Every business person and every buyer needs to know that traditional marketing is dead. Its replacement: 21st Century Marketing. Customers no longer respond as they did in the 20th Century. They dont salivate on demand, stimulated by your glitzy marketing, as Ivan Pavlovs dog salivated over 100 years ago at the sound of a bell. Pavlov was a Russian who documented the conditioned reflex. Pavlov trained his dog so that whenever he rang the bell, the dog would get food. When the bell rang, the dog would salivate instantlyeven before seeing or smelling food, a conditioned reflex. Pavlov was a Nobel Laureate in 1904 in Physiology & Medicine. His experiment with this dogs conditioned reflex was part of his research into the digestive system. Since traditional marketing is dead, how to you market in the 21st Century? Since cats cant bark and customers dont salivate any more as a conditioned reflex to your marketing tactics, how do your market and sell now? Many answers are found in Waiting For The Cat To Bark: Persuading Customers When They Dont Respond To Traditional Marketing, a book by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa T. Davis. No surprise: the Internet and generational differences have hastened the death of traditional marketing. Since my 24 year employment career was in corporate marketing, advertising and public relations, I have mixed emotions about the death of traditional marketing. But Im having too much fun professionally in the 21st Century to lament the demise of traditional marketing. Heres why. There are 700 million regular Internet users worldwide. As China and India continue to enter the modern age and create a huge middle class, the number of Internet users globally will increase sharply. Chinas economy is growing at over 11% annually, far faster than that of the United States. One commentator said thats because people in China and India work very, very hard because they want to experience the American Dream more than most Americans do. 73% of Americans use the Internet regularly. Thats about 219 million folks, based on a population of roughly 300 million. Thats the mainstream. Non-users, of the Internet, 27% of the American population, are out of the mainstream. The authors say The Internet is the worlds global brain. And, the web is the glue that binds all marketing information. Why is that? Its because you find just about anything you want to know online speedily. Google searches average of one second. We can no longer view the Internet as totally separate from store and non-store retailing. Consumer behaviour has changed. The truth is: in the new 21st Century marketing, online and offline marketing methods have become interwoven by crafty consumer usage. That means you, as a business person, can no longer ignore the Internet because you dont like it, dont approve of it, or believe your business is so unusual, the Internet does not apply to you. New technology provides the lubrication to ease friction in a sale, say the Waiting For The Cat To Bark authors. Therefore, stonewalling Internet use is like throwing sand in a gear box. You cannot ignore the role of retailers in the whole equation. Now, retailing includes all kinds of store and non-store retailing, traditional and non-traditional forms of retailing, including millions of network marketing (MLM) distributors, too. Retail Bonanza Begins Online, a study by Paul J. Bruemmer, published in the May 2006 edition of Website Service Magazine, included 83 million Americans who made 522 million searches in 11 product categories in late 2005. 25% of searchers bought an item directly related to their search inquiry. Of those, 37% bought onlinebut 63% bought offline. People did not buy right awaythey shopped and compared. Many bought after several subsequent search sessions. This study was conducted in the Christmas Holiday season of 2005. Over 60% of all searchers started the search process before November 15, 2005about a week before the day after Thanksgiving. In addition to the Internet changing how we buy, generational differences impact consumer marketing, too. People in their 20s and 30s were brought up on interactive technology. As a result, they dont have fixed media viewing habits as older people dosuch as reading the morning newspaper upon arising or watching 5:00 PM newscasts after returning home after work. Thats why newspapers are experiencing declining circulations and readerships and why large national TV networks are taking a beating by video on demand, video downloads, interactive game networks, and Internet TVnot to mention the hundreds of alternatives on cable TV. Marketing in the 21st Century must be reborn as a consumer-centered craft, says Booz Allen Hamiltons Strategy & Business Magazine, 2006 summer Edition. Before, the advertiser was in control, trying to persuade the customer. Now the customer is in control, having much more information available. To make marketing a customer-centered craft, you must accept that traditional marketing is dead. You need to learn and practice 21st Century marketing, with its weaving of the Internet and online and offline marketing into a cohesive while. Moreover, to practice marketing as a customer-center craft, you need to answer three questions: Who are we persuading to take action? What is that action? What does the person need to feel confident? Booz Allen Hamilton, a well-known management consulting firm, warns about the silo mentality which exists in stodgy corporations. The company lives in a silo and ignores everything going on outside of the silo. If you have the silo mentality, tear the silo down and the barn, too, if necessary. Start over. Breathe fresh air. Open you mind and feed it refreshing information about 21st Century Marketing. Learn from the colossal marketing mistakes of American automakers. In the early 2000s, they ignored 21st Century Marketing, continuing to overspend on TV commercials and magazines and not spending enough promoting their Dealerships and marketing on the Internet. Talk about burying your head in the sand and sleeping through a major trend! Detroit has a bad case of the silo mentality. It's putting them out of business. Finally, do what I didgraduate from 20th Century marketing, and become a 21st Century marketing maven by educating yourself. |
