Marketing: Changing the rules of the game

Marketing is now specialised and complex with more tools available.

Marketing has become increasingly pervasive and better targeted. It used to be pamphlets and posters, billboards, magazines, radio and television. Then came websites, search engines and online social communities. Unsolicited SMS, email and mobile marketing also lurk in the crevices, most often as a source of annoyance its.

Product placement has also taken off drastically, inside movies and even games. Celebrity endorsements are also big, especially for sports gear and designer wear. The top A-list bloggers can charge thousands of dollars for product endorsements because it translates to direct sales as well as massive publicity.

The line between traditional, paid marketing channels and recent forms of viral marketing, micromarketing, guerilla marketing and social marketing has blurred. A lot of startups and home run businesses rely on their Facebook friends to get the word out. This sort of guerilla marketing can be very effective with the right viral strategies and product. It used to be that local businesses operated locally. Now they just build locally, but operate globally. In fact, often times the only limiting factor for these local businesses is supply-chain logistics and resource allocation. You can order baby blankets from a housewife in Sweden who has never spent a dime on marketing but relies only on her eBay ratings or Facebook page endorsements.

Product endorsement is also big business though often done through back-channel deals. Techcrunch.com ranks in the 200 most popular global sites (source: Alexa) and it’s founder Michael Arrington has often found himself in controversy arising from his personal investments in the very companies he sometimes promotes on the blog to many million readers. At one point Arrington claimed he would not invest in startups to remove the conflict altogether, while later on he said he would continue to invest but clearly and explicitly put up disclaimers on his stories. He wasn’t so subtle and flip-flopped his position but others celebrities often exercise more tact doing the same. Celebrities often breathe life into new brands by simply carrying them around.

The line also blurs when marketing transitions into awareness campaigns and other forms of personal statements. The peace sign was conceived in 1958 by British designer Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The sign even made it into the Unicode standard, making it a part of the standard set of characters used globally by computers. It was considered hip to brandish a peace-sign locket and it may well come into fashion again. Wearing a red ribbon on World Aids Day is another wonderful awareness campaign conceived by James Bunn and Thomas Netter in 1987 while working for the World Health Organization. Lance Armstrong partnered with Nike to create the yellow, rubbery, gel arm bracelet which sold for a dollar as part of a campaign to raise $25 million for cancer research and to “Live Strong”. It became a popular fashion accessory globally.

Other forms of marketing opportunities include banner exchanges schemes across websites, platform-partnering and cross-sell deals and even implicit marketing through discount sites such as GroupOn which reaches out to millions of consumers each day.

In Pakistan, few businesses leverage these emerging marketing tools to full capacity. There is, however, a growing interest as businesses discover its effectiveness.

The writer heads Online Strategy and Development at Express Media and can be contacted at [e-mail]

Published in The Express Tribune, September 19^th,  2011.