I've been at the New Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, MA (my first time there), for a couple days. Frankly, it's the 3rd new media/marketing thing I've attended in six months and the newness is starting to wear off.
What I mean is that "new marketing" seems kind of like a misnomer, and this was brought home to me by two talks in particular.
First, there was Chris Brogan's interview with Alan Scott, CMO of Dow Jones. Scott (brother of David Meerman Scott, it turns out), was talking about the cool things that he's done using various social media. When asked, however, how much he budgets for social media, he said, "Nothing" (or words to that effect).
Instead, he showed us an overview of his marketing plan including his messaging strategy as it related to his various target audiences. Then, he showed his sales funnel starting with several hundred thousand prospects and filtering down to a smaller number of leads that got pushed to his sales folks and capped off with revenue numbers tied to converted leads. In other words, he does traditional marketing (messaging, audience segmentation, lead generation, sales conversion, etc.), and he just happens to use new media when it is appropriate for a particular audience.
The old vs. new dynamic was then driven home by Christopher S. Penn's presentation (which I have not yet found on-line, but will link thereto when I do), which emphasized "studying something old to learn something new." His main point was that humans are the same today as they were 100 or five hundred years ago and that emerging media and technologies are just new tools that we are applying to a rather traditional situation: communicating with other humans, trying to provide them with valuable information, services, etc., and hoping to influence their behavior. His challenge to the audience was to look for a success story from your industry that happened between 1850 and 1930, and see what applicable lessons the past might offer you today.
In other words, there may be new ways of carrying out some traditional marketing functions like PR or Communications more broadly, but the "new" marketing of today sure resembles the old marketing of yesteryear, at least as far as the fundamentals are concerned.
Am I right or am I right?
Hey Matthew. In case I wasn’t clear in my presentation yesterday, here is what I was trying to say. We use new media extensively at Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, and we always will. However, we do not look at it as a separate category of marketing with its own (limiting) budget. Rather, we focus on attracting our target segments in every way possible and through every marketing vehicle, including "new marketing."
Our strategy is simple: create a killer message and offer, and get it in front of our target audience in every way possible. If our audience reads certain blogs, we put the message and offer there. If they attend Webinars, there we are. If they read newspapers, we go there too. We try not to make artifical (limiting) distinctions between old and new, but rather let our clients tell us how to reach them.
Alan,
That was exactly what I thought you were saying, sir, and I think your comment underscores my point: the crux of marketing has been, and remains, the creation of "killer messages and offers" and getting the aforesaid in front of target customers in the way these folks want to be reached. While there may be more and more new, inventive, and personal ways to do marketing, the key to doing it successfully remains unchanged and that goes back to listening to, understanding, and responding to our customers.
Matt