After James kindly pointed me to to some thinking off the back of my engagement post I've been having some thoughts. They're far from formed thoughts, just thoughts, so I thought I'd write them down. Hope they make you think.
Marketing is too important to be left to marketing teams
Seth Godin said this the other week when I saw him talk. He's right, every single person employed by brand could be/ should be working on marketing in some shape or another. Just think of Dell, they've created what they claim is millions in new revenue just by getting their employees blogging.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil
It's true. And digital/ social media etc has been extremely squeaky over the last few years. Just because it's squeaky doesn't mean it's where you should be concentrating all your energy though. As Asi points out; putting Johnny Rotten in your advert is going to get you a far better sales uplift than making a widget, if you happen to make butter anyway.
Staying engaged once you've engaged
It's a bit off topic but it's a thought all the same. Once you've got some one engaged it's good to keep them engaged. Kind of permission marketing but not always email. Two examples that come to mind of brands that keep me engaged are howies by sending me a nice catalouge to look at and read every few months, and Monocle for giving me an interesting podcast to download each week. Both of which are free to me.
The responsibility of brands in all this
I really like Asi's thought of brands having to become more social, empathetic and humane. Nice basically. But I can't help thinking this is going to have to be led by brands themselves not agencies, there is something a bit fundamentally wrong about an agency owning and updating a brands twitter feed for example. The agency isn't the brand, it just helps the brand, it doesn't know the answer to all the questions so shouldn't be asking people to ask (the brand doesn't even know the answers in a lot of cases so should be the one to say we'll go and think about it, think of Dell again). If this is the case then more and more in-house teams will start to emerge I think. And if this is the case there'll be some great opportunities for agencies to help set up these teams and get them through the transition of always defaulting their voice to someone else to having their own voice. Then they might have to both wave farewell for a while, which is why no-ones probably suggesting it at the minute.
rss feed
yeah, definitely. a lot of what you're saying is about the brand's commitment to actually being the brand, which is really interesting. nice as more than a marketing strategy, more as a philosophy of being in the first place.
it'd be a brave agency indeed that helped a brand set themselves up with an in-house team...but it'd be a smart one. like you, i reckon more in-house teams are a big part of the future.
Posted by: james | March 08, 2009 at 06:53 AM
Fortune favours the brave as they say James.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/09/in-the-house.html
Posted by: ted at innocent | March 09, 2009 at 01:52 PM