Inspired by the white paper "The future of Marketing" written by The Economist Intelligence Unit and Google, I would like to dedicate this post to what i think we can learn from the paper and then apply them to Singapore market.
The big picture
Singapore is a so called "funny" place. It's a lovely, safe and convenient place to live. However, advertisement is everywhere. Virtually when you are outside, you can't find any place to hide from all the ads, even in the Toilet :D
Everyday, customers are exposed to hundreds of different ads. They are coming from the following sources:
- Internet
- Sponsorship and events: Travel Fair Natas, Comex, PC Show, Furniture fair etc...
- Direct Mail (Offline) from SingPost, all the banks like OCBC, DBS, UOB, POSB etc...
- Magazines
- Guerrilla marketing
- Television: Channel 5, channel 8, channel U, Indian channels etc...
- Newspapers: The Straight Times, Today, Zao Bao
- Outdoor advertising: Billboards, Bus, Taxi etc...
- Print classifieds
- Radio: Harvey Norman is a big advertiser there (quite tired of listening to this guys actually :D)
- Yellow Pages
- And recently phone sms...
The fact is that there have been much talk about the future of online marketing (Search Engine Marketing, PPC, SEO in particular) and how fast it's going. However, only until now that i have seen a comprehensive white paper which views the internet or online advertising as a channel amongst multi advertising channels available and analyze the hybrid relationship between all these channels.
The internet itself or online advertising consists of the following activities:
- Email marketing
- Banner advertising or Display advertising
- Paid Search Advertising or Pay per Click together with Search Engine Optimization
- Mobile marketing
- Sponsored websites like blog etc...
- Pop-up and pop-under ads
- Affiliate marketing
- Rich media ads
An Overview
The Economist surveyed over 200 senior global marketing executives (most of them are CEOs, presidents or Managing directors of some of the most respected brands in the world).
The key findings revolve around the four basic elements of marketing: "branding, integration, measurement and accountability, and internal organization".
There is no doubt that worldwide, more money are being allocated to online marketing, be it from offline marketing budget or additional budget.
Regarding online marketing, the total budget is obviously not divided equally amongst all the above activities. If you want to know the actual percentage breakdown, you will need to buy the report or buy the newspaper itself because i think they are worth much more than the cost and obviously the numbers are not for free.
As in Singapore context, most of the companies are spending no where near the percentage that their counterparts in US, Europe or Australia are spending in online activities. However, we are getting there so hopefully in the next 6 or 12 months we start to see positive developments.
Branding
Coming back to the four basic functions of marketing, the paper clearly points out that for branding instead of pushing information towards consumers, companies start to move into some kind of dialogue, trying to engage customers as much as possible. At the same time, giving customers the right to interact, research, explore information about the products/services that they want, seems to be an growing trend.
Online marketing does this better than any mediums available. With rich media, flash, dynamic html banners, poll, blogging, search engine,etc, customers really become the central of all marketing strategies. Clients can choose what kind of information they want to hear, to see, when they want to see them and for how long.
However, all of these activities are possible only because of the excellent infrastructure that Singapore has; without high rate, cheap broadband connection, we would have trouble viewing a normally website with dial up, let alone blogging, emailing, instant messaging etc...
In this aspect, Singapore is ahead of other SouthEast Asia countries.
Integration
Regarding the integration of offline and online campaigns, most of the senior executives surveyed mentioned that their companies are already in the process of integrating everything into a single marketing strategy. This is true for different online marketing channels as well.
As I mentioned before, we need to treat online as a single channel and have a holistic approach towards online marketing.
Online is just one channel and if you want to do really well online, you need to utilize all of the available activities to engage, educate, have dialogue with consumers, ultimately this leads to sales or conversion. And for this to work, again, a long term, middle and short term plan need to be planned.
Accountability and Measurability
A more integrated approach does pose the question of "greater degree of measurability and accountability". Clearly defined goals, conversions, objectives are vitally important to enhance measurability.
At the same time, a complete new skill sets, more sophisticated, with deeper understanding analytical skills are essential to marketer in the future. Marketing managers will be bombarded with tons of data from all different channels and it takes The Special One to be able to analyze, summarize and more importantly give meanings to those otherwise useless numbers. Senior management level people clearly recognize this much needed skill as well, according to the survey.
With regards to measurability, online seems to have certain advantages over offline. Having said that, it doesn't mean that all the companies out there have a way of measuring their online campaigns or know exactly what they are measuring means. It's not as simple as impressions or clicks anymore. One needs to customize a unique set of parameters which truly reflect the conversions, objectives being measured.
I briefly mentioned about web analytics in Singapore before.
However, the fact is free Google Analytics certainly has some limitations that paid tools can solve. For example, flexibility, the full user journey, visitor segmentation, filtering etc...
Some of the more popular tools available in the market are: Clicktracks, IndexTools, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Unica Affinium NetInsight, Visual Sciences' HBX Analytics, WebTrends and DC Storm
I will dedicate another post later just for these different analytics tools alone.
One interesting point to note is that although Chief Marketing Officers realize the important of assessing the performance of marketing campaigns, the time they actually spend on doing this activity is very limited compared to planing, executing etc... The same situation happens in Singapore market in my opinion. That partly explain why people can just "throw" huge amount of money on Yahoo homepage without understanding what they actually get in return (this is my own observation only. By all means this shouldn't be interpreted that Yahoo in general and Yahoo Singapore in particular is not a growing company and does not offer any value proposition)
Internal organization
The last basic function is internal organization. Loosely said, this means the greater involvement of marketing with the rest of the corporate activities in the future provide incentives to changes in internal organization.
For example for a bank, branding managers, credit card acquisition manager, e commerce manager etc... need to work more closely together and more or less be part of a whole big "marketing department" in the future.
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Ok guys, really love to spend more time elaborate or discuss more for this "not easy topic". I have been thinking about this for some times and understand that by all means this article is far from perfect. I will need to rework on this again. However, it might be better that i post this first and see what you all think about it. Feel free to drop any suggestions, feedbacks or elaborate more on points that i briefly cover.
It's 11.21 pm. I am off for now. This will conclude the first section about "The future of Marketing"
Cheers,
Chandler
P.S: One final point i want to mention is that previously we all know how baby boomer shaped the world economy and industries while they went through different phrases in life.
The same with the new age, high tech group of people who are in their 15, 17, 20s or early 30s. They are internet savvy, hip-hop and spend considerable amount of time online. So I am eager to see how different industries in the online world change in accordance with different milestones in this young group of people life.
