The Suit Magazine

Social media will play an important role in the future of marketing, but in a different way than you might think.

That’s what Jeff Rosenblum found while producing a documentary on the topic. Rosenblum is a marketing pioneer who was one of the first to incorporate website usability, digital analytics and online surveys into his research. He’s now co-president of the marketing firm Questus, and since his company’s inception he has embraced digital tools as vital.

“There are so many different ways [consumers] touch a company digitally. So rather than relying on this really big advertising campaign, we like to focus in on every single one of those touch points,” he explains, “And any one of those touch points tends to be as important as that big overarching campaign.”

The documentary seems a natural extension for Rosenblum, who helped to define modern digital marketing and has a researcher’s curiosity about its trends. But predicting his industry’s future depended on a present that’s anything but clear.

The Internet’s effect on marketing is no trade secret. In 2006 the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Google, published “The Future of Marketing: From Monologue to Dialogue.” The report compiled quantitative data from an online survey of over 200 senior global marketing executives and qualitative insights from follow-up interviews with willing responders. Its executive summary opens on a scientific note: “The past two years have witnessed the first examples of true two-way marketing ‘conversations’ between customers and some of the world’s leading consumer brands.”

Read today, “The Future of Marketing” reveals a prescient analysis. It declared that CMOs would need to rethink branding, channel integration, efficacy measurement and internal organization. It also tentatively tried to predict the future, giving nods to the growing importance of mobile devices and social networking. But in 2006, MySpace and YouTube were the dominant social media platforms, and smartphones were relatively primitive—the iPad and Twitter were mere specks on the horizon.

In the past five years, software and hardware innovations have disrupted marketing as much as everything else. So Rosenblum expected his documentary to be about how those technologies would carry marketing into the future.

And those expectations were largely met. Companies were using social media, digital technologies had changed the marketing landscape, et cetera. That was all fairly obvious to anyone with access to cable news. But Rosenblum was surprised by other reoccurring themes.

“It turns out the future of advertising, it’s a different story,” he says. “It’s a story of transparency. And what that means is consumers have the ability to find out anything about a brand in real-time.”

Five years ago, marketing could be defined as ‘event-oriented.’ Advertising was based on reactions to events—a fall in sales, the release of a new product—but is now a streaming conversation with consumers. Marketers, in other words, need to constantly be managing their digital touch points.

Further, Rosenblum found, the average consumer, who has access to a wealth of instant information on multiple devices, now has manifold platforms with which to “call bullshit” on advertising campaigns. Consumers have quantified business reputations online through reviewing tools like Yelp and other rating systems. Three pivotal but until now disparate reference points—how a company actually performs, how that company projects itself, and how the audience receives that projection—are converging as the audience takes a large part in projecting the company’s image.

“People are going to know whether a brand acts ethically, or whether a brand creates good or crappy products,” said Rosenblum. “[Companies] need to find a way to disseminate information naturally and honestly in order for customers to trust their message.” But his film focuses on large corporations: Patagonia, Pepsi, Zappos, Red Bull. How should a smaller company behave in the world of growing transparency and accountability?

In late October, Alina Dizik wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled “@Foodies: Peek Into My Kitchen” about the way some chefs and diners are using Twitter. Dizik writes, “Many chefs tweet before dinnertime about what they are planning to cook that night…Foodies, meanwhile, are also avid Twitter users, snapping pictures with their smartphones and tweeting real-time reviews in between bites.”

This is an illustrative example of how a small business can effectively use free social media platforms. Where analytics and other methods for reading customer sentiment were formerly cost-prohibitive, there are now plenty of free tools. Where TV ads were the most direct way to reach a customer, it can now be done constantly and in real-time.

But stepping into the digital domain merits the same careful consideration devoted to traditional marketing channels.

“The number one piece of advice I could give to businesses is to be true to yourself in terms of how you’re marketing online,” says consultant and designer Jason Amunwa. His blog, The Zest, focuses on small business marketing. In a post called “Are ‘social media campaigns’ missing the point?” he warns that tweeting for tweeting’s sake is as vapid as it sounds.

Amunwa says small business owners need to be honest about what digital channels they can fill with meaningful content. Customers are no longer wowed that a business is merely available online. If they’re going to be engaged face-to-digital-face, they expect nuggets of useful, relationship-building information, ala chefs tweeting the evening’s specials. And when consumers feel engaged, they’re more likely to share brand impressions amongst themselves. In a way, this makes them an extension of a business’s own marketing efforts—except that consumers have no obligation to report favorably.

That means it’s up to businesses to step up their performance. It’s less about talk, and more about action. And for small companies without the resources to put together a huge marketing campaign, this is great news. As Rosenblum explains, “There’s probably never been a better time to be a small company because the playing field has been completely leveled.” Expensive advertising is simply losing its power to persuade.

Social media remains an effective, low-cost way to get consumers involved. But when it comes to projecting a brand image, interaction must be backed by integrity. “[Digital tools] are going to help you build awareness for your products, but they’re not going to sufficiently shift perceptions,” said Rosenblum. Today’s well-researched customers are more sensitive to discrepancies between their perception of a company and a company’s attempts to alter that perception. So tomorrow’s businesses will need to act responsibly, communicate authentically and realize that consumers are always calculating the distance between representation and reality.

For more information, please visit: www.questus.com

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