Marketing - How is it changing?

Forrester, has come-up with some research around emerging trends in marketing ( ahead of their Marketing Forum 2008) - Engagement is becoming an important metric. Key highlights include:

Marketing leaders steer based on hard data. Measuring engagement will take the guesswork out of budget allocation. Engagement can drive awareness, transactions, brand preference, and loyalty. But each of these objectives requires a different approach and investment in people, processes, and technology.Marketing leaders from firms like CompUSA and BMW prioritized one goal, chose a very specific set of tools and vendors, and successfully moved the needle on transactions and loyalty, respectively.

Direct marketers and market researchers unearth deep client needs. Leading direct marketers already combine Web clicks with purchase and loyalty data to unearth a consumer's interaction with the brand. But BrandIntel went a step further and recorded the content that users generated and other consumers read.

eCommerce professionals drive online sales with personalization. More than a third of Web visitors will make a purchase after seeing a personalized recommendation. eCommerce professionals can boost online sales with one-to-one personalization.

Customer experience professionals innovate the brand. Whirlpool observed people at home and used the results to develop a new sub-brand -- Gladiator -- with fridges for men in their garages.To meet these uncovered needs, customer experience professionals will develop a disruptive strategy, simplifying the interaction, amplifying the service elements, and repositioning the brand overall.

My view:  Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy & Influence - 4Is as Forrester calls it, needs to be measured by marketers on a regular basis. This will increasingly make marketing more data-led. They need to be building programs around the 4Is using data. It is important that they start fusing transactional data with web data - clicks, blogs, social networks etc. along with customer service data. This will increasingly give marketers a peek preview into how customers feel, think and talk about their products and personalize their marketing efforts basis the degree of engagement they have identified with these set of customers. 

Comments

[Krishna Mony]

The challenge clearly is not accessing the data, but sifting through it to find information that is truly representative of the target audience. It’s a highly specialized field and the intricacy involved can be gauged by the level of frenzied M&A activity witnessed amongst the large enterprise IT vendors. Vendor like SAP that swear by organic growth have changed tack and ended up acquiring Business Objects. Oracle, the database top dog - didn’t deign to develop it in-house, went ahead and acquired Hyperion. That to me, betrays a tearing sense of urgency.

But too much buzz around market research does come with a hidden caveat – commoditization of research itself. Something that does not bode too well for research buyers :-)

[Tender]

agreed with you, Krishna Mony
Nice article