By nickjohnson - September 4th, 2013
In our final extract from the upcoming Incite briefing, "The Accessible Consumer: Marketing and Communications to 2015". You can sign up to receive a complimentary copy at www.incitemc.com/briefing/
The core challenge for marketers attempting to build a multi-channel strategy is the accurate impact and opportunity assessment of channels - at speed.
There are three elements to this challenge:
- Determine which channels work for you
- Determine how you should market on a new channel
- Do it all very fast
Senior brand executives lend weight to this argument.
Jerome Hiquet, VP of Marketing at Club Med says
“Everything changes so quickly, and in terms of new trends, new actors in the market, we need to be very humble in what we can do”.
Linda Rutherford, Head of Communications at Southwest Airlines agrees:
“There are new ways to engage your audience with your brand that are popping up every day - the speed, and the creativity, with which things are moving these days means we are constantly going to be learning about these new opportunities to connect”.
Jeff Shafer, VP of Communications at Lenovo, feels the same:
“It’s the biggest challenge right now...The pace of change in the technology of communications is obviously an overwhelming influence on everything that we as executives do”
Shafer expands to point out that new communications technologies mean that all brands must constantly keep themselves apprised of new technologies that their audience is using to communicate.
In a space given to hype and a relentless fascination with the new, this can be hard to do in a calm, objective manner. The annals of marketing are filled with stories of brands who ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’ and ditched traditional, proven marketing channels for a new platform that turned out to be rather less effective than initially expected - only for a humiliating turnaround after loss of share of voice, and even market.
It is essential that brands move fast, yes. But they must be moving fast in the right direction. For that to happen, marketers must have a detailed understanding of the capacities of new channels, their audience (new social channels are increasingly specialising in terms of audience, and the wide reach of Facebook is unlikely to be replicated, with new platforms like Pheed and Vine favouring more niche markets), and said channel’s capacity to get across the message you need to transmit. One cannot and should not attempt to use Instagram video to drive sales, nor to get across complex information, for instance. It is best placed in brand building, in adding extra facets to an already mature storytelling focus, and to engage a younger, more forward looking community with often inconsequential and loosely targeted messages focused at ‘going viral’ and building share of voice, not building relationships
As an aside, ‘going viral’ strikes me as an enormously damaging aim in and of itself for a corporate marketer. Virality, by it’s very nature, has to be humorous and or/shocking, and must have very limited brand messaging within it. Granted, some advertising campaigns pushing the brand hard have gone viral, though the most successful examples are ‘surreptitious’ recordings of ‘impromptu’ flashmobs, funny videos (Dollar Shave Club) or emotive video from campaigning organisations (KONY). Viral marketing will emphatically not work unless the aims of your campaign align with the capacities outlined above.
Of course, for those brands fortunate (?) enough to have a global market, the channel mix will change depending on the area of operation. To build a global brand in China, one still must show the market coverage in traditional heavyweights like the NY Times and the WSJ. In the US, however, large brands are struggling with the traction smaller competitors are now able to get from a simpler, more targeted social campaign to a niche market.
It’s undeniable that fragmentation is happening, that ‘multi-channel’, while ‘old news’ is becoming more important, and more complex, and that there are significant challenges around both the pace of change and the accurate assessments of the options that work for your brand.
This concludes the final extract from the forthcoming Incite briefing entitled "The Accessible Consumer: Marketing and Communications to 2015". For a complimentary copy of the full 30-page briefing, please sign up here.