, product/ service reviews can be easily found online with a few clicks, there’s no doubt that the only way brands can survive in long-term is to deliver true value.

“True value” is a pretty abstract and broad term, it could be anything that is delivered to the customers including feelings, creativity, entertainment…

At the end, “idea that spread, wins.” In the future, marketers will have to pay more attention to how easy the idea of the products/ services can be spread, especially when social media will play a big role in the marketplace.