Interactive {Marketing} Bandwagon

The evolutionary cycle of marketing has lead marketers wondering on how to leap into the interactive bandwagon. This no more seems to be pertaining to any specific industry, company(s), or sector. It’s now a global phenomenon or rather a cross industry phenomenon. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996)

Well, this could explain by President Barack Obama, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Mahindra, Gul Panag and so on is all on Twitter. Of course the another example that I love talking about is Amazon.com that mainly started to use interactive marketing so effectively, as customers record their preferences and are shown book selections that match not only their preferences but recent purchases.

I have to admit that though interactive marketing has been dominant in the digital domain, however the same has started to make inroads into other means of non-digital marketing. Though whatever terms we may use however the simplest way to understand interactive marketing is to understand the behavior of your customer and predict…well what ever predictions you can make about your customer, but not merely based on your intuitions, feeling and so on; rather based on substantial data.

While we, marketers, are attempting towards interactive marketing and trying to make a mark through getting into a conversing mode with its customer. Yes, I am talking about conversation mode in business to consumer environment. But with an event of such interactive marketing, marketers need to focus on two fundamentally important ingredients of Interactive Marketing - Analysis and Profiling.

Analysis and Profiling are fundamentals to Interactive Marketing. While I used the definition by John in starting of this articulation, I equally like to emphasis to the fact that it’s important to know your customer. Knowledge of your customer is the only way or element that could enable you to move towards interactive marketing to your customer.

For developing an effective interactive or conversational marketing, we need to understand and acknowledge about what our customer or prospective customer want to converse about. What are they like and what are their dislikes, and of course, what medium they prefer to converse with or at.

With an explosion of tools and technology we can start targeting consumer or prospective consumers about what they want. But….Hey….those are just tools. We cannot let a tool decide about our strategy(s) to converse with our customers. With the plethora of tools available it has become even more important to evaluate what tool to deploy and how the same would enable us to meet our strategic goals. It becomes little concerning and/or alarming when I enter into meeting or calls where we all are discussing about social media, Google keywords, etc without any clear strategic goal that is based on what profile of customer that we plan to target. It sounds something weird to me that we are going the interactive way without any substantial effort or homework towards understanding the customer. We just love to quickly get onto the bandwagons……… without even realizing that it may not be going where you would like it to go.

Now again how to gain that profile of your customer. Of course I can give a simple answer…Analytics or analysis of your current customer base. The analysis would yield “some” insight to your customer base, that could enable you to draw conclusion or at least draw a behavioral trend(s) of your customer. The same could be act as an important ingredient or the right spice for your strategic development activity for interactive marketing.

If I can come back on the example of Amazon, they did a wonderful study of their customer base to develop new understanding of their customer, based on which they developer programs for marketing and product offerings. Equally, if I may use an example of Facebook, a glorified discussion board that led to utilized a niche requirements of the customers. Again, this idea could have not been ideated before doing a great work at analysis of what a customer would or could have wanted.

Though this post alone will not justify the subject hence lookout for more discussion on this topic. Would appreciate your thoughts or comments at shiraz@shirazdatta.com