Marketing is Dead! Long live Marketing

Marketing, Advertising, PR. All these “creative industries” seem to have one thing in common to me – a relentless pursuit of the next-big-thing.

Its no suprise then to find that the web is a buzz with talk of marketing 2.0 – the application of the marketing principle in the brave new world of social participative media – a quick google search of the term generates over 1 billion results which comes to roughly 1/7 of the traffic for marketing as a whole. Now I dont know the specific ins-and-outs of the relevant algorithms but that sure seems impressive to me.

Of course as a marketing intern & recent convert to the notion that blogging represents more then just a ‘fad’ you might expect this post to be ravingly optimistic about the new possibilities this so called ‘information revoloution’ will most likely bring to the industry.

Dont get me wrong, im excited, but im hardly preaching from the rooftops just yet. Heres why…

The other day i came across the concept of creating customer evangelists – a lesser known element in the marketing mix related to conventional word-of-mouth recommendation but thrown into the spotlight by the proliferation of corporate blogging.

The idea is simple – customers who are truely thrilled with the experience of a product or service often (naturally) come to see themselves as a part of the brand itself thereby spearheading PR and WOM advertising free-of-charge. Customer evangelism strategies therby seek to stimulate this process as a component within a marketing mix.

Its a fascinating idea which in my opinion (when you look through the details) has some real weight behind it as a marketing 2.0 device. But in my opinion grand theft evangelismo (i.e. easy£) is only going to work whilst it remains an intelligently designed niche as opposed to generally accepted mainstream marketing.

After all it rarely pay to be smart. It pays to be smarter then the competition.

Innovation –> edge –> ££

££–>adoption–>convention