Where is digital marketing heading?

March 11, 2010

Marketing body releases latest discussion paper, What hasn’t happened yet: the shape of digital to come?

The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) is calling on marketers to examine where digital marketing may be heading in the next few years and asks leading practitioners how they think companies can thrive in the digital marketplace, whilst making sure they get the right levels of return on investment (ROI) from their activities.

With this in mind, the CIM’s latest Shape the Agenda (STA) paper aims to fuel the digital discussion by suggesting that the key to future success lies in identifying the fact that people self-select their own digital ‘villages’ in which to live.

Putting marketing money where its mouth is

Commenting at the paper’s launch Mark Stuart, head of research at The Chartered Institute of Marketing and author of this latest STA paper said: “It’s a myth that people explore the world the internet has to offer – the reality is that most people stick to eight or nine websites that they regularly visit. This means that businesses need to inhabit the spaces their customers inhabit, in order to build the brand, create awareness and generate a relationship with the customer. There are some good examples in the paper, including Waitrose successfully doing this, but American Apparel getting it wrong on Second Life.”

“The need to create a dialogue with customers is easy to say in theory; how do you do it in practice? Practising marketers need to live online the way their customers’ do; that’s the best way to create offerings that customers will like and respond to, versus being intrusive of personal spaces and becoming an unwanted third party. It means you find insights that lead to products and services. It also means you spot problems on the horizon and have the time to deal with them,” added Stuart.

The Institute’s STA paper also argues that a distinction can be drawn between collecting data and invading privacy. Data can be used to target customers with offers they want; yet marketers have a challenge on their hands to show that this data is anonymous.