1.3 The Technology Revolution

It wasn’t that long ago that “social network” was the term that described a group of folks who get together at church to knit quilts on Saturday mornings. Your grandparents remember when there were only three television networks, and the most technologically advanced piece of home electronics was a VCR. Didn’t you love the flashing “12:00” on the face of the VCR because most adults were too intimidated to program it?

Now social networks mean Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Twitch, and countless affinity groups. Cable, satellite providers, and streaming services have diluted the effectiveness of TV advertising, bringing over 200 channels into homes that are specialized in everything from sports to history to home improvement.

YouTube allows you to “buy” your way out of watching advertising by charging a monthly fee. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, Disney+, and devices like Google Chromecast, Roku, and Apple TV all allow us to stream digital programming on our mobile devices and forget about the traditional cable TV package altogether. In June 2017, for the first time, more time was spent viewing programming on mobile devices than on a television screen.

This carving of the audience into small niches is helpful in some cases if you’re selling to a specific audience but poses a problem in reaching consumers far and wide.

Smartphones are now complete entertainment devices, with the ability to stream TV and videos, hold your music library, access your email, give you turn-by-turn driving directions, replace your alarm clock, manage your calendar, and many other conveniences. DVRs have replaced VCRs, and watching a TV show when it’s being broadcast is largely a thing of the past. Consumers record their favorite shows on their DVRs or just access them on-demand and watch them when it is convenient. This allows them to skip through all the commercials, which is a bad thing for marketers. About the only programs being watched live when they are broadcast are news and sports.

Advertising to youth has changed the most radically. Generation Z and Millennials use the TV more as a device to play games on their PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, and Switch than to watch programs. They don’t listen to the radio; they get their music from a streaming service like Sirius XM, Spotify, Pandora, TIDAL, or Apple Music. They don’t read the newspaper or magazines; they browse the internet, use widgets, or subscribe to RSS feeds to find news about the things that interest them. The traditional media channels used for decades to advertise are becoming less and less effective.

Can vs. Should

Marketing isn’t about making noise to get noticed. Sure, you can initiate an email blast to your database, text them, tweet at them, or create a cool mobile app.

While those are tactics that can be used, they need to fit within a strategic brand plan that drives product sales. Creating a great looking website the ad agency has asked you to make “sticky” so that consumers come and linger doesn’t necessarily translate into improved product sales or even increased brand affinity.

Taco Bell created the most incredible interactive website I’ve ever seen in conjunction with Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition. It allowed you to be a virtual Sports Illustrated swimsuit photographer with supermodel Daniella Sarahyba. You could virtually move around with a camera and click photos of Daniella, then print them out on your home printer. All the while, Daniella was chatting with you, just as if you were there. Awesome! Fun! Sticky! But did it make me go to Taco Bell to buy my lunch? No, it didn’t.

Texting and Twitter

American Idol made text-voting the vogue, and it made perfect sense for that program to use texting as their voting platform given the show’s youthful target audience.

But does it make sense for Ford Motor Company to send you text messages to try and sell you a car? No. Does it make sense for Ford to make an offshoot of the Daniella technology to create virtual test drives on the web? Absolutely!

Should a sports team offer real-time score and team news or injury updates via text to their fans? Yes. Do you want your local grocery store sending you text messages promoting their sale on Froot Loops this week? Probably not. But would you like to go to your grocer’s website and note the products you would like to get text alerts for if they come on sale? You might!

What you can do and what you should do in a marketing campaign are different. Too often, young marketing managers get caught up in the can do—what can we do with Twitter, Facebook, texting, Snapchat, Instagram, email marketing, mobile apps, widgets, RSS feeds, search engine optimization, targeted online ads, or micro-sites? These platforms seem so exciting, cutting edge, and innovative that young marketers want to hurl themselves into this world of evolving digital technology without considering if they should use that technology.

Doing the should do’s—brand positioning, website design and functionality, packaging, traditional advertising, and point-of-sale materials­—seem old school and boring. The truth lies in between. Successful marketers need to keep a keen eye on all the possibilities presented by things they can do with new revolutions in digital technology and integrate it if it makes sense into the plan of what they should do. The fundamental strategies of marketing, the should do’s, haven’t changed. The ways we can execute them have.

Learn from Successful Companies

The best way to learn is to keep an eye on how successful companies execute their marketing. I have been fortunate in my career to work for three of the top consumer marketing companies in the world: Procter & Gamble, The Walt Disney Company, and The Coca-Cola Company. These titans have all stood the test of time in proving how to effectively build a strategic plan for effectively marketing their wares to consumers. Having lived in all three environments, I’ve been able to gather the similarities and strengths each created in its brand management and marketing to share the best practices with you.

While looking at what has worked in the past, we also need to keep a keen eye out for new innovations in marketing. What’s Google up to? What’s Apple doing next? What is Elon Musk working on? How can artificial intelligence (AI) be harnessed? How are driverless cars going to affect car sales and the taxi and trucking industry? We need to keep an eye on the innovators to see what possibilities are opening up so that we can leverage them as marketers.

Only one thing is assured: everything changes. The world is not static. Stand still, and you’ll get run over. We have to keep moving, maintain a healthy dissatisfaction for the status quo, and always seek better avenues and methods for effectively improving our products and services. In this book, I’ll share with you ideas on how to effectively combine the innovations of the digital revolution with the fundamental marketing truths of the world’s best consumer product companies to build your marketing acumen and effectiveness.