It’s a year since I wrote a post suggesting that Google was a ‘slow mo train crash unfolding’.
Google grew popular (and rich) by helping individuals use information as a tool in their own hands, and by basing its business model on volunteered information – information that individuals willingly provided (the search term) because of the value they got back (search results).
I’m still trying to get my head around the implications of the new draft EU data protection regulations. One thing is puzzling me in particular – big changes to the definitions of ‘consent’ and ‘personal data’ that could, in my reading anyway, effectively ban current approaches to behavioural targeting.
Remember the days when there people were debating about bricks or clicks? Looking back, it’s quite astonishing to see just how fast the rush into ‘bricks and clicks’ has been. For brands like John Lewis and Next nowadays, online is now their big growth opportunity.
I’ve just finished writing a feature for Marketing magazine about customer and brand engagement. It’s fascinating to see how a word enters the lexicon and spreads so that soon, everyone is using it. It’s not only consumers who have a herding tendency (as Mark Earls) would put it. It’s marketers too.
You can’t go long in marketing nowadays without someone pointing out the critical importance of data.
There’s an awful lot of fuss right now about so-called ‘big data’, for example. In my view, big data is not such a big deal and I’ll tell you why in a future blog. The really important development is the emergence of the consumer as a data manager.
Could it be that the very way marketers think about marketing blinds them to certain market opportunities (and threats)?
If you think (for example) that marketing is about changing and influencing consumer purchasing decisions, you are not going to look for, or see, a new market of decision support services emerge – a market for services that actually transforms the way consumers make these decisions.
I have just started reading Persuasive Advertising by J Scott Armstrong – an academic’s attempt to collate, sift and review all the available evidence about what works in advertising and what doesn’t.
Sensible article by McKinsey on customer engagement
“Over the past two years, that evolution [the difficulty of "influencing customers by relying solely on one-way, push advertising"] has only accelerated. More and more consumers are using digital video recorders to fast-forward through TV commercials and are consuming video content on Web sites such as YouTube and on mobile devices. Billboards alongside train lines and bus routes struggle to capture the attention of people absorbed by the screens of their smartphones. Meanwhile, today’s more empowered, critical, demanding, and price-sensitive customers are turning in ever-growing numbers to social networks, blogs, online review forums, and other channels to quench their thirst for objective advice about products and to identify brands that seem to care about forming relationships with them. Individuals even are posting their own commercials on YouTube. In short, the avenues (or touch points) customers use to interact with companies have continued to multiply.
I’ve just come across the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee’s report on Government’s use of IT. Entitled “recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach” it covers lots of things but one in particular struck my eye.
I’ve spent the last few weeks helping the
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) get its mydata project off
the ground – fascinating stuff.
Haymarket © 1957 – 2012
