Marketing 2.0: What’s Old Is New

It’s heartening to see people from the bastions of old, mass-marketing think start to embrace the new world order. Of course they realize that, as in many aspects of life, there is nothing new under the sun.

Today’s MediaPost (registration required) features an excellent editorial by J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich Partners. He opens with the bold statement that the “Internet has matured into the most important medium since television”. He goes on to provide a thoughtful analysis of the reasons why.

“The smartest use of technology is to leverage this dynamic of participation and engagement. This is what people want to do in general, and it's what all of the new technologies do so well. E-commerce is booming, but the biggest trend online is social engagement, and this will be an essential foundation for e-commerce in the future.”

Both Smith and Yankelovich recognize that this is the age of consumer resistance, and that people seek engagement with each other, not brands. In this environment successful marketers will recognize and embrace this important shift. They’ll stop focusing on controlling the message and the brand. Instead they’ll engage users in everything from product design to advocacy, to word-of-mouth sales. They’ll learn to listen first and then to join the conversation, as opposed to trying to dominate it.

Scott Karp takes this a step further, and asserts that Web 2.0 cannot be successful without Marketing 2.0.

“If Web 2.0 is going to make any money, it needs to pursue these new marketing paradigms and not just depend on Old Media models like selling ads — even Google AdWords feels like its Marketing 1.2 at best.”

He refers to Umair Hague’s recent claim that Web 2.0 cannot live up to its enormous potential unless the “geeks step outside their geekery”. In other words, that they need to embrace one of the essential premises of marketing (being truly customer-centric); instead of categorically refuting old-school marketing, they need to change it. 

That they're evil doesn't mean you should ignore them - it means you should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them less about Madison Ave and BuzzAgent, and more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing the deep economics of many industries - principles like peer production, gift economies, sharing, transparency, social capital, anticonsumption, and deep culture.

All of these recommendations resonate with anyone who’s ever managed a customer service center or a customer loyalty program. It’s about listening to customer needs, designing products and services that they actually want, and marketing thing in the context of their preferences.

Imagine, being successful by actually giving the people what they want. Now that’s new!

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Marketing 2.0, Media Economics, New Media, Old Media, Web2.0

Comments

[Srinivasan]

“If Web 2.0 is going to make any money, it needs to pursue these new marketing paradigms and not just depend on Old Media models like selling ads"

I dont understand. This is simple logic: there are only two ways to make money on the internet: ads and subscription. its that simple. whats your point here?

[Leslie]

Srinivasan,

Thanks for your comment. I would add transaction fees as the third economic model of Web 1.0.

Fifteen years ago if anyone had told you that the world’s largest bookseller and flea market would both be online, you wouldn’t have believed it. But Amazon and eBay turned into powerhouses of Web 1.0, creating new ways for consumers to buy and sell, and becoming disruptive forces for several large, existing industries.

I was trying to make two points in my post. First, consumers are rapidly becoming both skeptical of and immune to traditional types of advertising and marketing promotion. Marketers are going to have to figure out new ways to engage customers. Second, Web 2.0 tools, technologies and behaviors lend themselves to new forms of customer engagement. The blogosphere is the world’s largest focus group, giving marketers unprecedented capabilities to learn directly about customer preferences and choices. Consumer generated media is a digitized, amplified version of word-of-mouth marketing. These new media give marketers more options to cultivate brand advocates and even to generate sales. Web 2.0 enables marketers to take a further step of evolution, to develop new marketing and sales paradigms which will be more aligned with customer behaviors, and in the end, more effective.