Reinventing our marketing behavior

Reinventing Our Marketing Behavior
Reinventing Our Marketing Behavior

Reinventing our marketing behavior
Ben Jorgensen

Last week I gave a talk on “Reinventing the banner ad”, put on by Social Media Monthly. I wasn’t overly excited to talk about the the banner ad: no one likes banner ads, no one admits they click on them, and most people would rather attend/speak on well…just about anything else.

Needless to say, banner ads do not scream hyper intellectualism. However, if we take a step back and contextualize banners as a division and channel of marketing, a necessary “evil”, all of a sudden “banner ad” has more of a ring to it. Marketing allows us consumers to become educated on things that we hope will improve our life, relationships, work, and state of being. I believe that we are finally entering a time of consumer capitalism where “companies should seek to maximize customer satisfaction while ensuring that shareholders earn an acceptable risk-adjusted return on their equity.” – HBR 2010.

What does this have to do with marketing? A lot. Marketers are starting to focus on that fact that customers value choice and are willing and able to voice their opinions across channels such as Twitter, Yelp, and Glassdoor. As a result, marketers are reimagining the customer journey and how their customers experience their brand from first impression to consumption to even post-consumption. More specifically, they are beginning to share knowledge and learnings as one end of the journey affects the other.

When I was in Spain at the end of April this year, I heard Will Adeney, Vice President of Marketing and Analysis at OgilvyOne say, “The Customer journey will replace ad campaigns and the linear funnel will dissolve.” This was powerful. This stuck with me. This was proof that the customer journey was becoming not just an idea, but something that was beginning to gain legitimate practice. Marketers are beginning to look at the experiences they create for a consumer and reevaluate how they interact and communicate with the customer.

“Reinventing” the banner is not what we need to be focused on; we need to focus on how and when we use every marketing channel to communicate with customers. Additionally, internal marketing teams and agencies need to be de-siloed in order to more fluidly share knowledge and collaborate around data learnings, channel insights, and new technologies that are helping achieve goals. This will stage the process by which we reinvent marketing altogether.