Cutting Through the Marketing Noise
Marketing methodology today is a Tower of Babel, with hundreds of voices shouting their opinion of what's "best." Here's an attempt to make some sense of it all.
It probably won't come as a big surprise if I say that marketing has gone through a sea change in recent years as technology provided marketers with dozens of different ways to sell their wares.
It also won't come as a big surprise if I say that most marketers, while expressing confidence on the surface, are scared to death underneath about what it all means to their craft.
Marketing used to be relatively easy: You put up a website, bought advertising, sent out direct mail, unleashed a sales force, or worked the one-on-one landscape through networking and presentations.
Then technology changed all that. The Internet took over most marketing. Along came social media, Facebook, twitter, content marketing, informational marketing, list building, interactivity, conversations instead of delivery, demands from customers or clients for a larger part of the marketing interaction. Every few months, it seemed, there was a new flavor that was going to revolutionize marketing. Was there still room for traditional marketing?
It's all become a Tower of Babel with hundreds of voices weighing in with their opinions and insisting, of course, that they're right. How do you choose what to use? Now there's a conference that's trying to bring some order to the discussion.
Contagious, which is being held by the BC Association of Integrated Marketing (BCAIM) at the Vancouver convention centre Nov. 19, promises to "uncover insights, provoke thought, challenge the status quo and inspire action for all things marketing."
The organization has brought in some big marketing guns to help stimulate the discussion. Chief among them are two experts in behavioral psychology, which is at the root of all marketing. Seth Godin, the marketing guru and author of 12 books, in a video interview, will talk about how to become a Lynchpin, the creative center of an organization that makes things happen. Daniel Pink, author of books on innovation and entrepreneurship, will discuss the basis of his new book Drive, the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Other speakers will discuss more of the nuts and bolts of marketing, such as cultural value shifts, generational shifts, brand shifting, convergence marketing, the changing role of content in marketing, and the shift toward more transparency in marketing.
I'm not certain that Contagious is going to leave anybody with The Answer to this cacophany of voices regarding marketing in the Internet age – I think it's far too big a subject to be defined in one conference.
But for those interested in marketing – and what business isn't in today's challenging times – it might generate some insight into which way they should jump.
Marketing today is no longer a simple menu of a few options. Instead it has changed to a smorgasbord of choices, and you have to pick the one or two that are most appropriate to your business.
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