Discovering the new era of marketing

[seonajmulislam00]

For those of you who are as old as I am, you’ll know right away that the quote is from the famous Grateful Dead song “Truckin’,” which translates to “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” When I think of those lyrics, I’m not thinking about my high school days. Well, maybe a little. Mostly, I’m reflecting on how much the science, the art, the profession of marketing has changed in the last few years.

Stop for just a moment and think about the marketing landscape just 10 years ago. Google had just gone public and only a small percentage of marketers knew what the acronyms “SEM” and “SEO” stood for. The iPhone was in its infancy.

Facebook had barely left the college campus and was still being thought of as a place to tell people what you were having for lunch. Now, we can’t imagine a world without them. I often say that marketing has changed more in the last 5 years than it has in the last 500… and it’s likely to change even more in the next 5.

If you look back, it used to be like we all lived in an era of mass marketing, where it was just “one message to all people.” And, it was as good as that one message was. How clever we were as marketers.

Then, the internet showed up, and we moved into an era of taiwan telegram data transactional marketing, where it was all about the ‘click’ at the point of interaction. But, now, in this pervasive mobile, social, digital world, we are graduating to this new era, an era where that click, that interaction, is just the beginning of a lifelong relationship and journey with a customer. Let’s call this era Engagement Marketing. A long, strange journey indeed.

This new era of engagement marketing is one that is just beginning to unfold and will depend on organizations’ ability to engage people on a personal level, continuously over time, across channels, and across all their experiences. This will be the new basis of competition, with organizations with deeper engagement emerging as the winners.

And, all of this puts the marketing function even more in the driver’s seat as organizations increasingly turn to marketing to shepherd this customer journey. A “marketing first” world, if you will.

But let’s be honest. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know exactly how this will play out. But, I do know that this wild ride we’re about to take is one that will fundamentally change the way brands and organizations interact with people and customers.