Making sense of life, & communications, online & offline
DM & CRM
Marketing Predictions for 2012
January 1, 2012
At this time of year we see a multitude of articles about predictions for the year to come – some obvious and some less evident – I’ve tried to keep my list short and focussed this time around as we marketers have only a limited bandwidth to evolve our increasingly complex ecosystem. Some elements may seem like they should have happened in 2011, whilst others are reaching their peak now. There is no doubt that 2012 will, yet again, be a year of changes – let’s hope that this time around the marketing world can keep up!
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is coming to life, and 2012 will More >
What the CEO needs to know about CRM
July 9, 2011
What the CEO needs to know: The change in the communications landscape has made customers more important than prospects
In an ever changing communications landscape the role of customer communications or CRM has become more important than ever; the ability for customers to express themselves both positively and negatively now has both reach and impact that far outweigh any marketing programmes that a brand or organisation could run.
For brands this means understanding and managing their customers and leveraging their content to drive business – but to do this means finally moving to a More >
My Job is about Change – Agitating & Activating
April 10, 2011
Depending on who I’m talking to, I find it very hard to describe what I do – a lot of the time I talk about ‘digital strategy‘ but I know that if I find it difficult to explain, that probably means that others find it even harder to understand – it’s a logical conclusion.
What is digital strategy? Where does it start and finish? How is this different from business strategy or communications strategy? Invariably, when I start to try and answer these questions, I end up talking about the tasks I cover, or what I deliver, or how a typical day looks – but really this doesn’t get to the heart of More >
Social CRM is CRM via new channels
December 13, 2010
There is a new fad coming… the latest and greatest in marketing with new media… it is called Social CRM. I think actually I might have called it direct marketing to digital natives before someone coined the social CRM phrase – but I’ll give them the credit because it does roll off the tongue a lot easier. So what it is all about, and as CRM Challenge says, is it time to get on board?
Before understanding Social CRM, we have to be clear on what we mean by CRM in isolation, since this is an acronym that gets thrown around quite a bit, and very often confused with direct marketing in it’s More >
Tomorrow’s creative team
October 22, 2010
Back when Bill Bernbach changed the landscape of agencies by partnering art directors and copywriters we thought that this was a major revolution in agency team structure – finally the art department which had up until then really only been thought of as production took its merited role alongside the copywriters to come up with concept and creative. The next revolution in terms of agency teams is coming, and it is already happening in certain places, but unlike the creation of the art director / copywriter duo, today’s change is going to be much more dramatic because not only does it change More >
Reinventing marketing strategy, plans and thinking
October 9, 2010
As I read the pipeline article on ‘learning to unlearn‘ it occurred to me how key this idea is when applied directly to the way we plan marketing and communications campaigns today. The last few years have seen the arrival of new channels, the prevalence of content as key to engagement and have put the consumer in charge of the way that businesses and brands communicate, but even with these dramatic changes in the marcomms landscape we have not seen an equal change in the way that marketers and brands approach their own strategy and planning. Rather than a reinvention of the way we approach More >
What happened to direct marketing?
I’m worried to say that I fear direct marketing as a skill has disapeared. how many people even know what a johnson box is and how to use it? In our rush to become integrated, 360 and digital we have have forgotten that a key piece of the marketing mix was about how a brand has a conversation on a one-to-one basis with a consumer.
Please don’t tell me that this is email marketing, because the majority of the 270 million hits I get on google with these two words relates to technology suppliers who are getting better at delivering you a message and also (thankfully) giving you some analysis as More >