Today’s Internet is way way different from the Internet we first encountered back in the day. So many things have occurred since the browser wars, the web mail wars, the social network wars and finally, the war to dominate the Internet. Companies have spent millions in trying to understand how the Internet can drive growth and have failed. In 1999, about $10 billion was spent by corporate America in developing “web-sties”. Yeah, they did that and then sat back. What the hell were they hoping would happen?
Cmon folks! the basic financial principles of ROI, in-store traffic, conversion of visitor into a sale, cost per acquisition, demand generation strategies were applicable to brick-and-mortar institutions who had metrics in place to determine the effectiveness of a physical location. Why couldn’t those principles be applied to the web even then?
Oh well, mistakes made. Hopefully, everyone has some analytical tool that they’re using to quantify the success of their web initiatives. Back in 2000, many folks were talking about how ubiquitous the web would become and how it would proliferate every sphere of our daily lives . Today it’s everywhere – cell phone, TVs, at the airport, faster speeds- FIOS etc. etc. So, with this penetration, marketers have increased opportunities to reach customers. The drawback is that traditional models of marketing have been shaken at their foundations. For e.g. the 4Ps of traditional marketing: Price, product, placement and promotion suddenly have looser structures. Marketing goals are still the same : Deliver the right product to the right customer at the right time and place but today’s mechanism of delivery has changed. The Internet demands a stronger analysis and a deeper understanding of customer’s needs and desires.
Pew research did a survey of Internet thought leaders and analysts and found that they anticipated the phone to become a primary device for online access given the increased accessibility of the Internet through more and more channels.
Predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020 included the following :
- Phones will be used by most people globally to access the Internet in 2020.
- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
- Intellectual property law and copyright protection will face newer challenges as copyright violators will find will find ways to copy and share content illegally.
- The next-generation version of the Internet to improve the current Internet architecture will more likely result in building a new network from scratch.
All this means that as the Internet progresses, more and more people will visit or stick to their comfort-zone communities of interest. It’s easy to pick them out; there’s Facebook for friends and more, there’s Amazon for shopping, there’s Google for web searching, there’s Yahoo or CNN for the news, there’s Youtube for entertainment and there’s Hotmail or Gmail for webmail.
What companies need to do is partner with more and more of these sites and leverage their understanding of different market segments. For e.g. You can run polls on Facebook targeted towards a very specific target audience. Dell used to have its product reviews and ads on CNET and ZDNet and utilize these websites’ relationships to improve its customer acquisition economics. Almost all major brands have their own Twitter accounts and various Facebook Pages and Groups.
The commonality of the Internet doesn’t mean that the landscape is getting more and more confusing.Rather more and more opportunities are being created to cross utilize various mediums of product delivery so that the customer can have it at their fingertips. In Sweden, some garages now accept payment from the digital wallet of a Sonora cellphone. Borders book stores send emails to customers with coupons that they can use at their brick-and-mortar stores and tracks the same through the use of a Borders card that a customer can get for free – that’s a good example of a company using the facility of easy customer access to their advantage. In short, change will keep occurring consistently and it’s up to marketers to up their savvy levels and adopt ( if not predict) this change.
