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More Talk Than Action
The buzz at THE Conference on Marketing Everyone was all about the need to go beyond traditional marketing tactics to focus on the customer experience. The speakers – from such companies as Mercedes Benz, eBay, Mandalay Entertainment, Starbucks, Pitney Bowes, Wachovia, Wal-Mart, and PepsiCo -- all talked about 1to1, but never CRM. One said, "You don't have 100 million customers. You have one customer, 100 million times." (Sounds familiar…) Everyone in every business mentioned something about experience, engagement, and building long-term loyalty.
One odd thing was that while everyone talked about how it's a new age and you need to look at non-traditional marketing tactics like word of mouth, ring tones, and Web games, they still mostly showed commercials, print ads, and other traditional means as their examples. So they are talking about new marketing approaches, but not actually doing that much of it. It comes down to fear of risk and also a fight for marketing dollars. "We'd rather hold on to the pain that we have instead of facing the future," said Peter Guber, chairman of Mandalay Entertainment.
On the other hand, this is the year that even packaged goods companies are bailing out of network tv ad dollars in favor of interactive, DTC and web investments, as well as beefed up call centers. The worm has turned.
We've moved from a seller-driven economy to a buyer-driven economy, but some companies are willing to wait it out until it switches back. I doubt that will happen anytime soon, so the more non-traditional a company can be to reach customers, the better.
some of the buzz lately has been that some marketers and advertisers prefer the "old pain" versus facing the future because they prefer the compensation associated with TV and magazine ads versus the pay-for-performance often associated with new media.