Marketing is broken. At least in the traditional sense.
Focused on customer acquisition, promotions and sales volumes, traditional marketing views customers as “targets” to be arrowed.
Bigger, bolder and flashier campaigns are launched to attract their rapidly diminishing attention while carrots like discounts, freebies and lucky draws are dangled to coax them to open their wallets.
AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) is no longer serving us as well as she did.
At least according to Avinash Kaushik, renowned Digital Marketing Evangelist of Google.
Zillions of pre-teens are under his influence (courtesy of The Global Daily)
Are you under the influence?
If you’re like the billions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other social networks, you most definitely are. While we can also be influenced by mainstream channels like newspapers, television, radio and magazines, chances are that it is the people we know – our family and friends – who exert the most influence on our behaviours and actions.
Courtesy of this YouTube Channel
Have you heard of the PPAP song? If you haven’t, you must’ve been living on another non-digital planet.
Also known as the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen song, the short 51 second ditty by Japanese comedian Kazuhiko Kosaka (who plays the fictional character named Piko-Taro) has sparked off an endless number of memes around the planet.
What will the future of your business be like? More importantly, what will your life be like then?
Armed with a digital crystal ball, renowned marketing podcaster and president of global digital marketing agency Mirum Mitch Joel shared his thoughts on this in his book Ctrl Alt Delete.
Imagine that you are a smoker. You pick up a pack of cigarettes.
On the front of the pack are gory images – a hemorrhaged brain, blackened lungs, deformed baby, ugly cancerous growth – coupled with stern admonitions like “SMOKING KILLS”.
How would you react to these gruesome warnings?
Marketing – and branding – is all about the little things (courtesy of Allographics)
Since time immemorial, marketers are obsessed with the “Big Idea”.
Ruled by “out-of-this-world” campaigns that win Golden Lions or Creative Circle awards, we were transfixed by the notion that bigger and bolder is usually better.
Can your business help others without expecting to be paid?
Most entrepreneurs will not think so. After all, businesses are created to make a profit by selling a product or a service to a customer.
Do you know that your five senses (sight, sound, scent, taste and touch) play a major role in what you buy?
While marketers go gaga over social technologies and their impact on digital commerce, it is often our physical perceptions of a product which influence buying decisions.
Weird is the new normal. Mass is dead.
And the rich, who is anybody who can afford to buy stuff or do stuff for fun, are no longer embracing the mediocre middle of the bell curve.