Does Technology Make it easier
The Economist is running a series of online debates and over the next week the topic is “This house believes that if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing.”. You can add your comments and vote to that page - or here.
From a marketing perspective, the answer has to be no. Technology, in the form of the web and mobile and multiple channels on TV all make the marketing job harder. No more a simple list of ways to reach an audience, ways to drop a few million bucks to reach millions of people in one go. Now they avoid the ads, they do more things with their time instead of watch the telly, they actually talk to one another and review your products and tell everyone what you are doing wrong - and right.
As a marketer, you have to be present in more and more ways, you have to treat customers as individuals not a demographics as the routes to the customer splinters, you have to put in more ways to collate and manage feedback from multiple roots to have a hop in hell of responding in a way that works for both you and for the customer. You can’t just do TV anymore, you have to think of websites, of social netwrorks, of video, of SMS and MMS and all that stuff. All the stuff you had to do before - understand the brand, understand the need and how the brand can fill it - is still needed to be done but overlaid by so many other things you have to think about, all the different ways to touch and connect, to listen and hold a dialogue outside of focus groups.
So the answer to me, technology just makes my job harder - but a lot more fun!
If you’re interested in the rest of the debate the details are:
Esteemed Debaters:
- PRO debater: Richard Szafranski, Partner, Toffler Associates.
- CON debater: John Maeda, President Elect of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
- Moderator: Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor, The Economist
Guest Participants:
- Jack Santos is CIO and Executive Strategist of The Burton Group. He authored the December 2007 report, “The ‘Too Much Information’ Age: What CIOs Can Do About It.”.
- Tim Ferriss, top blogger and author of New York Times and Bestseller, The Four Hour Work Week.
- Dave Karger is a Professor at MIT and lead the MIT Haystack Project which investigates approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them.
Here’s a short schedule of how the debate will run:
- Feb 27 - Opening statements posted and voting begins: Pro statement, Con Statement
- February 28th - Guest speaker, Jack Santos, posts
- February 29th - Rebuttals. Share your comments on the issues so far, and vote
- March 4th - Guest speaker, Tim Ferriss, posts
- March 5th - Closing arguments by the speakers. Post any additional comments you would like to share and vote for your winner
- March 7th - Debate winner announced
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3 opinions for Does Technology Make it easier
Reasonable Robinson
Feb 29, 2008 at 11:14 am
There is an assumption here that when we use the word ‘marketing’ we are talking exclusively about about ‘marketing communications’ activities. This is a severly limited conception of the philosophy and process of marketing.
Technology can, and often is approached from an implicit marketing perspective. Good technology works because it is instinctivley about understanding needs and problems and providing a valued solution from the ‘users’ perspective.
Thinking about technology and marketing as divorced functional specialisms perpetuates an unnecessaru polarisation
Rachel
Feb 29, 2008 at 12:10 pm
You’re right - I should have defined better which area of marketing I was talking about. It is definitely the communications, the shear number of channels that are available, the different ways you can connect and the speed that people connect and talk about you.
One side i did not touch is how technology makes the process of marketing easier. I’ve worked on a number of projects where technology is used to connect everyone together - the brand teams, the agencies, the lawyers, etc etc etc - which you need to speed up the process and reduce delay and confusion. If everyone has access to the same stuff and can comment on it over the web, far easier then shipping things round.
There are other areas - but my mini-rant was just about the communications routes.
Linda Mihalick
Feb 29, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I agree, technology can make the marketer’s job harder because it is no longer as simple as hiring a PR firm, creating print materials, buying lists - traditional tasks we can understand. To be in the game, it’s required that both real and virtual worlds - which are constantly changing - be addressed. There is not a singular option to survive. The good news is, the new marketing approach allows a laser focus on what is really important to the target audience, not just taking a broad swipe and hoping for 2% ROI. As consumers become more and more in control of the marketing messages they will accept, the way they want to get information about products and services and who they want to accept opinion and advise from, the more committed businesses have to become in reaching them on their terms.
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