brand marketing blog

It's a generally well accepted dynamic that traditional forms of advertising that us baby boomers and GenX'ers grew up with are steadily becoming less and less effective. It's not surprising considering how many advertising vehicles are on offer and the sheer volume of consumer advertising bombarding us from all directions.

Not only have we learned how to 'zone out' to this clutter but we have the power to ignore, bypass and discard unwanted commercial messages like never before. Those blatant commercial messages that are not easy to blot out (billboards for example!) probably aggravate us, rendering them relatively ineffective as an advertising medium. You only have to look at the lame Waikato Draught beer billboards to understand why we've had to become so adept at 'filtering out'.

Traditional advertising was based on interruption, force feeding us with commercial blurb and overstated product promises. The long accepted media planning principle of 'reach and frequency' simply fuels the growth in unwanted messaging.

Today consumers/customers/clients/buyers have the power to 'find' the information that interests them, filtering out unwanted incoming commercial messages. They don't need to be exposed to dozens of impressions of the same message to become brainwashed into making a buying decision.

If your prospect is interested in and cares about what your marketing message has to say, very few repeats are required to entice a buying decision. If your message gets to them through their own efforts you are in the pound seats to make a sale or generate a qualified enquiry.

As we move forward, the smart marketers are going to spend less of their marketing and advertising budget on epic campaigns, rather focusing their efforts and dollars on connecting directly with their market by building online communities, viral and social networking, search engine optimisation (to generate page 1 listings in Google search results) and permission marketing.

The crazy thing about the new marketing model is that it's generally a lot cheaper than traditional advertising. However, it does require a lot more energy and commitment to execute on an ongoing basis. It's about taking command of your marketing rather than passing control and responsibility across to an advertising agency. So instead of throwing more good money at ineffective campaigns, take some time to research how today's (and tomorrow's) smart marketers are doing it.