Epiphany Interupted

I've been on the edge of my own epiphany for the last couple months (which keeps getting interrupted by the melt down of the financial markets). So... here it is! The web is changing the very nature of marketing in a profound way. Yes, I'm not deaf and have not been asleep for the last 10 years. We have all heard this before, but on inspection, the Web 1.0 world changed my marketing tactics, but not the nature of the marketing mission.

My career in technology has been and will remain centered on marketing as a discipline. The marketers job is to get the product in front of the customer. In the past, this meant push the product. Get the attention of customers and march in a highly motivated sales force and some brilliant technical sales people. Parade through some carefully chosen and well coached customer references, discount appropriately, close hard, and you stood an excellent chance of getting an order.

Information was scare and information flow inhibited. Vendors knew little about each other and customers knew little about vendors let alone each other. Web 1.0 made the linear flow of information much smother. My marketing budget wasn't spent so much on printed material as it was on slick web communication. Here the web changed the nature of marketing communications tactics.However, my marketing remained the primary source of information for customers. Sure, word of mouth was still the best marketing but no customer was loud enough to be heard without a vendor acting as an amplifier. Since we all remember Milli_Vanilli, no one trusts anything unless they are sure its 100% real.

The buying process today is different. First, the binge buying of the buddle has been replaced by a try-and-buy mentality best epitomized by saleforce.com and its ubiquitous CRM offering. More importantly, my customers’ social and business connections are increasingly becoming a huge electronic network that can be searched and queried as needed to find trusted references for most product choices.

We quickly are moving away from a world where marketing’s principal requirement is to push a product into a customers view. The future looks like a reference driven world where customers pull products based on information gleaned from trusted sources. These source will increasingly be part of unique individual networks. Looking back in 10 years, I’m confident that we will point to this as a Web 2.0 phenomenon with things like blogs and social networks getting much of the credit. However, these tools stand on the shoulders of 10 years of innovation and cultural change. In particular, the global adoption of email as a business-to-business tool has enabled the non-trivial cultural change that makes communications between businesses who view themselves as competitors acceptable.

The implications for marketing stretch far beyond the walls of the marketing organization.