Top Ten Integrated Marketing Trends for 2010
1. Less will get done: until we learn to do more with less.
While the year 2009 was marked as the ‘great recession’, we won’t feel its full effects until 2010. Both marketers and their marketing services agency partners are dealing with reduced resources in terms of head-count and budgets. We won’t likely see enough breakthroughs in the marketplace, simply because marketers and agencies alike have to remain focused on ‘getting the work out the door’. The only way to ‘do more with less’ is to align resources toward a single and powerful integrated marketing solution. Individual marketing tactics will simply become marginalized and highly tactical with ‘less’.
2. Marketers will mistakenly ‘whack’ a medium of the marketing mix.
With reduced marketing budgets, ’something has to give’. Unfortunately, marketers are making wholesale cuts to specific marketing/media channels in the process. We’ve seen the most dramatic cuts occur in print media: newspapers and magazines. I caution marketers to consider whether the remaining media in the market mix can compensate for the cuts. For example, does the internet behave like print? Is the consumer experience the same in both media? Are the message formats the same? The answer is a clear NO. Reduced resources should not come at the expense of an integrated, multi-channel mix.
3. Marketers rush to employ ’social networking’ strategies.
Marketers are in a mad rush to enter the social networking space with ‘tweets’, ‘widgets’, ‘apps’ and ‘fan pages’. However, social networking is not a marketing tactic; nor is it a surrogate for the brand’s social experience. It is not a line item on a marketing plan, a specific channel, or a form of content. Rather, it is an outcome. And, no single channel has a lock on the ’social’ nature of content. Most any medium can serve as the ‘originating’ medium in a journey that can take a great piece of content across channels and into vast networks of hearts and minds…
