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Marketing 3.0 isn’t about throwing away the basics

This is more of a think about it post. Was reading a blog on Marketing 3.0 that new marketing is on many levels not related to “old marketing”. Excerpt:

We need to somewhat abandon traditional methods of marketing and look for inventive ways to build brand, awareness and of course leads for the sales folks. [tag]Marketing 3.0[/tag] is knowing the marketplace, the technologies available: harnessing and executing on all of the above to win the end game.

It’s still about the basics – the 4 P’s. Promotion and placement have significantly changed, but it’s always about the product. A great example is Xobni, an outlook plug-in – GREAT online [tag]marketing[/tag], GREAT word of mouth and they have the social network thing working. Cool [tag]product[/tag], interesting concept, but not actionable and no productivity lift – still cool though. I just might not be the target users – try it.

Utterz on the other hand – GREAT [tag]moblog[/tag] product, good concept and mastery of using a network for growth. So Marketing 3.0 is still about the basics.

October 31, 2007 by
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B-Travel – 3PM a new low in hotel internet fees

So there are 2 things I think are really horrible about hotels – room service fees (food quality too) and Internet fees. I’ve seen some really crazy fees for both, but internet fees are just illogical. I paid ₤22,00 once for a day and a couple of weeks ago, I paid for €88 for 5 days. I paid for five days because I could get 2 devices and share the connection.

So types of things I have seen in the marketplace:

[tag]Swisscom[/tag]: multiple plans, but the most interesting was a time AND bandwidth limited account with overage fee (what?!?!), as i noted above I opted for the multi-day and multiple device plan

[tag]Four Seasons[/tag]: I don’t remember the location but it was like $24.95 or almost the 50% of my monthly bandwidth fees from my cable provider.

[tag]t-Mobile[/tag]: I like t-mobile’s hotspots, but I normally only use a connection for 2-3 hours, since its typically a airport stop. I have been lucky enough to stay at a hotel which had t-Mobile, but only like twice. In that case it was well worth the $9.99 fee for the day pass.

But the winner on weird configurations for the week was [tag]Wayport[/tag], a session until 3PM. The session is static and I only got like 1 hour in my session for like $9.99, apparently these folks cannot program the logic to manage dynamic sessions or maybe they are just greedy. The art of effectively pricing a captive audience.

Optimistic Prediction: Cell phone wireless cards will more or less obsolete paid wireless connections just like pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I used a pay phone and I long for the day I can’t remember typing in my credit card number for an abusive rate to rent a commodity pipe from a hotel. Although, the real irony is that low end hotels offer FREE wireless – why is that?

October 13, 2007 by
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Genius! The iPhone coupon – a market maker

“Customers aren’t going to have an issue with this price move.”

Clearly Apple didn’t overlook this fact, it has become a holiday promotional activity.   This is like a captain obvious situation for a promotional event!  So Apple has effectively created a $100 coupon for a holiday purchase (additional iTunes, a new laptop….).

Apple has essentially created a compelling market event to purchase more Apple stuff. More people on the iPhone may help establish apple as a new mobile computing leader and people that may have been just been introduced to the Apple brand, will need to spend more in-store. A n typically spend beyond the credit, I’ve always spent more money than I have ever had on a gift card. Store credit/Gift cards are just a catalyst for incremental spend.

This also increases the consumers investment into the Apple platform guaranteeing an increased share of wallet within the iPhone community across the product porfolio.

It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone ‘tent’. We strongly believe the $399 price will help us do just that this holiday season….

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.

More people with iPhones will extend the apple platform and drive an i-centric application developer community. Apple has the opportunity to be the “on-the-go OS” for the next generation of computing. This market seeding event will help justify AT&T’s upgrade which is sorely needed for high speed wireless.

to balance the thought a little – another view below from bold investors friday round up:

I give AAPL a thumbs up and advice people to buy Apple shares AAPL while its still down since Wall st. simply gets it wrong, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu thinks the price cut on 8GB iPhones to $399 from $599 to be both positive and necessary.
“We have had reservations with its high price point and are glad to see Apple address this problem,” he explained. “In addition, we believe this lower price is necessary to reduce cannibalization with the new iPod touch, which is essentially a thinner iPhone without the cell phone, e-mail, and Bluetooth.”

September 7, 2007 by
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The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.

Here is the deal – the 4 P’s “are what they are”, but perhaps they need a little revitalizing. The emergence of later market realities across industries are resulting in a need for a different approach. On the extreme, some have predicted the demise of marketing – specifically Piers Fawkes:

Certainly the conditions are right. I mean, if “marketing” were a brand, we would have redesigned and [tag]relaunched[/tag] it a long time ago. As it is, the idea stands for an extraordinary bundle of things. It is a very messy concept indeed, and the practice…well, the practice is even messier.

So I thought about it death? Probably not but it could be something else.  I centered on the following questions “is it a relaunch or brand extension?” So perhaps Marketing, as a discipline, is just a late stage market and requires a different approach.

So as with any late stage market, or in this case, a discipline, the first step is to look for innovation – find an emerging P. Various folks have indicated [tag]web 2.0[/tag] could be considered an innovation fulcrum, but continues to demonstrate an emergence of new channels which is changing the effort to impact change. These new channels require a portfolio based approach which focuses on optimizing revenue by channel and is effectively product agnostic and segment focused.

So we have the [tag]4 P’s[/tag] of today:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Placement (as a geographer I can’t use place, it’s too specific)
  • Promotion

The Marketing Mix

So if the 4 P’s represent the market mix, the 5 P is managing the mix against multiple channels – legacy, emerging and under development.   Marketing teams continue to be challenged with only so much capacity and budget.   With limited resources a ROI based strategy is required. To that end, the 5th P, portfolio management, requires you balance investment, expectations and the ability to execute in such a way that you don’t end up over invested in a channel which isn’t delivering the optimal return.

Not all products are good for all channels and not all channels perform the same for like/similar products so a detailed set of instrumented processes and metrics are required to drive a successful portfolio management strategy. So is the 5th P, Portfolio, is effectively a brand extension of marketing or is it more of an assortment extension?

 

August 23, 2007 by
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