Marketing is still primarily perceived as a fuzzy touchy feely discipline. But the Internet is bringing this to an end rapidly. In ten years our current perspectives on this will seem quaint.
Marketing will be much more like what Wall Street quant guys do. Everything will be math. There will be few "soft" taste judgments. It will all be about precisely definable ROI. The good marketers will be the people who can design the tightest systems for adjusting messaging based on the reaction of the audience. The *great* marketers will be the ones who can figure out how to tie feedback to rapid turn product adjustment in real time.
As I have discussed before, technology is removing all friction from the marketplace. Marketing will really be about figuring out how to most quickly and effectively tap the feelings of the market for the benefit of the product. This will go from a process that currently takes months or years, to one that happens in hours and days. All messaging and product feature sets will be rapidly optimized using the next generation of marketing techniques and technologies.
Like hedge fund algorithms, the best marketing systems will be proprietary. And the best creators of these systems will make Wall Street style bonuses and profit sharing.
To be clear, the direct marketers have, in some ways, been doing this for years. The Internet, and things like Google Analytics have brought direct marketing ideas to a wider audience and reduced the information turn time dramatically. But marketing is today still driven more by the creative folks -- the softer side. In the future, creative will be a marketing systems input, not a marketing driver.
The bottom line is, today, it is not uncommon to hear a marketer say, "Oh I'm not technical, I'm in marketing." In the future, when your marketing person says that, you will know that indeed, they suck.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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3 comments:
I have to say I agree with the post but disagree with the title. I think that in 10 years, marketing *should* be taught in engineering school (or is it engineering in marketing school?), but it probably *won't* except for at a few schools like Stanford. You did peg the direction that successful marketers are going though.
peter,
Thanks for your comment. Yeah, I could have hedged a bit, but that would have been less interesting :)
Actually I do think that we will start to have movement in the better schools on this issue as you suggest. At wharton, for example, even when I was at penn (20+yrs ago), they taught database/IT stuff in the business school. This is distinct from learning C or data structures and algorithms. I don't know what it looks like now, but I think at a place like penn, or stamford that there will be marketing related majors in engineering or IT tracks, though I agree it wont yet be ubiquitous in 10 years.
This is a consequence of moving from mass marketing where the goal is to _create_ groups matched to the message, to user-centric marketing where the goal increasingly is to recognize customer attributes and tailor the message and/or customize the product.
Web-based marketing accelerates this trend because it is (increasingly) interactive. So, for the first time, marketing actions can be constructed by modeling the user in their current situation. This type of personalization is at an early stage, but companies holding lots of situated-data about interactions (say, Google) are extraordinarily well-placed to push (no, _invent_) this future.
The traditional ad agencies won't know when they are already dead.
Michael
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