The Virtues of Post-Recession Marketing

[Dave Duarte]

Marketing is generally not considered a virtuous profession these days - Marketers are often lumped with the blame for rampant consumerism - people living above their means, spending money on things they don't need, or wouldn't have desired otherwise.

I think that a new era of Marketing is dawning though. This new era of Marketing is driven by buyers and influencers of buyers. i.e. pretty much everyone in modern civilization. This is another way of saying that we've moved from a Seller's Market to a Buyer's Market.

People are making new demands on companies - such as eco-friendly products and ethical manufacturing - and even though may it cost a little more to meet these demands, it would be unwise not to comply.

Marketers need to be on the pulse of consumer trends and opinions globally. It's near impossible to predict where things are going, but there's clues all over the place to tell us where we are and how we can serve people better.

The digital environment makes paying attention to customers a lot easier - everything that people do online can be a clue (or cue) for marketers, from typing in a search term to expressing a desire on a Twitter stream.

Furthermore, in this brave new world, people will not tolerate spam, fatty pricing and other forms of waste that can be directly attributed to sloppy target marketing.

Just as we've moved from a Seller's Market to a Buyer's Market, so we are also transitioning from Push-Marketing dominance to Pull-Marketing dominance.

If you, like me, need to feel good about the work you do, consider some of the things great marketing today is about:

* Enabling communities of shared interest
* Helping people make more informed buying choices
* Reducing inefficiency and wasted effort and resources
* Fulfilling people's needs
* Informing customer-centric innovation

There's a stack more, of course, if there's anything else you'd like to add to this - pop it in the comments below.

[Dave Duarte]

So true. I get annoyed when someone tries to sell anything to me, actually. I want information!
That said, I really appreciate it when the information is presented in an enticing way that makes it easy to engage with and is memorable. So the info can be sexy.

[Helga Louw]

I can definitely relate to "reducing inefficiency and wasted effort and resources" and believe strongly in pull-marketing as a means of achieving that - viz the bad media on poor telemarketers :-)
We (Milpark Business School) hosted Stafford Masie (he's the ex-CEO of Google Africa) at a speaker evening at our JHB campus - he spoke at length about how online searching changed and is changing our world and definitely directly impacting on the marketing landscape.